kuniform

Since Tom Coates’ Native to a Web of Data is somewhat difficult to get to print or read given its format (exported from Apple’s Keynote presentation software) and is written for a fairly technical audience, Jeremy Zawodny translated it for MBAish Product Managers. Unlike this dusty ol’ blog, there’s a fairly lively debate on the value of many of these services. It’s a fairly interesting read, though many of the points he makes about hackable URLs or patterns of interactions are regurgitated from Nielsen circa 1999 or other sources, such as Welie or Tidwell, etc.

I don’t mean to denigrate Coates’ work; the presentation is insightful and there are interesting ideas in there. In particular, when he mentions charging cash for API services and correlates that to O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0? memes on the culture of participation and the ownership of the format of certain types of data—calendaring, Amazon’s ASIN supplanting ISBN, etc., you can get some clear sense of how established players like Yahoo!, Google, or Amazon can get some hefty from this trend. eBay/Paypal already makes a big chunk of their change off their API by increasing transactions through other channels.

It’s been a long Monday, and maybe I’m just tired and cranky, but it begins to feel like there more hot air in the Web 2.0 bubble than gas to make it lift. O’Reilly calls Google the banner-carrier of Web 2.0, given the seismic nature of its IPO. That feels appropriate, as they created a new model of data and services to share it. Having been through the hype of Web 1.0, the 2.0 hype tastes a little more bitter for one reason: the last time around, there were clueless traditional companies throwing lots of money at young people to produce things they don’t understand.

Lots of ups, many more downs, and a pretty radical redistribution of wealth for many. Good times. This time around, though there are some pretty amazing things being created, flickr, del.icio.us, etc., most of them seem headed for a quick ramp-up and buy out. Good times for those folks, good times for the users of these services, but I look out at a bunch of web geeks out there and think they’re doing a Steve Ballmer over Web 2.0. Working themselves into a fervor over another slight incline in the usefulness of computers. Why did flickr get bought? Because it was all Web 2.0ish? No, because it is a great service at a reasonable price that provides value to the user. del.icio.us? You got me, aside from Yahoo!’s assumption that there is strategic value in the acquisition. Yahoo! has more bytes of user-formatted data than you can count in your lifetime. Unless you are Google, you don’t.

That may sound like a huge wet blanket, but the first application I hacked was Lemonade on an Apple II as a 7 year old, so I’ve seen a few of these bubbles before. Is the promise of Web 2.0 much greater than that of 1.0? Of the GUI? Of the microcomputer? Sure. I am getting tired of my third or fourth trip around the hype cycle. So, here’s to Web 3.1, when the multi-gestural direct manipulation interface arrives (thanks for the link Albert.

Finally, this post by Russell Beattie hits it square on the noggin.