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Dion Hinchcliffe

Leveraging the convergence of IT and the next generation of the Web
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Pick a blog category Ajax Architecture of Participation ATOM Badges Blogs Business Models Business Process Management Collaboration Collective Intelligence Convergence Cost-effective scalability Crowdsourcing Customer Self-Service Design Patterns Encouraging Unintended Uses Enterprise 2.0 Enterprise Mashups Enterprise Web 2.0 Enterprise Wikis Gadgets Global SOA Governance Hype JSON Lightweight Service Models Mashups microformats Network Effects Open APIs Orchestration Products Radical Decentralization REST Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Right To Remix RSS SaaS Small Pieces, Loosely Joined SOA SOAP Social Computing Social Media Social Networking Social Software Structured Content Tagging The Long Tail Tolerance Continuum Two-Way Web Uncategorized User Generated Content Web 2.0 Web 2.0 Platforms Web as Platform Web services Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) Widgets Wikis WS-*
May 17th, 2007
The story of Web 2.0 and SOA continues - Part 1
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 5:40 pm Categories:Web 2.0,Collective Intelligence,Mashups,Architecture of Participation,Web as Platform,Rich Internet Applications (RIA),Lightweight Service Models,SOA,Governance,WS-*,Convergence,Right To Remix,Products,Enterprise Web 2.0,Global SOA,Web services,Ajax,SOAP,RSS,ATOM,REST,Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA),Encouraging Unintended Uses,User Generated Content,Open APIs,Web 2.0 Platforms Tags:Software,Web,Web 2.0,SOA,Simple Object Access Protocol,It,Dion Hinchcliffe +8
12 votes Worthwhile?
It’s nearly the middle of 2007 already and I’ve had occasion to sit down and look at where Web 2.0 and SOA software models have evolved lately. Partly it’s because we’re now seeing some of the bigger software companies seriously embrace lightweight SOA recently, and it’s also because we’re continuing to see more clearly that Web 2.0 and SOA really are largely (but not 100%) the same concepts that merely lay on different — if fairly different — parts of the software continuum. Here’s the latest on this story.
For those not up-to-date on this trend, the fact that these two big conceptual foundations in the software business overlap extensively — and somewhat unexpectedly — appears to be a pretty important subject for a number of reasons. One is that SOA is the dominant design paradigm in business software today, with most software development projects using some subset of it as their primary organizing principle. The core principle of SOA is the decomposition of software into sets of services which can be used and composed into new applications that have a very high level of integration and reuse.
The second reason this convergence is important is that potent ideas in Web 2.0 have been mapped back from what seems to be working best on the often unruly, much less-organized, but considerably larger Web. Web 2.0 is more of a pragmatic extraction of what actually works best in online product design than a rigorous a priori engineering exercise. That both have arrived at largely the same endpoints on their own, but with very different priorities and focus in some areas, should not be understated.
SOA and Web 2.0 have also crossed over considerably around Rich Internet Applications and Ajax. Read ZDNet’s Joe McKendrickrecent post for the latest on this story.
I’ve written in the past about the considerable overlap and convergence of these two popular software models. From mycontrived or converging article exploring the early possibilities to myfirst Venn diagram showing the similarities and differences, it’s been clear that Web 2.0 and SOA are closely related. Understanding the exact demarcations and differences between the two, however, is driven by a couple of realizations. One is that from a product design perspective, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each method prescribed for creating your software can dramatically effect what an online product can do in the market or for your business internally. Go with traditional SOA and you’ll be able to leverage the advantages that its design center confers. Go withWeb 2.0 ideas, and you’ll be able to take on a different set of challenges and be successful in a very different environment and for different reasons. But make no mistake, it’s fairly clear that choosing one of the other can really matter to a project’s or product’s ultimate success.
