toni.org » Web 2.0

Bubbly video

Toni Schneider — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:22:42 +0000

Funny Dilbert

Toni Schneider — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:58:27 +0000

I always enjoy Dilbert, but this one is especially funny: Dilbert on Web 2.0.

A moment in time

Toni Schneider — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:00:28 +0000

Catchy name for a party, isn’t it

Open Source vs. Open APIs

Toni Schneider — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:06:17 +0000

When I helped start the Yahoo Developer Network, part of my job was to go around to all the product teams inside Yahoo and convince them that it would be good for their business to open up free web APIs. The response among technical folks was pretty universally enthusiastic. It’s just one of those ideas that make great sense to an engineer. Among business folks, the response was more mixed. They would bring up a pretty predictable series of concerns. Will it cannibalize my business? How will we prevent abuse? Do we have to go first? And the unspoken concern – how will this affect my job?

Another issue that came up – one that caught me by surprise – is that some people thought open APIs and open source were somehow the same thing. As in “if we open an API does that mean we will open source our software?”. Umm, no. Both open source and open APIs have to do with technology and both have the word “open” in them, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Yet it kept coming up. For example, when Yahoo announced an open API for Yahoo Mail someone wrote a big article on how Yahoo was open sourcing Yahoo Mail (the story has since vanished, I could only find this Digg link to it).

To help clarify open source vs. open APIs, here’s a quick overview of each:

Open source = decentralized software development

The idea of open source – freely distributing the source code of a piece of software – has been around for decades. Open source as a name and big trend emerged in the late 1990s when the internet made large scale collaboration on software development easy and when the .com boom fueled new business models around Linux and other open source projects.

Some of the best known open source projects are the popular Linux operating system, the Apache web server (which serves 60% of all sites on the web), the Firefox web browser (which has taken a surprising amount of market share away from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), and SendMail (which sends large amounts of email around the web).

The core idea behind open source is to give away the source code to your software so that anyone can study, fix and improve it. This tends to produce better software and happier developers and customers. However, the idea of open source goes against decades of software distribution business models that are based on keeping source code private and selling you software that you can’t modify.

In the traditional closed source model software development is centralized. A core group of developers at a company have access to the source code. They make all the changes. Customers have to request a fix or new feature, it has to be analyzed and prioritized by product managers, then it gets in the development queue and some day it might make it into the software.

In the open source model the software development is decentralized. Anyone can modify the software, independent of where they live or who they work for. The only centralized functions tend to be tracking changes to the software, enabling developers via collaboration tools and deciding which changes make it into the official version of the software. The benefit for customers is that they can add their own features and fixes. Software developed in this fashion tends to be more agile and responsive. Because the source code is given away, the typical way to charge for this type of product is not as a license fee for the software itself, but as fees for setting up, supporting or hosting the software.

Open APIs = decentralized business development

The concept of open APIs is less evolved and understood than open source. API stands for Application Programming Interface. APIs are a tool for programmers to make one piece of software talk to another piece of software. For example if you develop a software application for Windows you use a series of Windows APIs that let you talk to the Windows operating system to do things like open or save files, draw windows and menus, etc.

An open API is one that is openly an freely available for anyone to use. Open APIs make a lot of sense on the web, where an open web API can be used to let third party software developers integrate pieces of your web site into theirs. For example Yahoo’s open search APIs let you integrate Yahoo search into your own site. This also works for integrating maps or photos or lots of other things into your site.

APIs have been an indispensable software development tool for decades. Making them open and applying them to web sites extends their usefulness for software developers. But their biggest impact I believe will be on business development. Just like open source software makes it possible for software development to happen in a decentralized and more self-serve fashion, open APIs enable the same to happen for business development.

Let’s look at a simple Yahoo search API example. Let’s say company X wants to build a product popularity index for PR and marketing people. One way to do this would be to look at the number of Yahoo search results for a given product. If you check that number every few hours, you get a general sense of how rapidly the product is growing in popularity on the internet. Here’s how this kind of project would happen pre-open-APIs: company X approaches Yahoo business development and proposes a partnership for a product popularity counter. Yahoo decides the project is too small and turns them away. Or they decide to do it but they have to cover the costs of negotiating a deal, drawing up papers, and creating and maintaining a way for company X to grab that data every few hours. This gets expensive and complicated. It’s why business development is often a bottle neck and deals don’t get done unless they are big.

