Building Web 2.0 Applications? Think Big. (web2.wsj2.com)

Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog

Dion Hinchcliffe

Feeds

Archives

Building Web 2.0 Applications? Think Big.

« H » email link

Reaching the tipping point that takes your Web 2.0 effort well past having a basic but barely functional number of users to achieving gravity defying critical mass should be one of your primary goals. Like Google, eBay, and now del.icio.us, iTunes, and probably even Wikipedia, having the top one or two spot in a given space is the key to being truly successful and staying there. With data formats being more open than ever, and your competitor's service a URL away, you can't give users any reason to pack their things up and go anywhere else. And that brings in the best practices that the Web 2.0 tenets embody. Ignore them at your peril. Let's take a look at why...

While not every service needs to have Google-like domination of their vertical or horizontal domain, never forget that the power memes in the Web 2.0 tookit are harnessing collective intelligence, data being the new functionality, and The Long Tail. This is the high-octane fuel of Web 2.0, which tends to require massive numbers of active participants (engaged users) that are adding or extracting value from your Web 2.0 service en masse. Don't have them? Well you won't have enough enriched and contributed data to be a draw to other users. The more users you have, the better your service will be for a variety of reasons: Lots of users find more bugs, add more information, and darn it, they will have a louder voice to spread your service through word of mouth and tell people that your offering is the one that is happening. In the end, you have to build a successful community with all its attendant warts and conflicting interests. This is hard, but it can be done, especially if you study those that have done it already.

Success with attracting users and their participation in turn gives you success in the marketplace. This is a crucial point: the endlessly rich information and relationships your users add to your service provides its central value, whether that's pictures, podcasts, posts, presence, news, reviews, items to sell, page ranks, or whatever. This is the most important ingredient of the next generation of the Web. Like Ross Mayfield said, Web 2.0 is made of people. Are you not engaging your users in an almost fanatical fashion? Then you're doing something wrong.

And you can increase your engaged users by making functionality that is small, loosely joined, and open via services, not just a GUI. This way anyone can plug your functionality into theirs, increasing your user base, making you even more valuable and relevant. You can see how it works, all the Web 2.0 ideas really do come together.

When I have discussions about Web 2.0 with people they often have a pretty hard time initially grasping all the interlocking concepts. Take a look here at O'Reilly's (in)famous meme map or my attempt at a more concrete view. There's a lot of stuff here. As an example of why it can be painful to leave out or overlook these techniques, take a look at the first so-called Web 2.0 worm that knocked out the popular young person hangout MySpace last weekend.

I've been eager to study why this worm was so devastating. If you read the technical analysis of it, the exploit was a pretty effective XSS JavaScript hack that added a million users as "friends", presumably swamping the underlying databases of the service with an unexpected volume of information.

But as students of Web 2.0 practices would observe, preparing for a very large influx of users has to be job one from day one. O'Reilly has famously been quoted that the best Web 2.0 sites require no advertising because good ones will rapidly spread by word of mouth by their thrilled users. You just can't control what will happen, nor should you try. Anyone can take your services and plug them into theirs, making demand wildly unpredictable. If you have anything of value, other services will send a great deal of users your way suddenly. You must be in a stance to embrace this...

Being duly forwarned because you paid attention in Web 2.0 school, you implemented radical decentralization, another reinforcing Web 2.0 meme that says that not only is packaged software on a CD dying, individual web servers are going away too. The future of Web 2.0 software is to be a highly distributed and decentralized service like BitTorrent, with no single command and control structure and almost unlimited scalability. Using non-hierarchical content distribution services, loading up more functionality into user's JavaScript clients, and other easily accessible techniques today are now mandatory if you want to succeed. If you need to add ten thousand or a million new users a day to your Web 2.0 services, you should be able to handle it. Or they will go elsewhere.

I'm now starting to become aware that absorbing the full contents of the Web 2.0 toolkit is going to take the industry years and years. So then will appreciating that they have come out of the real experiences of the most successful offerings and services up to this point. Web 2.0 is best practices, pure and simple. So, let me end by saying this, do not fight them. Study them carefully, and learn how to build engaging, useful, and successful places on the Web landscape.

Technorati: web2.0

posted Sunday, 23 October 2005

Web 2.0 is about participation! Visitors are strongly encouraged to leave comments on Web 2.0 topics

You are not logged in. Click for reasons to login/register.

However, if you do not wish to create an account then that's ok; you can still leave a comment to this blog. If you fill in the email field, it will not be displayed with your comment. It allows the blog-owner to contact you should they wish.

Trackback

Trackback URL: http://web2.wsj2.com/read/trackback/1521419.htm

You can reach me at:
email: dion (at) hinchcliffeandco (dot) com
Skype/AIM: dhinchcliffe