Both conceptions do make one very important assumption, that all software is part of a larger ecosystem bigger than itself. This idea has been with us for a while, ever since distributed computing. But the focus of software ecosystems has continued to move around over the years, from computing, to services, to data itself. What’s the real core? What’s the most important aspect of our applications? The O’Reilly concept of Web 2.0 tells us that data is one of the most important parts of our software applications these days, and this is backed up by citing one world leading product after another that took this idea seriously. SOA tells us that services are the center of composition. That services in a SOA also transport data is also important, but the focus in traditional SOA tends to be much more on the seams of our IT systems than what makes them the most valuable overall. These may be seemingly academic distinctions but the ongoing struggle of SOA implementation in many organizations and the runaway success of many a Web 2.0 application hints that this may indeed be some very important hair splitting.


To show how SOA and Web 2.0 line up when compared to each other, I’ve included in the diagram above my most recent update depicting the overlap and convergence of the ideas in Web 2.0 and SOA. It paints a clear picture of what the two have in common and how they are different as well. Note: No depiction like this could be complete and this is very much a work in progress. For this version, I’ve recently added security and monetization as two core aspects that SOA and Web 2.0 share, but with varying degrees of importance (SOA cares more about security, Web 2.0 cares more about monetization of products and services.)
Another important item: The bottom of the overlapping circle contains a crypticRead the rest of this entry »
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May 14th, 2007
Mashups: The next major new software development model?
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:05 pm Categories:Web 2.0,Business Models,SaaS,Mashups,Web as Platform,Rich Internet Applications (RIA),Tolerance Continuum,Small Pieces, Loosely Joined,Lightweight Service Models,SOA,Business Process Management,Collaboration,Products,Enterprise Web 2.0,Global SOA,Social Software,Web services,Ajax,RSS,Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA),Enterprise Mashups,Enterprise 2.0,Open APIs,Widgets,Badges,Gadgets,Wikis,Enterprise Wikis,Blogs Tags:Software,Web,Software Development,Mashup,Dion Hinchcliffe +7
21 votes Worthwhile?
At last week‘s Mashup Ecosystem Summit held in San Francisco and sponsored by IBM with an invited assemblage of leading players in this space, I gave an opening talk about the current challenges and opportunities of mashups.  And there I posed the title of this post as a statement instead of a question.   The reason that it‘s a question here is entirely driven by the context of who is currently creating the majority of mashups these days.  Because even a cursory examination of what people are doing every day on the Web right now tells us that mashups — also known as ad hoc Web sites created on the fly out of other Web sites — are indeed happening in a large way, albeit in simple forms, by the tens of thousands online every day.
The consumerization of the enterprise as younger workers bring their Web 2.0 skills and habits to work has already begun.But inside our organizations, both in the IT department and in business units, mashups are a much rarer phenomenon.  And in fact, this is one of the classic hallmarks of the Web 2.0 era; the much larger community of the Web as a major source of innovation and leading edge behavior that subsequently moves across the firewall and into our workplaces.
However, the topic of this blog is aimed at the application of Web 2.0 to the enterprise and so whether mashups will be a significant new model for application development inside our businesses anytime soon is still somewhat of an open question.  It‘s worth noting that McKinsey‘s recentglobal executive survey of Web 2.0 in business said that a whopping 21% of large businesses across the board are planning investment in mashups in 2007, but a sobering 54% of business executives also said mashups were not even under consideration.  Understanding the timing on mashup adoption therefore is important along with the challenge of communicating their potential.
Since the mashup story is primarily being driven by spontaneous activity at the edge of the Internet, an accurate and updated picture of what‘s actually happening with them is harder to make out than if it was being driven by a centralized industry effort.  And as it turns out, this makes what‘s happening richer and more exciting than it would be otherwise while at the same providing significant challenges for those that want to take these compelling ideas and apply them deliberately to solve business problems.
So in the interest of making sure we have the broadest industry discussion we can about mashups — and to make sure there is some kind of snapshot of what we think we‘re seeing in this space — I thought I‘d summarize the notes from my talk at the Mashup Ecosystem Summit.

