Synergies Remixed
posted Tuesday, 4 October 2005
The Web 2.0 Conference starts tomorrow. But I'm sure you knew that. You'd have to be hiding under a rock in Rick Segal's basement with only his blog to read to have missed that. Even uber-blogger Scoble himself made a mostly tongue-in-cheek claim that it would be better to make a big Web 2.0 brouhaha before the conference, rather than after, to prove that you got the significance of it before everyone else did.
Unfortunately, the only major strategic announcement with Web 2.0 significance prior to the conference is a mostly anticlimactic one with established players Google and Sun. Announced today, with only tangential Web 2.0 tie-in (the announcement makes some hay about Google and Sun being at the forefront of the Participation Age), the joint venture has Sun distributing Google's Toolbar (optionally) along with the Java RunTime distribution. Yes, seriously, it's big stuff. No, I'm not kidding. Well, maybe a little. Personally, I think it's likely not much more than a helpful bailout to the previous Internet generation from the current.
Neverthless, because of the timing, I did read the news releases carefully. I can't find anything worth a major press conference much less tons of news coverage other than Google is currently believed to be able to do no wrong. I know many of you are thinking, "there has to be something about this announcement. Why today, why this?" I just don't see it. Although there is murky discussion of OpenOffice and other interesting tidbits around the edges of the some of the analysis, for now, I'm going to going to put this on my internal mental pile of major insignificance. Though I realize Google is a company made of ridiculously smart folks, I'm guessing they are just laying down the obvious planks in their Web as a Platform strategy. Java is a good language for building a new platform though probably not the best any more. So how Google's Search product fits into this is probably not the big news here. Anyone catch something I didn't?
In a bigger though less covered Web 2.0 development, the start-up led by Marc Andreessen has gone beta. Called Ning, it's a very intriguing Web 2.0 place that is a "free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications." In reality, Ning is mash-ups for the masses and it seems pretty darn easy to use, though lacking a bit in the coolness factor. Ostensibly, Ning provides an open developer platform for non-developers to create new services that have been mashed out of well-known existing sources. This is a classic Web 2.0 meme about having users as co-developers and giving away control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer the more people use them.
Ning already has numerous data sources preconfigured to be mixed and mashed by anyone who wants to try (and they have a pretty nice tag cloud of a bunch of mash-ups that have already been mixed and shared by its users at the bottom of their main page). These data sources include such well known open API web sites such as craigslist, Match, Zagat, Flickr, Facebook, and many others. Reading the Ning Faq closely, they let you build mash-ups and then reshare the data through more APIs to anyone. And they support a ton of API standards. The whole alphabet of acronyms is there including PHP, HTML, JSTL, RSS, Atom, REST, SOAP, OPML, XSPF, and SFTP. Red Herring isn't overly impressed however and thinks it's the star power of its founder that is primarily gaining Ning attention. Or maybe because it is making Web 2.0 abilities accessible to just about anyone who is interested. Time will tell and we'll come back at some future time and take a look.
Expect lots of interesting news out of the Web 2.0 conference tomorrow, we'll be following the latest here.
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Dion,
