eBay CEO talking about the new x.commerce payments platform. Http://www.x.com
Lightweight Models
And I’m not talking about the diminutive catwalk superstars!
The web has become the largest and most important computing platform in the world. Have you ever seen the constant improvement in products like we see now? Clayton Christensen came up with the term disruptive innovation, Low End Segment Strategy. The term describes the business process by which a product or service takes root initially through simple applications at the bottom of the market and then relentlessly move “up market” as the service takes hold, displacing more established competitors. This methodology can be seen in the web 2.0 pattern of lightweight programming models and cost effective scalability.
As O’Reilly discussed in his paper, “Scalability in web 2.0 applies to both business models as well as technology”. The change in strategy for web 2.0 businesses means that start-ups that develop scalable and cost effective models can deliver products to market much faster than ever before. And it’s evident. Never before have we seen such an explosion of growth in any industry. All you have to do is check your iPad each morning to see all the new apps that have been added to the app store overnight. Best of all, it’s cheap and effective.
I personally don’t think that from a technology stand point that this wouldn’t be possible without technologies such as LAMP, AJAX or SOA, etc. These technologies have been around for some time, it’s just that we’ve found more enabling uses for them. Saying that, having modular plug-n-play style software has made it easier for companies to “mash-up” services, as start-ups no longer need large teams of staff to create software from scratch. The new principle behind web 2.0 software development is “do more with less”. That is; if you’re app-dev team can eat more than two pizzas, then you’ve got too many developers! (Or maybe they’re just big eaters!)
A recent news article about an App developer from China highlights this example. In less than 6 months, Rye Studio’s has sold over one million downloads of a traditional Chinese children’s story app at 0.99 cents each. In a few short months, and without spending wads of cash to start up, the business owner who is not a software engineer has founded a very successful software company. If you dig a bit deeper I’m sure that this wouldn’t be a rare story for many small businesses that produce apps for the app store. Millions of developers worldwide are seeing the Apple App market as a channel to online business success. And they are seeing that they need to create an app that people just can’t do without. For millions of Chinese parents, I’m sure the app from Rye Studio’s to keep their kids entertained is a welcome break.
The growth is massive. Below is a graph that was presented at last year’s Web 2.0 Summit and it shows the comparison in growth between the Internet on the Desktop, other Mobile Internet devices (NTT DoCoMo i-mode) and Apple Mobile Internet devices. The graph timeline is for the first 20 months after release. That’s a lot of hardware, and they need apps!
Growth Comparisons: First 20 Months of release – Desktop Internet vs Mobile Internet
Bye for now, I’m off to get started on developing an app for my iPhone, iTouch and iPad! Any ideas?
The Long Tail – Kickstarter
For anyone attempting to create an online presence for themselves or their business, the web 2.0 pattern of the “long tail” is an important concept to understand.
The long tail was coined in an article written by Chris Anderson for Wired in October 2004 and describes the business strategy of online retailers to target specific markets.
The long tail term describes the differences in sales opportunity between the mainstream (high volume markets and products) at the “head” of the demand curve in red, and the huge potential in small niche sites in the tail in yellow. When the long tail portion is aggregated, the amount of items sold via the niches has the potential to rival that of the mainstream products sold at the head of the demand curve.
The pattern is therefore to reach out to the entire web not just the centre (head) and use intelligent data management techniques (i.e. customer self-service and algorithms) to do so.
A web 2.0 site that leverages the long tail concept is kickstarter.com. Kickstarter combines crowd-sourcing with a micro-payment funding platform to provide financial support for creative projects large or small. Essentially, every kickstarter project is an independent, niche creation. And like Amazon.com. kickstarter recommend new and noteworthy projects for support.
Have you started or funded a project on kickstarter.com?