To bring folks that are just joining the mashup conversation up to speed on why mashups are so exciting, I‘ll start with my take on the key aspects of mashups from a value proposition perspective.
Key Aspects and Benefits of the Mashup Approach
Effective leverage ofWeb parts and theGlobal SOA. Mashups are generally built out of the bits, pieces, and services of other Web applications that already exist, adding code only when it can‘t be sourced from internal or external suppliers or to provide integration "glue" between the parts.  This reuse can quickly and easily leverage millions of dollars in previous investment and results in a
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May 5th, 2007
Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:40 pm Categories:Web 2.0,Business Models,Collective Intelligence,SaaS,Mashups,Architecture of Participation,Small Pieces, Loosely Joined,SOA,Business Process Management,Governance,Collaboration,Tagging,Network Effects,Products,Enterprise Web 2.0,Social Software,RSS,ATOM,Social Computing,Enterprise Mashups,Enterprise 2.0,User Generated Content,Crowdsourcing,Web 2.0 Platforms,Wikis,Enterprise Wikis,Blogs Tags:Web,Web 2.0,Corporate Culture,Worker,Tool,Organization,Dion HinchcliffeIn Focus » See more posts on:Web 2.0
+8
12 votes Worthwhile?
I‘ve only recently had a chance to catch up and readTom Davenport‘s post a few weeks ago about his skepticism of Enterprise 2.0‘s ability to wreak significant cultural and hierarchical change inside organizations. Those of you tracking the Enterprise 2.0 story know the drill, namely that applying Web 2.0 tools and platforms inside organization may or may not — depending on who you are talking to — improve the way we collaborate, run our businesses, and even potentially tap major new veins of previouslyunexploitable worker productivity.  I myself tend to be a bit biased because I‘m very close to many uses of these technologies and their use in the field.  And that‘s shown me that if one trend stands out clearly above the fray, it‘s that most organizations are rapidly embracing these tools today, either from the top-down or at a grassroots level, and often both.
Viewpoints like Tom are entirely right on however if we were looking at tools that are hard to use, highly complex and overspecialized, and required significant resources and special skills to acquire, deploy, and maintain.  But this is entirely not the case in this wave of software applications that seem to systematically address virtually all the barriers we‘ve seen in the past to getting new tools adopted, rapidly providing immediate value, and broadly used.  One of the most important reasons for this is simply that the constantly evolving Web has continually refined and guided through competitive pressure — and other feedback loops — the design of sites until we have hit upon very effective models for collaboration and communication.  These include the now-ubiquitous blog and wiki but many others as well including mashups, roaming Web desktops, and highly-customizable SaaS apps.  Applying these to the enterprise is now extremely easy for anyone to do, highly applicable in many if not most business situations, and certainly last but not least, very inexpensive.

But as Tom goes on to note, the real obstacles to applying Web 2.0 platforms inside our workplaces may very well be our corporate cultures.  Cultural impedance is something that‘s also inhibited many otherwise highly useful and potentially beneficial IT initiatives including SOA, BPM, EAI and others.  The gap between what‘s technically possible and what the corporate culture is willing and able to accept — must less actively encourage — is often wider than many people automatically assume.  Clearly the exciting things happening on the Web today from the explosion of user-generated content, ad hoc collaboration in the large, rapid self-service global information discovery via Web search, and collective intelligence stories like Wikipedia are outcomes that many would like to replicate inside our enterprises.
And the very openness of Web 2.0 platforms, the control and power that must be handed to
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April 27th, 2007
A tale of two Web 2.0 conferences and mashups
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 7:03 am Categories:Web 2.0,SaaS,Mashups,Web as Platform,Rich Internet Applications (RIA),Small Pieces, Loosely Joined,Lightweight Service Models,SOA,WS-*,Convergence,Right To Remix,Enterprise Web 2.0,Global SOA,Web services,RSS,ATOM,Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA),Encouraging Unintended Uses,Enterprise Mashups,Open APIs,Widgets,Badges,Web 2.0 Platforms,Wikis,Enterprise Wikis Tags:Web,Web 2.0,Site,Mashup,Dion HinchcliffeIn Focus » See more posts on:Web 2.0
+5
7 votes Worthwhile?
