Openness
Web 2.0. What a bad term. I'll leave aside the irritating buzzzzword screech this phrase makes. The idea that the Internet develops according to an ordered, linear, numbered set of releases is quite stupid. Still, it seems to have gained traction, to the point where people who have never heard of 37signals, or flickr or even gmail want to know what this new version of the web is all about. I was asked this question by three separate clients in the final months of 2006. Each would be interested in investing time, money and their company's content or data, if only they could understand the opportunity. The danger is that they get told something stupid. Round corners and AJAX are the main benefits, right? Well, they're nice to have, but neither change the way the world works.
The big thing that is happening on the web is openness. This is not new, and is intuitively obvious to anyone who has been thinking about or playing with the Internet for a while. In brief, the cost of transmitting information over the Internet is next to free. Information therefore tends to travel freely between different parts of the Internet, once a pipe has been set up for it to flow down.
Luckily, there's an army of modern day plummer to make this happen. These are the kind of people who wrote and give away things like wikipedia (the site that's killed the traditional encyclopedia) and Apache (the software behind 60% of the world's web sites). Because these people are advanced users as well as providers, they'll tend to do what ever is in users' interests. That's generally to make the information flow.
The big online players have largely responded by opening the boundaries between their business and other online players. A few months ago I heard the statistic that more than a third of Amazon, Google and eBay's revenue comes via other web businesses in their affiliate network. They also release a lot of data to this network of affiliates to help build their business. For example, an Amazon partner can put prices, reviews and descriptions of the Amazon catalogue on their own site, as long as they direct some of the trafic they generate back to Amazon. I'll bet there's much more of this to come from the Semantic Web effort that Tim Berners Lee has championed, or possibly related informal efforts such as Micro Formats.
A business wanting to get ahead on the web - to 'move to web 2.0' - could do much worse than create an affliate network and share data with them. If they do as well as the online leaders it could mean a 30% revenue boost. But the real reason to start working like this is for the experience.
If the semantic web really succeeds, much of the valuable social data these companies hold (data on our opinions, usage and friends) is likely to become shared and public domain, rather than in silos owned by the web companies who helped us encode it.
That much openness would change the way things work very significantly.