Posted in #347class11, Web2
Tagged #347class11, Long-Tail, Niche, Web 2.0 Applications
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The Perpetual Beta
It was once said that if you developed a piece of software to a set of requirements, that it would take you 10 years of bug fixes and updates to the original code before it was completely bug free. This traditional method of software development had the objective for users to never see bugs, so developers would schedule new versions for release at specific interval periods, then work very hard to meet the scheduled deadline once the new code was debugged and tested for release.
In May 1997 Eric. S. Raymond released a paper titled the Cathedral and the Bazaar that described the theoretical differences in approaches of commercially developed software and that from the open source movement. Eric noted that software development in the open source movement adopted a release early and often approach that enabled bugs to be found and resolved more quickly and easily by the user community than could have been possible in the commercially developed software realm.
In the era of web 2.0 software development, Tim O’Reilly extends this release early and often mantra as the “perpetual beta”. Let the users be real-time testers and treat them as co-developers.
Zoho is an online company that offer an application suite that provides a rich portfolio of online business, collaboration and productivity applications. Since the release of Zoho Calendar, the developers have been working hard to add new features and integration with other parts of their application suite. But you wouldn’t necessarily know it by reading their website. There’s no version number or beta stamp displayed on screen. What I find refreshing about Zoho is that they don’t seem to follow the hype and fanfare model; instead they seem to go about their business quietly and purposefully. If you dig a little deeper you will find nice feature posts of new functionality from the team that walk through the newly added features.
But it’s not all roses either; there are underlying assumptions with the perpetual beta approach. Because customers are generally not paying for the application, that they don’t mind using imperfect software. Users generally don’t mind if things go wrong, they just don’t want them to go wrong for too long. The assumption from customers is having some faith that the service will be available or restored fairly quickly and that their issues are adequately addressed.
Essentially beta testing is not new. Companies have had users beta testing for decades. What has changed is the scale and duration of the process. Small defined project teams once owned the beta testing domain, usually for short testing engagements; now it’s an almost unlimited stream of end users as testers in a seemingly endless development cycle.
Posted in #347class11, Uncategorized, Web2
Tagged #347class11, Beta, Web 2.0 Applications, Zoho
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Software Above the Level of a Single Device
“Never forget the milk (or anything else) again.”
Gone are the days when I would use a pen on my hand or in the back of my note book to scribble To-Do tasks down. And almost gone are the days when I would use a desktop application installed on my PC hard drive to do the same. I now want to centrally store, manage and access my To-Do tasks via an online application. Pattern Eight (8) of Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 principles describe the theory that the PC is no longer the only access device for internet applications, and applications that are limited to a single device are less valuable than those that are connected.
An online service that embodies this principle is ‘Remember the Milk’ (RTM).
Many of us have difficulty with managing and remembering multiple tasks and need to take notes in order to remember them. The idea behind the app is pretty simple, create a list for each task and add an action to it. From inception, RTM was designed to enable users to organise tasks across multiple devices, with extra sync functionality available in the pro version to manage tasks between platforms such as Microsoft Outlook and specific mobile app versions and RTM.
Some of the features of RTM include:
- Support for multiple platforms
- Email, SMS or IM reminders
- Ability to share tasks
- Manage tasks while offline
- Integration with Google Calendar and Google Gadgets
- And it’s free!
RTM has also developed sync functionality for BlackBerry devices called Milksync. Milksync enables two-way synchronisation between RTM to BlackBerry and vice-versa via either a scheduled or manual sync activity. The function can be configured to include all lists or specific lists from RTM. The key features of the application are the simple user interface, actionable synchronisation with RTM, and background sync that enables you to work offline and sync when back online.
Another cool, notable feature is location awareness that detects your current location and helps plan the best way to get your tasks done.
While there are some that have criticized the application in forums, and while I take onboard some of the comments I’ve read, and while I don’t think that anything is without flaws of some kind, I’m yet to find a real problem with RTM. For a task list all you really need is a subject title, and alerts for due time and dates, tags and search features for those with lots of jobs. What else do you really need?