I‘ve just come off a whirlwind conference tour that started in San Francisco last week with Web 2.0 Expo and ended with the Web 2.0 Kongress yesterday in Frankfurt.  I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at both conferences and it was fascinating to see the differences in focus between the two events, as well as some of the apparent trends they had in common.
Given the estimates of the size of the crowd at Web 2.0 Expo, anywhere from 10,000 to 16,000 people depending on who you talk to, there‘s little doubt it was one of the leading events this year around the next generation of the Web.  In contrast, the Web 2.0 Kongress was a smaller and much more business focused affair with a lot of focus on integration and SOA.  Yet it was abundantly clear at both, based on my conversations with numerous attendees, that we‘re now well clear of the early hype of Web 2.0 and much more on how to exploit the opportunities that it maps out for us.

Another key trend I saw was the attendance of mainstream business people who were very much in evidence at both events, something that I‘ve noticed has been increasing at Web 2.0 events lately in general.  I met attendees from major corporations, federal and state government, and many others from medium to small size businesses.  And a good percentage of them were business people and not from the technical side of things.  This doesn‘t come so much as a surprise if we take into account indicators such as the McKinsey global survey on Web 2.0 which I coveredin my last post.
The boundaries of the Web are blurring
The other hot trend, besides of course of just about anything social to do with the Web, that was explored at both events was
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April 3rd, 2007
More results on use of Web 2.0 in business emerge
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 2:17 pm Categories:Web 2.0,Business Models,Hype,Collective Intelligence,Mashups,Architecture of Participation,Web as Platform,Lightweight Service Models,SOA,Business Process Management,Governance,Collaboration,Two-Way Web,Enterprise Web 2.0,Global SOA,Social Software,Web services,RSS,Social Networking,Enterprise Mashups,Enterprise 2.0,User Generated Content,Open APIs,Crowdsourcing,Social Media,Web 2.0 Platforms,Wikis,Enterprise Wikis,Blogs Tags:Web,Web 2.0,Blog,Business,Wiki,Dion HinchcliffeIn Focus » See more posts on:Web 2.0
+17
25 votes Worthwhile?
The last few weeks have seen a series of interesting new reports, studies, and papers on the past, present, and future of Web 2.0 concepts and applications as applied to businesses.  Most notable for many industry watchers have been fairly rigorous new works by McKinsey & Company as well as Forrester, whom have each released the results of broad surveys of executives in various industries.  The focus of both surveys was to capture a picture of the interests, activities, motivators for Web 2.0 adoption of several thousand C-level executives in medium to large companies.
While both theMcKinsey study andForrester report have summaries online — and you can read a detailed breakdown of the fascinating adoption numbers in Nick Carr‘s excellentroll-up of many of the key numbers in the reports — what stands out clearly from the state of Web 2.0 in business last year is the almost surprisingly high levels interest in some of the more advanced, and powerful, concepts in theWeb 2.0 practice set.
Gartner, for its part, had its own take on things last year with their widely covered hype cycle report on Web 2.0, indicating the things like collective intelligence (ostensibly thecore principle of Web 2.0) would be a long term, transformational business strategy that they felt at the time would take at least 5 to 10 years for broad industry uptake.  However, the report from McKinsey intriguing suggests something much different may be taking place.

