Last week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco set me all atwitter with fever dreams of summer 2001. There’s gold in ‘them thar hills’ but pay no attention to the economic storm clouds on the horizon. This time around we are all supposed to have better rain gear and smaller, sharper pick axes.
It was hard not to feel out of place in this stampeding San Francisco geekfest — a graphic designer involved in professional services vertical markets surrounded by coders and startup types looking for quicksilver in a sputtering marketplace. As Caroline McCarthy keenly pointed out on her “The Social” blog on News.com:
Tim O’Reilly preached a keep-on-trucking sermon in his keynote address, admitting, “We’ve been kind of whipsawed lately.” He also railed upon the statistics detailed in reports like one by Dow Jones VentureSource last week, which are finding that venture dollars for start-up companies are growing scarcer. Urging conference attendees to focus on innovation, he said, “If you’re following the headlines you might as well stay home, because you’ll be very terminally confused,” he said. “You have to think about what really matters.” … ”We’re at a turning point akin to literacy or the formation of cities,” O’Reilly said. “This is a huge change in the way the world works.”
So I set forth with my de rigueur complimentary web 2 tote bag and my recycled water bottle half full, so to speak. My inverted pyramid of interests collapsed into three narrowing layers:
- Big, bold Web 2.0 trends. (How healthy is the internet? Are we all destined to become part of a globally-warmed open social network?)
- Best practices for web development today, tomorrow and 18 months from now. (This was the eye-opening layer, including my new favorite conversation starter, Microformats.)
- Mobile web. Is your future really in my hand? (And did Steve Jobs place it there?)
Part 1: Big, bold web trends
We’re open for business. What started with thousands of horribly ugly web pages, each declaring ‘this is my space,’ has mushroomed into the next mantra of the web: Your site damn well better be open and social! Yahoo announced that it will be opening up vast portions of its data and applications with the launch of its new Yahoo! Open Strategy or Y! OS. Yahoo writes:
Under [the Y! OS] plan, third-party developers will be able to create applications that can access every property within Yahoo’s empire — from search, chat and mail to fantasy sports, photo sharing and social event planning. These custom apps will run anywhere on Yahoo a user wants to place them.”
The Y! OS system will support the Open ID standard which allows users to span multiple social sites with a unified set of personal credentials.
All your data be our data. From the opening moments of the Expo, a common thread ran through the 2.0 hype: If you want to plug into the world of mobile, widgets, apps running within apps and thus get cross-pollenated, you better open up your data sets. ZDNet’s Paul Miller wrote:
Yes, (some) businesses would suffer irreparable harm if they opened access to their money tree without also rethinking their Victorian business model. But the UK Government figures (and others) clearly suggest that business (and society) benefits from increased access to this contextual data, even if individual businesses might not.
Wealthy players such as Microsoft and the incumbent search engines might do much here (as they have begun to do with map data) to force a widespread shift in business model, away from enforced scarcity of supply toward plentiful supply and more innovative monetisation of value-added services atop the basic and increasingly commoditised data.”
Standards, standards, standards was the drumbeat from mobile developers, global-focus panelists, and high profile web companies like Flickr, Mozilla, Google and Microsoft. In order to have a richer, more context-aware extensible online experience, web developers need to be more vigilant about building sites in standards-based XML and XHTML-strict languages. I was also impressed with the overarching need to separate the presentation layer of HTML markup from the content-based layer.
This week, I will be looking at some of the breakout sessions from the Expo, including some posts on mobile development and microformats. In the meantime, do I think that Web 2.0 is going to crash as severely as Web 1.0? Who can say? Remember though, that objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
