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Dion Hinchcliffe

The latest news and analysis on the next generation of the Web.

How to Survive and Thrive in Business Today with Web 2.0 - Part 1November 6

Two of the big themes clearly evident at this week's Web 2.0 Summit is 1) how to effect change successfully today and 2) how to deliver genuine, meaningful value in today's marketplace.  The current economic climate combined with this week's seminal change in the current political administration has begun positioning organizations to think about how to not only survive the business environment and apparent recession today, but how to fundamentally transform what they're doing for the better. 

The era of get rich quick Internet startups has begun to give way to a quiet new pragmatism; rethinking what we're doing in the world of business today -- both online and traditional -- to achieve qualitatively different and better outcomes, especially ones that aren't exclusively financial.  There are actually many opportunities, if we only know how to look for them, as Mary Meeker brilliantly explained here in San Francisco yesterday (video ).

Interest in achieving important secondary outcomes has become vital too.  Reestablishing the trust we've lost recently in government and large institutions is certainly part of that, especially as

Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should KnowSeptember 14

Over the last year I've worked with organizations around the world that are attempting to grapple with Web 2.0 and the growing external marketplace pressure being exerted for the change and transformation of their businesses. Along the way, I've been fortunate enough to be able to identify and assemble a working list of some consistent recurring issues and themes around Web 2.0 strategy.  I've provided them below at a high level. Your comments and additions are very welcome as we try to frame up a consistent picture of what's happening in the marketplace.

It used to be a little surprising how long it's taken for Web 2.0 to begin to have serious impact on or even high-level interest in the business world.  However, the ideas have had staying power and have also largely been validated; there are now fundamentally different and very powerful new models for engaging with customers, designing our products, and applying technology in general to our business that are proven and have growing bodies of knowledge.  The Web has become the single most important driving force in many fields of endeavor as well as the leading source of both innovation and potent new modes for communicating, collaborating, socializing, and working together. It's taken a few years but businesses are now feeling the change in the air.

 

Building Modern Web Apps? Better Have A Deep Competency in Web 2.0, Open APIs, Widgets, Social Apps, and Much MoreAugust 24

The Web has an interesting property that those building Web applications and online businesses usually encounter soon after they first launch: It has its own unique and unforgiving rules for success and failure.  Appreciating them requires a certain level of understanding of the intrinsic nature of the Web and how it works.  Actually leveraging those rules requires an even deeper and more profound understanding of the Web. The challenge these days? The Web competency bar is climbing fast.

To drive the right decisions in what they do product designers, marketing teams, software architects, developers, strategy officers, and other key roles in today's generation of online businesses need to have a solid handle on an extensive array of Web topics.  This ranges from appreciating why plain old HTTP is so good at underpinning the Web to more sophisticated topics like modern application architecture, the latest in online user experiences, next generation computing models (grid/cloud/utility/SaaS/PaaS), cost-effective scalability, user identity, network effects, Jakob's Law, analytics, operations, user community, as well as the many compelling new distribution models that are nearly mandat

Web 2.0 Continues As Most Used New Internet TermAugust 18

While it's no longer quite so fashionable to label your Internet startup a "Web 2.0" company these days, the popularity of the term remains extraordinarily high and is presently used today both far and wide in traditional media and social media.  The Google Trends graph in the figure to the right tells the overall story; global search interest in Web 2.0 is more popular than "social media" and "social networking" combined and by a significant margin.  About the only other strategic technology concept that has anywhere near the same volume of world-wide interest is service-oriented architecture (SOA), which as it turns out is also surprisingly closely related to Web 2.0.  Granted, Google Trends is not a scientific, "bet-the-business" kind of source, but it's a pretty darn good barometer.

Even for someone who spends much time with Web 2.0 concepts, I was surprised at this and I carried out a little cross checking from other sources and they all show the same disparity: Web 2.0 is still far and away one of the most popular terms to describe the intrinsic nature of many new online applications and bus

The Growth of Open APIs: More Evidence That Web Services Drive Network EffectsMay 21

A few days ago Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr released a graph (Figure 1 below) showing the growth of the bandwidth used by their global Web sites versus the bandwidth being consumed by their Web services.  It's eye opening because of the dramatic growth in bandwidth being consumed by their customers via their various non-visual, data-only Web services. The adoption of Amazon's Web services is currently driving more network activity than everything Amazon does through their traditional Web sites. This is one of the key lessons of the 2.0 era: that the ultimate end-game generally boils down whoever has the deepest and most potent network effect, which are more pronounced when you're data and software is being used from many other Web apps, instead of just your own.  

The graph below clearly shows that Amazon has the hockey stick growth that generally signifies a powerful, deep seated uptake by 3rd party platform users.  It also underscores the exponential results that comes from leveraging the intrinsic nature of open networks like the World-Wide Web to enable rapid growth.  This is spreading Amazon's platform to the far corners of the Internet in the way that