Web 2.0 generally refers to a set of social, architectural, and design patterns resulting in the mass migration of business to the Internet as a platform. These patterns focus on the interaction models between communities, people, computers, and software. Human interactions are an important aspect of software architecture and, even more specifically, of the set of websites and web-based applications built around a core set of design patterns that blend the human experience with technology.
This book captures what Web 2.0 is by analyzing major changes in web resources uncontentiously deemed to be “Web 2.0” so that entrepreneurs, architects, and developers worldwide can reapply the knowledge to new business models. The format for that knowledge is expressed within this book as a set of patterns. Every website that implements Web 2.0 yields important clues regarding its core design patterns, models, and solutions that we can repurpose or leverage to solve other problems. This book lays out those patterns in such a way that readers can improve on and implement them over multiple technologies, families, and contexts.
This book often refers to “the new Internet,” a term used to include Web 2.0 design patterns and associated technical evolutions, such as the rapid adoption of broadband. The new Internet is not being built as a product of speed increases alone, though. Easy-to-use developer technologies coupled with innovative design patterns from smart entrepreneurs are the primary drivers for new, innovative Internet applications. Continued performance improvements in technology, along with designers building visually compelling user experiences connected to sophisticated services, have made new patterns of interaction possible.
One of these, sometimes mistaken for Web 2.0 itself, is a development trend called Rich Internet Applications (the RIA design pattern is described in greater detail in Chapter 7). New sets of vendor tools and technologies, along with better application architectures, are putting RIA development capabilities at the fingertips of hobbyists. However, from an architect’s perspective, how do you quantify “richness”? Is there a list of visual elements that are required, perhaps along with some optional elements? For an application to be rich, it must surely incorporate some functionality that defines it as being different from a non-RIA. But like beauty, the richness of an application lies in the eyes of the beholder. As with many other Web 2.0 concepts, the definition can be captured at best as a design pattern, with notes to aid implementers.
Beyond the development tools and techniques they use, much of the success of companies deemed to be “Web 2.0” is a by-product of a pattern of viral marketing, a scenario in which a new site is promoted far faster via word of mouth than any advertising executive could feasibly achieve via other channels. This phenomenon makes Web 2.0 a hot topic among venture capitalists. Entrepreneurs are creating Web 2.0 sites and applications that are so compelling that the users themselves do the marketing, enabling the little guys to enter into head-to-head competition on an even footing with large multinational corporations with huge advertising budgets. Enthusiastic users of a Web 2.0 site can bury a large corporation’s expensive advertising efforts within months. A case in point is MySpace.com, which became the top web destination in early 2007 based largely on viral marketing and content created by its own users. Other companies, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, share this pattern.
On these companies’ sites, users both provide and consume the bulk of the data. The users are an integral part of the sites’ overall conceptual architecture. These new Internet sites have changed in terms of how people experience them, too. Analysts predict that the bulk of first-time Internet users in the next decade might use wireless connections as their first means of connecting to the Internet.[1] Video gamers seek greater, more interactive experiences by gathering online to do battle with live opponents, mobile Internet users send messages via the Short Message Service (SMS) to keep in close contact with friends and family, and musicians separated by hundreds or thousands of miles are able to collaborate thanks to their Internet connections.[2] These are only a few examples of what this rich interconnected tool makes possible.
Web 2.0 represents more than just a change in Internet technology. It is a global change in how we engage with one another. Customer brand loyalty is at an all-time low. Competition is a mere click away for most companies. With the realization of social change comes a desire on the part of large enterprises to learn about the mechanisms behind Web 2.0. As enterprises race to gain a competitive edge over their global competitors, they’re realizing that Web 2.0 design patterns can be a critical ingredient in their overall success or failure.
Streaming high-definition television (HDTV)[3] over the Internet is driving the convergence of television with the Internet. When more people watch a sporting event on the Internet than on TV, the incumbent media companies should be scared. When more people view a Volkswagen commercial featuring a girl named Helga on YouTube than watch many regularly scheduled television programs,[4] TV executives should take note. When a homemade video of a baby laughing upstages the Helga video on YouTube,[5] and approaches the all-time best TV viewing figures for the Super Bowl,[6] it should become clear that the battle for the media is in a state of flux.
