Homework 2-23-2008 #02

2. Summarize the What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly in one page.

The Web As Platform

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence

1. Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web.s users add new content, and new sites, it is bound in to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it.

2. While Yahoo! has since moved into the business of creating many types of content, its role as a portal to the collective work of the net's users remains the core of its value.

3. Google's breakthrough in search, which quickly made it the undisputed search market leader, was PageRank.

4. eBay grows organically in response to user activity, and the company's role is as an enabler of a context in which that user activity can happen.

5. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page--and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results.Amazon always leads with "most popular", a real-time computation based not only on sales but other factors that Amazon insiders call the "flow" around products.

6. Wikipedia、Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr

At its most basic, a blog is just a personal home page in diary format. But as Rich Skrenta notes, the chronological organization of a blog "seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain."One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS

Data is the Next Intel Inside

• In the internet era, one can already see a number of cases where control over the database has led to market control and outsized financial returns.

• At present, these mashups are mostly innovative experiments, done by hackers. But entrepreneurial activity follows close behind. And already, one can see that for at least one class of developer, Google has taken the role of data source away from Navteq and inserted themselves as a favored intermediary. We expect to see battles between data suppliers and application vendors in the next few years, as both realize just how important certain classes of data will become as building blocks for Web 2.0 applications.

• The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.
  

End of the Software Release Cycle

• Operations must become a core competency. Google's or Yahoo!'s expertise in product development must be matched by an expertise in daily operations. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, continuously filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, continuously and dynamically respond to hundreds of millions of asynchronous user queries, simultaneously matching them with context-appropriate advertisements.

• Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.
  

Software Above the Level of a Single Device

• Much as the web succeeded precisely because it overthrew much of hypertext theory, substituting a simple pragmatism for ideal design, RSS has become perhaps the single most widely deployed web service because of its simplicity, while the complex corporate web services stacks have yet to achieve wide deployment.

• Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems.The complexity of the corporate-sponsored web services stack is designed to enable tight coupling. While this is necessary in many cases, many of the most interesting applications can indeed remain loosely coupled, and even fragile. The Web 2.0 mindset is very different from the traditional IT mindset!

• Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS and REST-based web services, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection. This idea is fundamental to the internet itself, a reflection of what is known as the end-to-end principle

• Design for "hackability" and remixability. Systems like the original web, RSS, and AJAX all have this in common: the barriers to re-use are extremely low. Much of the useful software is actually open source, but even when it isn't, there is little in the way of intellectual property protection. The web browser's "View Source" option made it possible for any user to copy any other user's web page; RSS was designed to empower the user to view the content he or she wants, when it's wanted, not at the behest of the information provider; the most successful web services are those that have been easiest to take in new directions unimagined by their creators. The phrase "some rights reserved," which was popularized by the Creative Commons to contrast with the more typical "all rights reserved," is a useful guidepost.

"innovation in assembly."

Lightweight Programming Models

One other feature of Web 2.0 that deserves mention is the fact that it's no longer limited to the PC platform.In his parting advice to Microsoft, long time Microsoft developer Dave Stutz pointed out that "Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come."

Rich User Experiences

As early as Pei Wei's Viola browser in 1992, the web was being used to deliver "applets" and other kinds of active content within the web browser. Java's introduction in 1995 was framed around the delivery of such applets. JavaScript and then DHTML were introduced as lightweight ways to provide client side programmability and richer user experiences. Several years ago, Macromedia coined the term "Rich Internet Applications" (which has also been picked up by open source Flash competitor Laszlo Systems) to highlight the capabilities of Flash to deliver not just multimedia content but also GUI-style application experiences.

SUMMARY

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability

• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them

• Trusting users as co-developers

• Harnessing collective intelligence

• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service

• Software above the level of a single device

• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Homework 2-23-2008 #01

1. List the companies Google acquired year by year.Briefly describe the strategic implications of each acquisition.

1. Blogger 2003/02/15 : The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.
2. Picasa 2006/08/15 : Google has stated that this technology will be applied to searching for photos within Picasa at some stage in the near future.
3. Youtube 2006/10/10 : Youtube is a Video web. Although Google have itself Video web,but Youtube is more popular than Google Video.
4. JotSpot 2006 10 31 : This absorb can make online synergistic techology merge into Google's online document service.
5. Endoxon 2006/12/18 : Swiss maps company . The reason is Google aim to gain their maps about Europe , and their professed techology in online maps
6. DoubleClick 2007/04/13 : DoubleClick has something that Google, for all its money and smarts, doesn't: a vibrant advertising business for banners, videos, and other so-called display ads often intended more to promote brands than to generate immediate sales
7. Feedburner 2007/05/23 : Feedburner has been a prime acquisition target for over a year, and Google needs to get into the RSS ad market.
8. Postini 2007/07/09 :
1. Make no bones about it, Google is definitely going after Microsoft's Exchange franchise. With the addition of Postini, if they just add push e-mail support and an off-line client, GMail will basically be as good, if not better than Exchange. I haven't heard anything about an off-line client for GMail but as Zimbra has demonstrated, it's possible so I would expect to see something like this from GMail in the near future. Speaking of Zimbra, IBM should buy Zimbra and kill off Notes. Zimbra is the only chance it has of keeping up with MSFT and GOOG in the e-mail race at this point.
2. This is not good news for other anti-spam companies, especially if GOOG decides to offer Postini's basic anti-spam services for free. The way Postini works (you simply redirect you MX traffic to go through their servers) reminds me of how Feedburner works. Google started offering all of Feedburner's services for free shortly after they acquired them, so it would be logical to suspect that some kind of price cut, potentially all the way to free is coming for Postini's services. That's not good for other folks out there trying to make a profit on their anti-spam services.
3. If you look at Google's recent enterprise oriented acquisitions they are building a pretty compelling set of hosted applications. Not only do they have e-mail covered but they have the big three productivity apps (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation) covered as well. They also added in Wiki capability (via JotSpot). To link all this together all they need is a hosted file server and integrated search across all these apps (basically a hosted version of Google Desktop). That's a pretty powerful suite of services.
4. Over the years, Postini received lots of inbound M&A interest, but the only bid they hit was Google's. I think this speaks to two issues that other companies attempting to compete with Google in the M&A market have: 1) Google not only can afford to pay more for companies, it does pay more. Google's competitors simply can't compete with Google's prodigious cash flow, multiples, and willingness to take dilution. 2) Google not only pays more, but is perceived as a better place to work by most targets. Thus, the management team is happy to support a Google deal because they know their team will be happy. This does not bode well in the short term for Google's competitors.
9. Marratech 2007/08/20 : Google announces it has acquired Web-based video conferencing and collaboration solutions provider Marratech.
10. Jaiku 2007/10/10 : Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users. Jaiku's technology and talented team are a great addition to Google's current application and mobile teams.

Syllabus: Web Services and Advanced Internet Systems, 2008

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Syllabus: Web Services and Advanced Internet Systems, 2008