ets 2008-01-19 experton technology - web 2.0 overview

8/14/2019 ETS 2008-01-19 Experton Technology - Web 2.0 Overview

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Executive Technology StrategiesResearch Note

January 28, 2008 ETS-2008-01-19

Web 2.0 Overview

Recently, we have had a number of clients ask us to present or participate indiscussions regarding web 2.0/enterprise 2.0. The following is an overview of thehistory, technology, and business applicability.

Experton Group Opinion: While the consummate technologist is always anxiousto use new technology, Experton Group strongly suggests that the client focuseson how to use Web 2.0/ Enterprise 2.0 before they evaluate the technology that issupporting it. There has been a lot of hype around Web 2.0 and as a result, a lot of

confusion and misdirection as to the benefits of this new methodology. It is veryimportant to obtain a “big-picture” view before embarking on an enterprise-wide re-tooling project.

Overview

Web 2.0 is a very strong marketing word where every single player in that space hastheir own definition. O'Reilly came out with the first definition. The table below wastaken directly from O’Reilly Publishing and clearly demonstrates the differences

between web 1.0 and web 2.01.

Web 1.0 Web 2.0

DoubleClick --> Google AdSense

Ofoto --> Flickr

Akamai --> BitTorrent

mp3.com --> Napster

Britannica Online --> Wikipedia

personal websites --> blogging

evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB

domain name speculation --> search engine optimization

page views --> cost per click

screen scraping --> web services

publishing --> participation

content management systems --> wikis

directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")

stickiness --> syndication

1 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

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Table 1 – Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0

Essentially there are three areas that “define” Web 2.0 and associated technologies:

1. Technology – Made up of a combination of very common internet technology likeHTML, Web Services, SOAP, etc., as well as relatively “new” technologies likeAJAX and RSS.

2. Business - Within that technology a new set of business models emerged.Google became the archetype of web 2.0. Yahoo, YouTube and many others aretaking advantage of this technology. These companies do not rely on the oldparadigm; they are giving a lot of their product free, they provide a structure andallow consumers to add their own content, place stuff on web and buildcommunities. The value in that business model is the number of people that are

using their infrastructure. While ad revenue is driving a lot of this, there are alsoother companies that are growing because they have a large community. For example, although YouTube was making no revenue, it was purchased by Googlefor $1.65 billion since they had a large community.

3. Social Network – In order to understand the nature of social networks, we haveto go back to the history of the Internet. In the 1990's the only thing you could doon the Internet was to come onto a website and read information. It was verynon-interactive; at that time the user of the internet was only a reader of information. The Internet was termed the “Information Highway”.

Then around the year 2000, the Internet evolved to a point where the user became a consumer ; where they could go to a specific site and interact (buy)products. The user would review catalogues, order products and pay for productsonline. The archetype is Amazon. That was an evolution from reader toconsumer.


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Now we are at the beginning of a new paradigm where the user is now a producer .Both Myspace and Facebook are the archetypes where the user is able to createtheir own environment, display their own ID and to add content in their ownperspective. This is a place where the user can share their interests with others. Weare moving towards that new paradigm where the users are not relying on another company for content. In addition, they are sharing information with others.

This is a big evolution. From here we can do also a step-back where now with theinternet technology I do not care about the SW or HW, I only need a browser...we donot know (or care) what the underlying technology is...do we have the networkcapacity between Paris and the states. Technology and usage evolution are twostrong evolutions here...


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Web 2.0 Principles

The principles of web 2.0 leverage information within our community; get the right

information and the right people at the same time.

Diagram 2 – Seven Web 2.0 Principles

Principle 1 – Collective Intelligence

We are able to now exploit the intelligence of the community, using the networkeffect. An example of that network effect is the Lego Company that has taken

advantage of this to create a social network of people who were interested inpromoting their products. Proctor and Gamble used these types of constructs toenable the exchange of engineering ideas.

Some Web 2.0 tools can be used to support the collective intelligence.