It’s not just a multimedia issue, though. A key trend in Web 2.0 is the inclusion of the user as a core part of any model. Most Web 2.0 examples have breached the purely technical realm and include users as an integral part of their workflow. Online applications are more than mere software; they represent a process of engagement with users. Users provide key functionality and content in most Web 2.0 applications, helping to build a web of participation and collaboration. These design patterns drive young startups, while incumbent enterprises scramble to adapt to the threat posed to them by people who have built something better to engage the user.
These changes are also bringing democracy to several aspects of our lives, from shopping to news reporting and even politics. YouTube hosts debates in which ordinary citizens ask harder-hitting questions than journalists do; citizens in Baghdad blog war reports that give us unprecedented insight into what it means for a government to be overthrown and slowly rebuilt; and giant computer manufacturers lose control over their public relations when not only Consumer Reports, but also consumers reveal these companies’ flaws on their own corporate websites’ support forums.
Historically, those who control the media have the ability to greatly impact the future. A combined media impact can rouse a nation’s population to question or overthrow its leaders. Recall, for example, media reports in the late 1990s regarding President Bill Clinton’s possible romantic escapades with an intern, which resulted in widespread calls for his impeachment before the matter ever reached a court. Web 2.0 represents a social change that may, within our lifetimes, forever shift the power of the media. Attempts to retain control are getting more and more expensive.[7]
Web 2.0 nudges the balance of power toward the average person. Like the invention of the printing press several centuries ago, the Web 2.0 revolution is balancing the unequal powers between large corporations and individual rights, the mainstream press and the concerned community member, and the large government and a single citizen. Web 2.0 is providing the infrastructure that allows any information to be published, blogged, linked, mashed, streamed, and syndicated, among a host of other interactions.
Much of the excitement of analysts and the press over Web 2.0 is linked directly to the Internet’s increasing scale, size, speed, and interconnectedness. The Internet is the largest single marketplace ever known to mankind. It connects together more digital information, humans, services, corporations, governments, and other endpoints than any previous infrastructure. It’s becoming easier than ever to reach out and get your message to a sizeable proportion of today’s approximately 1 billion Internet users practically overnight.
Users, businesses, and other organizations that deeply embrace the fundamental nature of the Web as a platform for intercommunication among all connected devices will be able to fully exploit the possibilities of Web 2.0. Once individuals start to understand the concept of patterns, they’ll see patterns everywhere. Patterns of using the Internet to route telephone calls, create music asynchronously, and use software as a service are causing major disruptions within the relevant industries.
Entrepreneurs who can learn to recognize these patterns and reapply them have reaped substantial financial benefits in the process, and may yet reap more rewards even in an economic downturn. The pace of innovation remains high. The pace at which new disruptive technologies[8] are being introduced is equally rapid. The rate at which young startup companies are replacing or upstaging large incumbent forces seems exponentially faster than at any other time in history. The signs of change—some more obvious than others—are upon us.
[2] See http://www.mixmatchmusic.com.
[4] At press time, the Volkswagen video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv157ZIInUk) had received over 4.5 million views.
[5] At press time, the “Hahaha” video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P6UU6m3cqk) had received over 80 million views.
[6] The 2008 American Football Super Bowl garnered over 97 million television viewers (see http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/super%20bowl%20audience%20sinks_1093563).
[7] Many of the top Internet companies from the first iteration of the Web were acquired by or merged with large media conglomerates that were attempting to retain their control over the media. Examples include Disney acquiring Infoseek between 1998 and 1999, USA Networks acquiring $37 million worth of shares in Expedia in 2001, and the merger of AOL and Time Warner in the late 1990s. More recently, Google and Yahoo! have acquired many companies, and Yahoo! itself has been the object of recent takeover attempts. Investors spent much of 2007 speculating about how to invest in Facebook. Companies trying to acquire the next Google, YouTube, MySpace, or Facebook, however, may find a mismatch with previous media company business models. Most of the content driving those sites is not owned by any one entity, nor can the sites’ contributors be constrained by non-competition clauses in a buyout contract.
[8] The terms disruptive and disruptive innovation are commonly used to note changes in which one technology starts to become deprecated in favor of a newer technology. The eventual retirement of one technology then offers opportunities to those who can provide the replacement technology. In this context, these terms refer to a concept of radical innovation defined in the 1997 best seller The Innovator’s Dilemma (Collins), in which Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen discussed the nature of certain changes within established industries that were so radical that they led to discontinuity within those industries. Some of these changes even unexpectedly reinforced the incumbent technology’s position. For example, Christensen analyzed the disk drive industry as a rapidly changing, technologically discontinuous model.
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