The numbers McKinsey provides from actual business leaders seems to indicate that broad, active interest in collective intelligence is rapidly forming in the offices of many company‘s CIOs, CTOs, and other executives.  McKinsey cites that fully 48% of the nearly 3,000 leading executives surveyed are actively investing in collective intelligence approaches.  What makes this interesting is that this number is a good bit more than executives are currently reporting that they are investing in other well known Web 2.0 approaches including social networking, RSS, podcasting, and even wikis and blogs, which come in about 1/3 lower in overall interest.  In fact, out of all the Web 2.0 trends surveyed, only Web services has a bigger footprint than collective intelligence in terms of current investment.  This strongly suggests some kind of sea change in business thinking since last year.
This is a fascinating outcome since
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March 12th, 2007
Encouraging Enterprise 2.0: As simple as possible, but no simpler?
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 6:00 pm Categories:Web 2.0,Hype,Collective Intelligence,Mashups,Architecture of Participation,Lightweight Service Models,Governance,Collaboration,Convergence,Two-Way Web,Network Effects,Enterprise Web 2.0,Enterprise Mashups,Enterprise 2.0,User Generated Content,Web 2.0 Platforms,Wikis,Enterprise Wikis,Blogs Tags:Web,Information Technology,Information,Wiki,Dion HinchcliffeIn Focus » See more posts on:Web 2.0
+1
9 votes Worthwhile?
Blogger Euan Semplerecently highlighted a key point about Enterprise 2.0 adoption that ZDNet‘s own Dan Farber also foundworthy of note over the weekend.  And that is that Enterprise 2.0 will happen in your organization entirely by itself, whether you encourage it, discourage it, or even consign it to benign neglect.  Euan actually laid out three strategies in semi-tongue cheek form likely meant as a shot across the bow of complacent IT departments; whether you get out of the way, actively encourage it, or do absolutely nothing, Enterprise 2.0 platforms like blogs, wikis, and related social, emergent, freeform Web 2.0-style apps are coming to your company, and in fact are almost certainly there already.
This is the call to action to IT departments where they can actually do the most good and use their top-down influence to find ways to embrace Web 2.0 by eliminating the intrinsic barriers to it without compromising the integrity of enterprise systems or our businesses.To reinforce that this isn‘t mere speculation, at theend of my last post I cited an instance of one large firm I worked with discovering that isolated wikis had begun to proliferate like crabgrass internally, with no impetus from from IT at all.  I could relate a half dozen more anecdotes of the same kind:  A worker that needed a wiki to collaborate on a project on-the-fly and couldn‘t wait for IT to provide it and used his own credit card to get access to one on the Web.  Or a department within a large Fortune 500 firm installs a solitary wiki server on a developer workstation and the rest of the company‘s departments jump on board and start adding to it, almost displacing the existing ECM system.
Though these are just two anecdotes and not rigorous case studies, I find that most people I speak with have started noticing the same thing; a marked consumerization of the enterprise that is resulting in employees using their Internet skills and the latest low-barrier Web tools and — as Prof. Andrew McAfee says —voting with their feet to use them at work.
But the enterprise is not the Web
However, while I completely agree with Euan and even witness grassroots, bottom-up Enterprise 2.0 happening myself, there is some serious issues with the do nothing strategy, which will be relatively common as the default stance.  While heavyweight top-down IT can certainly do a lot of good for a certain class of business problems, it‘s not the right answer to everything.  At its basic level, IT is good for ensuring some basic level of consistency to enable interoperability between corporate systems, safeguard data compatibility, the provide long term safety of corporate knowledge and systems, and as it turns out, give us the ability to access and exploit the vast, unique, and competitively vital repositories of knowledge that have built up inside most organizations.

Data is the Next "Intel Inside" is a key aspect of Web 2.0 precisely for
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March 8th, 2007
More organizations shift to Web 2.0 while IT departments remain wary
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 6:21 pm Categories:Web 2.0,Design Patterns,Business Models,Collective Intelligence,Architecture of Participation,Business Process Management,Governance,Collaboration,Two-Way Web,Enterprise Web 2.0,Social Software,Enterprise 2.0,User Generated Content,Crowdsourcing,Social Media Tags: In Focus » See more posts on:Web 2.0
+4
24 votes Worthwhile?