Wikis are being used instead of traditional publishing media. A Wiki is a place on theinternet where anyone can read and contribute. A good example is Wikipedia whereeveryone is able to update information. This principle is important since we areexploiting the network aspect of Web 2.0. In other words, the principle of Wikipedia is

that the truth will come because of the number of people that are using this vehicle.


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1. Harnessing CollectiveIntelligence

3. Data is the“Intel Inside”

4. End of the S/WRelease Cycle

7. LightweightProgramming

Models

5. Rich User

Experience

2. Web as a

Platform

6. S/W AboveA

Single Device




A Blog is a very simple place or a journal where users can put personal informationon the web.

The third piece is to be able to retrieve the information via a classification. Instead of having an organization creating taxonomy to classify the information, the user isadding their own personal tags to the information. All the user created tags is calleda “folksonomies”.

Users place some “tags” on information so that anyone can find theirs and relatedinformation. Anyone can place tags and anyone would be able to find the relatedinformation.

Principle 2 - Web as a platform

This is about the importance of the network. We are not talking about hardware andsoftware; we are talking about whether we have the right connection. This is a stepfurther - if we have those connections, the users should be able to create their ownwebsites such as a “mashup” composed of pieces of applications from differentwebsites and merging them to create a new application on the user’s own website. Agood example is the Google Map feature that can be used on any website that has aneed for maps or geographic features.

Principle 3 - Data is the Intel inside

Data is what drives the usage. It is important to get the relevant data and make sure

that the data has integrity and is of sufficient quality. More important, in these newbusiness models, the most successful companies are the ones that have the morecustomer data. They can leverage data to cross sell or up sell. For example, Amazoncan make recommendations when you buy a product by analyzing the behaviors of others customers that bought the same product.

Principle 4 - End Of SW Release Cycles

Since user is really a contributor, the impact of releasing new software is negligible.Specifically, if we imbed functionality from another provider, web services eliminatethe issues associated with changes since you are only interested with the integrity of

the interface. Knowing this, the providers work hard not to change the interface anddata schema. Typically, changes to the underlying service will NOT affect the user of that service as long as the interface and the input and output data are not changed.

While there is still an inherent risk in the underlying data quality and integrity beingsuspect, this is not viewed as being a significant risk since the providers know thatthe data is a critical component of their success.


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Principle 5 – Light weight Programming Models.

There are several web services that enable the social networking within Web 2.0,

such as RSS and SOAP.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to feeds so that they willautomatically receive information as it becomes available.

A RSS system to publish articles and news over the web is simple. On the server,you decide which pages you want to display (the RSS feed). An XML defines theRSS feed and holds URL, title and summary of each page to display. On theconsumer computer, a RSS reader is installed and uses the feed address to load theRSS file, then display title and summary. By clicking on a line of the list, the full webpage is accessed and displayed on the consumer computer. RSS support is

provided by email clients (Outlook, Notes, Thunderbird, etc.) or specific applicationsavailable on the Internet.

Do others use RSS to tie into their back-end services? No, this is more of a “push”technology, a feed service. RSS is how you create syndicated information service.In order to facilitate transactional traffic you would have to use other web servicestechnology.

Principle 6 - Software Above The Level Of A Single Device

We are not limited to any PC or IT platform...mobile/phone, etc.

Principle 7 - Rich User Experiences

While this has nothing to do with web 2.0, it has been a topic that has been raised atthe same time as Web 2.0 and therefore is closely associated with it. In this areathere are many possibilities on how the rich user experience should be delivered.Let’s highlight three of them.

The first view is from Microsoft. The application relies on the Microsoft operatingsystem to manage the user interface. The Windows Presentation Foundation is thegraphical subsystem of the .Net 3.0 framework. It provides a clear separation

between the business logic and the user interface. It enables to incorporate in theapplication all the rich control, usability features of the windows platform.

