Michael Gilfix Online

Incorporating Web 2.0 principles into application and service design is all the rage these days. A lot of people are still trying to wrap their head around what the whole Web 2.0 movement means. The short version is that Web 2.0 refers to a collection of technologies, architectural principles, and business principles. Some of the hottest items on the technology side seem to be Asynchronous Javascript (AJAX) based interfaces, Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture, Wiki's, blogs, and syndication. On the business side, the notion of combining existing assets in novel ways through Mashups, user driven content, and new models of product development. Still this hodgepodge that is Web 2.0 means many things to different people.

While online startups have adopted this model with great success, traditional businesses are still looking at defining and implementing their Web 2.0 strategy. Things just move a bit slower. The telecom service providers seem to be aggressively joining the fray. The problem is that amidst the shmorgasboard of things that are Web 2.0, it's difficult to find a simple, succinct explanation for what problems Web 2.0 really tries to solve that go beyond just the technology and just user driven content.

Here's my shot at what I think is a simple way to explain the value of a Web 2.0 strategy to a business. The essence of Web 2.0 is about three things:

1. Consumability: All the technology and architecture movements in Web 2.0 are really about making it easier to interact with, combine, and consume services in novel ways. At the heart of REST-ful architectures is a simple, yet powerful paradigm for exposing service capability, getting those capabilities to scale, and making it easy for others to integrate with those services. The syndication concept is about dissemination information or service content in an easy to consume form (one only need to look at the explosion of ATOM & RSS on the net to be convinced). Wikis, blogs, AJAX: these are all about improving the consumability of content and information.
2. Marketability: Web 2.0 is about exposing services and information such that they can be combined in novel ways. Whether it's originated by a business selling those services or user driven content, it comes down to a more agile form of marketing: coming up with new creative ways to sell or exploit a myriad of existing content.
3. User experience: In the end, what's being marketed really comes down to a novel user experience. That's what's fueled the popularity of the Web 2.0 movement: whether it's from snappier Web experiences via AJAX, the ability to better sift through content, the enabling of self expression, or the new time saving or convenient gimick. The culmination of this is the mashup. What defines the mashup is the novel user experience they get from interacting with content in new ways, whether via a novel combination of services or even a better presentation of existing information. The appeal of Web 2.0 is the ability to rapidly create new user experiences, without the traditional overhead of product development.

So that's it. Cutting through all the technology, hype, and jargon, those three words seem to capture what Web 2.0 is all about. And of course, they build on one another. The consumability serves to enable more agile marketing. Once the shift of control is in the hands of the marketing folks, they are free to be creative and create new user experiences. It's the user experience that people pay for.