A couple of recent announcements from two large, very well-known organizations provides an interesting data point on how Web 2.0 is affecting the product designs and business processes of otherwise very traditional institutions.  BothUSA Today and theU.S. Patent and Trademark office have recently unveiled strategies for letting their users use two-way Web capabilities to contribute directly to the products and services they offer.  And many other mainstream companies, such as Pepsi as well asGM and XM Radio have been exploring externally-facing Web 2.0 concepts in their products for a while now.
This means that if you get an employee to spend an hour to contribute to an internal Web 2.0 application, that‘s an hour of their regular work that doesn‘t get done.At the same time, a recentInformationWeek survey of IT departments are showing considerably wariness for doing the same thing inside the firewall with employees, with over half being either skeptical or wary of the utility of Web 2.0 apps in the enterprise.  The biggest concerns: Security, little expertise with Web 2.0 products, integration issues, and unclear ROI top the list.  In other words, the group inside most organizations that‘s most familiar with IT and software, is thinking carefully before deploying things likeEnterprise 2.0.
This is an interesting contrast, with a growing list of companies cautiously but clearly testing out the Web 2.0 waters with their customers while remaining largely on the fence for its use inside the enterprise.  Certainly, many organizations likely believe that consumer facing sites that extensively leverage user generated content, mass participation, and social networking have been proved to work on a large scale by sites like MySpace and YouTube.  And that organizations have already purchased and deployed countless IT tools that were already designed support internal business processes, ad hoc collaboration, and information capture and storage.

Another probably contributor to the increasing use of customer-facing Web 2.0 applications by large organizations is simple competitive pressure.  This is something that IT departments have only recently started facing in a serious fashion with outsourcing and other budget diversions in the enterprise as business units decide that they can do better by pitting their internal IT suppliers with external ones.  Thus, because of industry competition, a company‘s external products tend to improve faster and be more innovative since the concern over the displacement and dislocation of falling behind one‘s competitive peers is often pronounced in many industries.  Competition is usually much less, and often
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February 25th, 2007
Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 2: Mass customization, mashups, and recombinant Web apps
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 6:22 pm Categories:Web 2.0,Design Patterns,Business Models,Mashups,Architecture of Participation,The Long Tail,Small Pieces, Loosely Joined,Lightweight Service Models,SOA,Right To Remix,Two-Way Web,Products,Enterprise Web 2.0,Global SOA,Web services,SOAP,RSS,ATOM,REST,Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA),Enterprise Mashups,Enterprise 2.0,Open APIs,Widgets,Badges,Gadgets Tags: +7
9 votes Worthwhile?
In my last post, I took a look at the recent proliferation of Web widgets, which are modular content and services that are making it easier for anyone to help themselves to the vast pool of high value functionality and information that resides on the Web today.  Companies are actively "widgetizing" their online offerings so that it can actively be repurposed into other sites and online products.  And as we discussed in the last post, it‘s believed that letting users innovate with your online offerings by letting embedding them in their own Web sites, blogs, and applications cangreatly broaden distribution and reach, leverage rapid viral propagation over the Internet, and fully exploit the raw creativity that theoretically lies in great quantities on the edge of our networks.
DIY on the Web is looking to be a major trend; Newsweek recently speculated that 2007 will be theYear of the Widget.
Looked at this way, letting thousands and even millions of users build Web sites and apps out of your Web parts and then monetizing it with advertising, usage fees, or subscriptions sounds great in the abstract.  But one of the big outstanding questions is if widgitizing is mostly useful for gaining fast user adoption and market share, and not for building the fundamentals of a viable, long-term business online.  While this last question is still very much an open one, part of the answer will come from the way that the consumption side of DIY develops.  The question is this: Are environments emerging that will enable rich and sophisticated DIY scenarios that are usable by most people?

