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The end of 2006 is nigh upon us and this blogger for one had a terrific time covering Web 2.0 for those of you that are interested in following the topic. Love or hate buzzwords, there's little question that subjects related to Web 2.0, from its convergence with SOA , to the rise of rich user experiences including Ajax, to a flood of exciting new largely user-powered online applications both inside and outside the firewall and much more, were all very popular with our readers and covered here in as much detail as possible.
2006 was filled with significant events for us with regards to the next generation of the Web. During the year we participated in Microsoft's SPARK event, helped organize The New New Internet conference with great appearances by Michael Arrington and Andrew McAfee, launched AjaxWorld magazine in its print edition as editor-in-chief , and delivered numerous talks around the country on RIAs and Web 2.0 design patterns and business models for conferences including Interop, AjaxWorld, Office 2.0, and many others.
A quick look at the trends tell us that 2007 is shaping up to be even bigger than last year as an even larger, more general audience continues to develop interest in the possibilities of applying Web 2.0 patterns and best practices deeply into the core of their products and services both existing and new. Harnessing collective intelligence via network effects and feedback loops became generally understood as the dominant design element of the Web 2.0 by most accounts. This was palpably reinforced by new and old companies alike including YouTube and MySpace gaining market dominance over industry leaders in just a score of months while Google and Amazon continued to use their years old network effect advantage to maintain leadership in their sectors.
But much of this entire story was driven directly by the increasing scale, size, speed and interconnectedness of the Web, making it easier than ever to reach out to tens of millions of potential users practically overnight via the 1 billion+ users that reside there in the biggest single marketplace in history. Continued performance improvements in a number of metrics has also made much of the Ajax and RIA phenomenon possible. This includes not just the speed of the Internet itself but the speed of the computers that the average user has as well. Thus, the dramatic performance improvements in the overall physics of the computing experience will just continue to push the envelope of what's possible on the Web in an essentially continuous fashion. Hopefully early adopters of the Internet such as the United States will continue investment in Internet infrastructure improvements and not let this trend languish.
While I'll save the predictions for where all this will lead in 2007 for another upcoming post, it seems clear that users, businesses, and other organizations that deeply embrace the fundamental nature of the Web as a communications-oriented platform without any single owner except all of us, will be the only ones able to fully exploit the possibilities of online applications. Because until now actionable ideas and techniques that directly explain what the most successful ways of building online software weren't well understood or easily accessible to most. The continually evolving model of what works and what doesn't in online applications design is currently labelled Web 2.0. And our tools and techniques finally started to adapt to these models this year and the rise of simplicity and optimization for Web-oriented systems as exemplified by the new applications stacks like Ruby on Rails, the growing adoption of lightweight protocols like RSS, ATOM, JSON, and REST, and network effect-powered business models including building hard-to-recreate sources of data and fully leveraging The Long Tail will become the norm. For now, the early adopters will be able to use techniques potentially heads and shoulders above their competition. What this will mean for those that fail to embrace this is something I'll cover in a my 2007 predictions post.
With a hat tip to Rod Boothby's idea of the same, here is a summary of our most popular material on Web 2.0 this year as judged by our readers. These are the top read posts of 2006 on this blog site with over 10,000 page views. I do hope you enjoy:
Top Web 2.0 Blog Entries for 2006
11. Thinking Beyond Web 2.0: Social Computing and the Internet Singularity (10,131 page views)
10. All We Got Was Web 1.0, When Tim Berners-Lee Actually Gave Us Web 2.0 (10,203 page views)
9. Notes on Making Good Social Software (10,485 page views)
8. The Ajax Spectrum (10,544 page views)
7. Why Ajax Is So Disruptive (11,320 page views)
6. Seven Things Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax (11,346 page views)
5. Web 2.0 Predictions for 2006 (16,531 page views)
4. Ten Ways To Take Advantage of Web 2.0 (21,666 page views)
3. Ruby on Rails 1.1: Web 2.0 on Rocket Fuel (29,204 page views)
2. The Most Promising Web 2.0 Software of 2006 (44,125 page views)
1. The State of Web 2.0 (50,147 page views)
Stay tuned for Web 2.0 Predictions for 2007 and The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006, coming next week.
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Nice listing of which page has the most page view. Any prediction for 2010s
? Web 3.0 ?
http://seoptimization.blog.com/1221628/
mmh.. I'm thinking about this web 3.0 definition, are we sure that there
will be a web 3.0? I mean, changes happens so quickly in our time that a
technology is not able to archive the 3.0 definition. I think that the next
year we are going to talk about other strange acronyms instead of www.
Happy new year.
Sandro.
Nice article! I hope I may add my expectations of 2007:
1. Consumerization, the adoption of consumer applications (on the web)
within the organization, partly due to a new generation of 'digital
natives' entering the workforce.
2. Finding information within the organization has become critical due to
reorganizations and restructuring. Enterprise portals are starting to
become mainstream.
3. Software as a service is becoming interesting enough for business.
Translating processes in terms of services when it comes to software,
becomes a natural behaviour.
4. Blogging and wiki become natural way to communicate within
organizations.
5. Mash up, i.e. breaking up structures (all kinds,
information, techniques, organizations) in little pieces and joining them
in new meaningful ways, will remain the most dramatic and creative effect
of this information age.
6. The world as a whole and the world of business becomes more and more
'real time'; steering the company will be more complex but also more
direct.
7. Knowledge management becomes a focus point of management
(instead of something academic). The way to organize it will be in terms of
'ownership', bottom up or horizontal, definitely not top-down.
8. Strategy has to be formulated in terms of stories that are credible,
understandable and inspiring. Vision will become even more important than
it already is.
9. Management of the social environment will start to become an important
competence.
10. Work will be done more and more in virtual environments.
11. Virtual worlds and games are becoming ways to communicate in business.
Closing the gap between virtual and real world.
12. Strategic issue will be how to organize 'structured chaos' in the
company.
VERY interesting blog. It inspired me at least partly to my 2007
predictions. See http://axelschultze.blogspot.com/
Your site (hinchcliffe.org) and images have been down for the past several
days.