RTM provides an easy to use interface that doesn’t make things complicated, which I kind of like. Admittedly there are stacks of competitors in the online Task Manager app market such as 2Do, Springpad and BHive Tasks to name a few, but for my reminders and task lists I think I’m going to stick with RTM for the time being to remember the milk!
What app do you use to help you remember the things that need to get done?
Rich User Experiences
Rich internet applications (RIA) are delivered through the combination of Graphical User Interfaces (or GUI’s for short) and multimedia content to create a rich user experience. A key component that enables this to be possible is a combination of web standards. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and isn’t a technology itself but the collection of technologies such as XHTML, CSS, DOM, XML and JavaScript that when used in combination produce a visually and functionally enhanced user experience. How Ajax applications achieve this is by introducing a presentation layer; the Ajax engine, between the user and the web application to eliminate that wait time involved with the web interaction. The engine performs the user’s interaction with the web application asynchronously, independent of the server’s communication so that in theory the user never waits for the server to do something.
A classic example of this in practice is Gmail compared with the Outlook Desktop Client. The rich user experience provided by Gmail is the ability to send and receive email anywhere, anytime. The features and experiences from both are comparable; such as the in-mail search functions, keyboard shortcuts and in-line views.
When it comes to AJAX there are two camps. Those that think that the use of Ajax will replace desktop applications; and those that do not. I’m straddling the fence. Research data from Gartner suggests a strong, positive market for rich internet applications, with a broadening market beyond earlier adopters. While I agree with this statement, I’m also of the opinion that specific user communities will always need a desktop application to perform tasks, for instance the architecture and design communities that need powerful desktop programs (like AutoCAD and Final Cut Studio) to create content due to the processing capacity required. I believe the online move will be made by those applications that bring together multiple streams of data sources. These applications will be good candidates for “AJAX’ification”, as the benefits for easy distribution and usability are magnified.
Which camp are you in?
Posted in #347class11, Ajax, Web2
Tagged #347class11, Ajax, Rich User Experiences, Web 2.0 Applications
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Innovation in Assembly
In the good old days of the web, it was difficult to dynamically share and update information; typically it was a one way interaction between web master and reader. We would think of online collaboration tools as a web page where people could share information for others to read, but it wasn’t necessarily easy for others to respond to or update information directly. Unfortunately this example is still the reality for most corporate intranets.
Nowadays the dynamic sharing and collaboration of information is much easier. We see a loose coupling of systems that provide access to online services and resources that are linked together through the use of common libraries, applications and protocols. This lightweight design of services provides for an agile integration environment with a very low barrier to entry.
This model has been widely adopted by the public, and some good examples are social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Somehow the enterprise has found this type of collaboration tool difficult to grasp. Socialtext is now providing the enterprise with an easy solution to help get them on board the collaboration bus and away from the static intranet bus stop.
In my opinion, Socialtext really adopts Tim O’Reilly’s principle of “innovation in assembly”. Their tag line is “where work gets done, together”. For any CEO, that must be music to their ears. Socialtext brings the power of social software into the enterprise by integrating social media into one usable dashboard. Multiple deployment options are available, from Software as a Service (SaaS), to a hosted appliance within an organisation’s datacentre, the platform relies upon the Google OpenSocial Gadget standard to provide over 100,000 widgets. The Socialtext REST API to enable integration with record creation systems for mashups and other social tools. The Socialtext REST API supports JSON, HTML and other text formats, as well as Microsoft friendly.NET wrappers.
But wait there is more; Socialtext also provides pluggable integration with the traditional enterprise software like IBM Lotus connections, Microsoft SharePoint, as well as user integration with Directory Management Systems (i.e. Active Directory and LDAP) to centralize user authentication and username and password credentials.
How often have you been at work and asked yourself (or a colleague) where did you find that document? With Socialtext it becomes easier as feeds and alerts that are related to you or your job function can be sent to keep you informed. Fundamentally it’s a different approach. Socialtext removes the silo’d pain points for data that normally doesn’t get shared well within the organisation, or document control and versioning problems, or even data leakage.