So while my last post looked at the recent growth of available Web parts, now we‘ll look at the consumption side of the DIY phenomenon.  Specifically, beyond the simple copy-and-paste of snippets of HTML, what is the current state of capable tools that will let all of us assemble useful apps beyond the widget encrusted dashboards that are most likely outcome possible today?  Because without tools that enable real integration between all these portable Web parts, services, and feeds, we don‘t have useful new software, we just have fancy information displays.
Like the emergent, DIY usage currently being explored and increasingly embraced withEnterprise 2.0, the idea of DIY is to get developers and IT departments out of the demand loop and letting users self-service themselves.  Like spreadsheets and desktop databases have been used for years by end users to build simple apps, with the rise of reusable, portable Web parts and feeds allows the assembly of an entire spectrum of Web apps that don‘t require true software development skills.  Given the right tools that guide users down the right paths (palettes of pre-tested, approved parts, built-in security, versioning and configuration management), DIY might become a major force for leveraging the largely untappedThe Long Tail of software demand, instead of becoming a giant support headache for public Web companies and internal IT departments.
Of course, what I‘m referring to here is
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February 19th, 2007
Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 1: Widgets, badges, and gadgets
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 6:24 pm Categories:Web 2.0,Design Patterns,Business Models,Mashups,Web as Platform,Small Pieces, Loosely Joined,Lightweight Service Models,SOA,Right To Remix,Network Effects,Global SOA,Ajax,Encouraging Unintended Uses,User Generated Content,Open APIs,Widgets,Badges,Gadgets Tags: In Focus » See more posts on:Web 2.0
+7
9 votes Worthwhile?
One of the hallmarks of a good Web 2.0 site is one that hands over non-essential control to users, letting them contribute content, participate socially, and even fundamentally shape the site itself.  The premise is that users will do a surprising amount of the hard work necessary to make the site successful, right down to creating the very information the site offers to its other users and even inviting their friends and family members to use it.  Web 2.0 newcomers MySpace and YouTube have shown how this can be done on a mass scale surprisingly quickly, and of course older generation successes like eBay and craigslist have been doing this for years.
There‘s little question that the Web is increasingly turning into a sort of online Home Depot with its shelves lined with thousands of useful, off-the-shelf parts of every description and utility.As part of this, users are getting increasingly accustomed to the ease of which they can customize their own corners of the Internet, whether it‘s a blog, profile page, Web site or even Web application.  While skinning and customizable layouts have been with us on the Web for a long time, increasingly users want to share — or particularly important to this discussion — even repurpose the content and services they find on the Web in locations and forms of their choosing.
Particularly younger, Web-savvy users have been encrusting their blogs and MySpace profiles with things like badges and widgets for a while now, especially now that a significant number of Web sites have opened up their content to let users do this.  In fact, these increasingly portable visual parts are now becoming quite commonplace, easy to consume by regular Web users, and are becoming richer and more useful all the time.   In fact, the spread of widgets, and badges — also called gadgets by the big Web players like Microsoft and Google —has been very clear in the last year and there are now hundreds of them readily available to use after a minute or two of configuration.
Motivation, Benefits, and Business Models
It seems obvious that portable Web parts, which I‘ll call widgets from here on out since that seems to be the growing consensus on terminology, confer a lot of benefits to those that use them.  Widgets let anyone put the high value services and content of the Web‘s leading companies right on their own site, for anyone to use.  There are widgets readily available that offer customized local Google search, weather maps, instant messaging, social bookmarking, site meters, games, and even entire software applications.  And most of them can be installed with a bit of GUI configuration and a cut and paste.  There‘s little question that the Web is increasingly turning into a sort of online Home Depot with its shelves lined with thousands of useful, off-the-shelf parts of every description and utility.

So while it‘s clear that there‘s a lot of value to end-users to repurpose the valuable functionality and information from elsewhere on the Web for their own needs, what does this confer to the Web sites that offer them?