Here’s how it can happen in the new decentralized, self-serve business development model based on open APIs: Yahoo creates a generic open API. Company X finds and uses the API without ever approaching Yahoo, builds a product and follows the usage rules (for example Yahoo might require a “powered by Yahoo” logo that links back to their search services). After a while company X’s service might get popular enough to warrant a direct deal with Yahoo (think of open APIs as a self-qualifying biz dev funnel). But even if it doesn’t, Yahoo gets the benefit of having thousands of small projects build on their APIs. Added together, they can make for real scale.

Conclusion

Even though they surprisingly often get lumped together, open source and open APIs are different and serve different purposes. Because of their effect on business development, open APIs are often feared by business people. They shouldn’t be. In an online world where services are continuing to evolve rapidly and intertwine in interesting ways, open APIs are rapidly becoming the best way to relieve the business development bottleneck and achieve rapid growth. Well designed open APIs – both technically (keep them simple and use standards) and from a business point of view (have clear self-serve usage rules and no adoption hurdles) – can be powerful tools for building great businesses. Just don’t confuse them with open source.

MySpace content ownership

Toni Schneider — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 14:08:04 +0000

Musicians are starting to pull content off of MySpace because MySpace's terms of use claim ownership of anything you put on their service:

Musicians' rights: Lost in MySpace?

User Generated Content -> People Media

Toni Schneider — Fri, 26 May 2006 03:32:50 +0000

Many people don’t like the term user generated content. It’s because it focuses on content, not people. And people are what matters most on the new web. I mentioned this to Tony Conrad a while back, and yesterday I noticed that he’s using the term People Media instead of user generated content. I asked him why and he said it just seemed to make sense to him. I agree. I like it. Mainstream Media. People Media.

Better blog search

Toni Schneider — Wed, 03 May 2006 00:40:22 +0000

In case you haven't already, you should check out Sphere. It's a great new blog search engine which I helped get started last year and which, more importantly, will help you discover great blogs.

Web 2.0 impedance mismatch

Toni Schneider — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 19:47:29 +0000

Everyone but Wall Street seems to be excited about the “new web”:

Consumers: excited: 200,000 new MySpace users every day
VCs: excited:pre-revenue web 2.0 startups are raising $5-10MM
Press: excited: Business Week, Business 2.0, DesignTechnica, lots more
Wall Street: not excited: Google drops 7% (again) overnight

Random quote

Toni Schneider — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 03:52:55 +0000

If you thought that nobody really talks in that certain way that various “bullshit generators” make fun of, consider this: a few weeks ago I got a voice mail from a recruiter and he said verbatim “Would you be interested in joining an exciting startup? They are called ****** and they provide a hosted on-demand development integration platform to build composite applications delivered over a thin client or you could also say they do last mile delivery of SOA apps“. I could not believe my ears and had to write it down word for word.

What is Web 2.0?

Toni Schneider — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:34:19 +0000

In the build-up to next week’s Web 2.0 conference, technology observers are debating what web 2.0 is (I’m speaking at the conference on a couple of topics). I think the term web 2.0 has reached a tipping point in Silicon Valley in the last couple of months. People have been prognosticating a shift in the evolution of the web for a few years now. The shift is towards the web as a computing platform on which to build applications (and away from a publishing platform for web pages). This new computing platform will consist of open and easily accessible web services such as search results, news data feeds or people’s shared photos. Software developers will use these services as building blocks to rapidly create whatever new products they can think up. I think the tipping point for this idea was Housingmaps. Built by a single developer in his spare time over the course of a couple of months, it makes the concept immediately obvious to people. Take two web 2.0 building blocks, in this case an RSS feed for Craigslist real estate listings and a maps API from Google, mix them together and you get a cool new app. Now have a few hundred thousand web developers repeat this process and you get a explosion of new ideas and products.

Housingmaps was quickly noticed by bloggers and written up in the NYT. Since then, I hear web 2.0 everywhere. As is typical when Silicon Valley is in the grip of a new buzzword, lots of ideas and people are piling onto the bandwagon. All of a sudden, every company with a corporate blog and an RSS feed is “web 2.0″. Conferences and roundtables are popping up. VCs are working overtime trying to figure out where the money will be made. I guess this is all part of the process of vetting an idea and finding the core that will enable true long term value. In the end, I believe we’ll find that this is a real and important trend that will be driven by a handful of building block service providers such as Yahoo! and Google and thousands of software developers who will be building new products such as Housingmaps. Incidently, an important part of my job at Yahoo is to create the building blocks, so I’m obviously totally unbiased.

PS: If you couldn’t get tickets to Web 2.0, check out Web 1.0 to be held across the street!

Update: I like this web 2.0 definition by Tim O’Reilly: “Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.”