The second view is SaaS/Ajax which takes advantage of web services. The richinternet application solves two challenges, HTML and JavaScript are not “rich”enough to support full functionality as Windows and using traditional internetapplications there is a lot of interaction between the desktop and server makingperformance an issue.

Ajax solves this problem by changing the interaction from synchronous toasynchronous request-response pairs. With Ajax, we are able to desynchronize thedisplay and the calls for data. This allows us to try and do things in advance before


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the user makes requests on the screen.

It is often said that Ajax is part of Web 2.0 or required by Web 2.0. Using Ajax, we

can do things that are very close to applications developed in a more traditional way.For example, Yahoo mail uses a lot of features in Ajax. Although Ajax is in itself astandard, it has many dialects, therefore it can be hard to debug. There are a lot of Ajax toolkits available.

Moving to Ajax is a good idea, but complex. Keep that in mind it can be very time-consuming.

We have to learn the technology in order to exploit or make use of it. Again, it isimportant to understand that it is only one of many technologies and that Ajax is notan integral part of web 2.0.

AJAX uses a combination of technologies including:• eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) for marking up information;

• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for styling information;

• The document object model (DOM) is accessed with a client-side scriptinglanguage, like JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact withthe information presented;

• In most cases, the XMLHttpRequest object is used to exchange dataasynchronously with the web server;

• XML is sometimes used as the format for transferring data between the server

and client, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plaintext;• JSON and even EBML. These files may be created dynamically by some form

of server-side scripting.

The third view is from Adobe, which is based on the assumption that everyone hasboth Adobe reader and Flash player on their desktops. That is another way todevelop rich internet applications on the internet.

In terms of how it can be used in your Enterprise; again Web 2.0 has multipleaspects and trends. First you have to determine what you want to do with the social

collaboration, rich internet experience, and mashup capabilities. That is the startingpoint.

Next, you must divorce yourself from the marketing hype. Web 2.0 is used more inthe consumer market, but there are other aspects of Web 2.0 that can be used in theEnterprise. Enterprise 2.0 is basically how do I use the Web 2.0 technology withinmy enterprise? How do I enable collaboration with my employees?

Projects, interaction with partners, integrate my customer/partner/supplier/employeeto create commonality of interest? It is much more a question of business strategythan education.


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To add value to the existing business process, you need to make sure that all of thepeople that have been identified as a part of the project are included. Enterprise 2.0has been used to obtain feedback from customers. It has also been used to find the

right person within the enterprise to solve a particular problem. For example, for years IBM has had their “bluepages” directory where people could find the name,e.mail and phone number of a colleague they knew. Adding information such asgroup, skills, expertise, employees are now able to identify the “right” expert, even if they don’t know him.

We want to see how other corporations have successfully enhanced their businesscustomer and user experiences (using Web 2.0). What can you do to improveservice to the customers? What can you do to facilitate interactions with our customers?

The Bottom Line

There are many ways you can use Web 2.0. You can use it to publish. You can useBlogs as to capture information from customers; such as being able to start adiscussion with your customers about product ideas, service quality, etc. Essentially,you need to think about what you want to do and then address the technologicalchallenges/implementation. The other part of the story is what Enterprise 2.0 isoffering. Essentially, this paradigm enables informal social networking within theenterprise. Many prominent enterprises, like IBM, have demonstrated that the abilityto conduct impromptu brainstorming and information exchange between “experts”within an enterprise speeds decision-making and increases the knowledge-base

within your enterprise.

Additional relevant research is available at www.experton-group.com. Interestedreaders should contact Experton Group Client Services - [email protected] - to arrange further discussion or an interview

About Experton Group

Experton Group is the leading fully integrated research, advisory and consulting

company for mid-sized and large organizations, maximizing the business value of their ICT investments through innovative, neutral and independent expert advice.Experton Group offers consulting services, market surveys, conferences, seminarsand publications related to information and communications technology issues. Our consulting portfolio includes technology, business processes, management andbusiness co-operations, investments and mergers.


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