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January 29th, 2007
Big software firms take aim at Web 2.0
Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 8:08 pm Categories:Web 2.0,Design Patterns,Business Models,Hype,Collective Intelligence,SaaS,Mashups,Architecture of Participation,The Long Tail,Rich Internet Applications (RIA),Small Pieces, Loosely Joined,SOA,Collaboration,Convergence,Right To Remix,Tagging,Products,Enterprise Web 2.0,Social Software,Ajax,RSS,ATOM,Social Computing,Social Networking,Enterprise Mashups,Enterprise 2.0,User Generated Content,Widgets Tags: In Focus » See more posts on:Web 2.0,Oracle
+8
10 votes Worthwhile?
While 2006 was a big year for Web 2.0 in the consumer space, it was barely on the radar in the enterprise world.  That didn‘t stop volumes of press coverage, speculation, and debate about how applicable Web 2.0 technologies — from Ajax to social networking — would actually be to the business world.
However those in the enterprise who wanted to go ahead, experiment, and conduct pilot projects to see how Web 2.0 concepts work for them were largely stuck with very consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications to try out.  That‘s because until recently, the major software makers that supply the application platforms that run the vast majority of the business world haven‘t had applications that specifically focused on Web 2.0 patterns and practices, things like social networking, tagging, mashups, architectures of participation, and so on.
The consumerization of the enterprise was predicted to be one of the significant trends of 2007 and a quick look at this list of applications confirms that it will indeed be a key story this year.However, in the last couple of months quite a different picture has emerged and the world‘s largest software companies have taken clear aim at the Web 2.0 product space with announcement after announcement.  IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Intel all have significant products, often many of them, targeted at offering the modern consumer Web experience to workers inside the firewall.  And far from being a me-too play with the rest of the industry, the truth is that as popular as open source is getting — particularly in the Web 2.0 community — many business customers still prefer solutions that play well with the mountains of enterprise IT applications and back-end systems that currently run the business.
And with approaches likeEnterprise 2.0 heating up including the cutting edge topics like the emergence of mashup creation tools to build a visual "face" of service-oriented architectures (SOA), it turns out that Web 2.0 applications aimed at the enterprise must deal well with formal services integration, enterprise search, information security, single sign-on, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and a laundry list of other enterprise issues.  These are all topics that the aforementioned firms understand well and are actively addressing in most cases with these new products.
Adding "enterprise context" to Web 2.0 tools require some work but doesn‘t have to be daunting.  Read overviews of how to provide this forblogs andwikis.
It‘s also true that these are uncertain days for many of the big software firms.  This is partially because the world of software is becoming increasingly commoditized while the expectations for how software should be hosted is also moving rapidly from installed native applications to online Software as a Service (SaaS).  There‘s also a sense that enterprise systems have become too complicated, unwieldy, and slow-moving compared to their nimble brethren out on the Web.  New Web applications have continued to adapt and evolve out on the Internet quite quickly in comparison to traditional IT, essentially ushering in the Web 2.0 era itself.  It was no accident that the Web 2.0 Summit‘s theme last year was disruption and opportunity, and so it‘s concomitant on software companies to adjust to the industry and evolve.
The Web 2.0 strategies of these new applications are as interesting and varied as the companies that have come up with them.  It‘s worth taking a look at the big Web 2.0 enterprise apps being announced so far.  To get a good feel for the this next generation of enterprise apps, here‘s a round-up of the latest Web 2.0 software plans of the industry‘s top software firms.  In no particular order:
SAPannounced last week that it would be adding Web 2.0-style collaboration capabilities in many of its projects.  While SAP‘s specific Web 2.0 plans are the least defined of all the companies in this, a couple of notable points are the specific implementation of widgets, small bits of mobile code that can be added to a Web page by a user and provide data or functionality from back-end systems.  Theemergence of end-user widgets on the Web was one of the more interesting
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