5 things to consider when planning a Web 2.0 solution

Posted on 21. Apr, 2008 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized   and has   0 Comments

Originally posted in the February ITWiki Newsletter, Network World

Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way online solutions are being developed. The popularity of social websites like Flickr, MySpace and Youtube and technology that promotes collaboration such as blogs, wikis, tags and widgets have made Web 2.0 functionality an important consideration for enterprise development. When planning these solutions there are many things to consider. Recent technology advancements have resulted in a flurry of solutions in many categories. The tree will eventually shake out; standards will evolve. Will your project stand the test of time or go the way of the Betamax? Here are 5 things to consider when planning a Web 2.0 solution.

1. Social Networking Standards

There are so many social networks and online communities, social shopping and recommendations, sites for sharing content, and each one with a process to register and manage your profile, interact with members and content. Each site with its own language or application programming interface (API). It’s difficult for developers to learn site specific API’s and then build and maintain applications for multiple sites. A common set of API’s that work across sites would provide a greater use and distribution of applications. Developers could then build and maintain a single application.

Google has created a solution called OpenSocial. This platform provides a common framework developers can use to deploy applications on any social network that chooses to participate. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

The APIs make it easy for developers to build applications quickly using quality code. You can build complete applications that can be either hosted on the Google network or on your own server. There are three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks: 1. Profile Information (user data), 2. Friends Information (social graph), and 3. Activities (events, updates, rss feeds).

When planning solutions that include registration functionality; social tools and/or consumer generated content be sure to look at OpenSocial. Even if you are building an enterprise solution or do not intend to leverage 3rd party applications it’s important to keep your options open, you never know how your business requirements can change in the future.

2. Online Identity Management

If you are like me you’ve registered on several sites; Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr etc. Clearly it would be convenient if there was a way to claim that profile, make it portable and maintain relationships across other social networks. How many usernames and passwords do you have? Many people use the same relatively easy-to-remember and worry about how much havoc a malicious hacker could reek if they cracked their code.

OpenID is a decentralized system to manage your identity. With OpenID enabled sites you do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead you only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID “identity provider” (IdP). Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in; OpenID solves the problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity.

OpenID is still in the adoption phase and is becoming more and more popular, as large organizations like Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, etc. begin to accept and provide OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are hundreds of millions of OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins. When developing your next solution you should consider this as an alternative for password and account management.

3. Mobile devices

There are more mobile devices in China than there are in the U.S., and in there are 2.6 times as many devices than there are computers in North America; over 30% have accessed the internet. Beyond mobile phones, personal entertainment devices such as the iPhone open up a new venue for consumers to engage content.

There are numerous businesses and solutions geared toward mobile device formats such as mobile advertising, gaming, mobile social networks and mobile widgets. There’s a large contingency advocating creating experience optimized for the small screen. There are technical solutions that provide this today: compressing/down sampling proxy servers and micro browsers, like Opera Mobile, which can tailor any website to small display (using Small Screen Rendering technique).

Mobile browsers must still download an entire page (with graphics and other related files) which, if not optimized for mobile phones, can be time-consuming and expensive to download. dotMobi (.Mobi) is a foundation dedicated to delivering the Internet to mobile devices with the premise being sites provide an alternative experience (www.bmw.mobi) optimized for the small screen. There’s a free testing tool to check your website for mobile readiness called Read.mobi. Should you be considering an alternative small screen version?

With the success of the iPhone touch screen technology and increasing mobile bandwidth will there be a need to provide small screen experiences in a few years? As we see with phones and cameras by integrating the user controls into the touch screen the entire face of the device and be a screen, resulting in a much larger viewing area. When planning how the solution will leverage the mobile channel you need to consider if it’s a long-term or short term solution before designing functionality for devices to ensure the investment will pay off.

4. Technology Selection

Business owners typically define business requirements and IT selects technology that will support the features. There are many robust frameworks and 3rd party applications that provide impressive out-of-the-box functionality. Often these solutions when presented to stakeholders can get the gears turning and influence the overall design. Additionally the projects can benefit significantly when they leverage existing functionality. There is less customization, reduced issues, and ultimately a much faster time to market. By getting the solution to the end-users sooner you can leverage real consumer insight to plan incremental enhancements.

We need to also consider new ideas in system architecture. A pillar of Web 2.0 is service-oriented architecture (SOA). Large scale start-ups leverage the web as a platform using distributed services such as Google’s Open Social, Amazon Web Services, OpenID, and many SaaS solutions. One example is USAtoday.com. When the site was redesigned as a social network news site they used white label social networking platform Pluck. From the user perspective the functionality is part of the site, but functionality that allows users to register, comments on articles, add tags, promote and demote news stories and manage their profiles are all provided from the Pluck services via a JavaScript proxy.

Centralized services provide the opportunity for your applications to exist in a highly scalable environment. If you tried to replicate the elastic cloud computing services provided by Amazon it would cost millions of dollars. Because of the business model allowing a high volume of subscribers to use the service the s

ervice is provided at a very low cost. This model has been a disruptive force allowing high profile websites like Meebo and Twitter to provide scalable services at a fraction of the traditional infrastructure costs.

Additionally there are options for delivering rich media content. If your solution depends on large format video or delivering Flash applications there are providers that can dramatically improve your delivery resulting in much higher quality experience that the end user doesn’t have to wait to download. Bitgravity offers impressive high-definition content delivery services and a live broadcast solution with a different approach than popular CDNs (content delivery networks) such as Akamai and Limewire.

5. What’s Next? Web 3.0…

Anyone that has searched on Google knows there’s a lot of web content out there and it can be a challenge to find what’s relevant to our needs. Researchers at MIT, Silicon Valley and around the world are feverishly working on artificial intelligence that will make the interface smarter and deliver a better experience to users. The question is will that interface be in context of a site or be an aggregate of internet content and services?

Today navigation is often site specific; better navigation, taxonomies, ontologisms, user generated tagging, better search functionality. One example is the powerful Endeca guided summarization technology. This engine powers almost half of the top 100 commerce sites today. It delivers layered navigation that allows users to quickly filter content down to a finite set of results. It can do this by consuming all kinds of disparate data sources and indexing them using their proprietary MDEX engine. The theory being that the search results experience should be no different than the navigation experience. Look at the following sites, navigate to a sub-topic level and then try entering that topic name into the site search to see how that works: www.forrester.com, www.homedepot.com, www.buzzilions.com.

What if the content didn’t have to be indexed? What if the content could be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily? That is the Semantic Web theory as first defined by internet inventor Tim Burners-Lee. There has been lots of buzz but there haven’t been any mainstream solutions. One Semantic Web tool that is close to market is a called Twine, a venerable Wikipedia on steroids, this information platform provides a glimpse into what’s possible. Another example is Exhibit, a semantic web application framework developed from the research in the Haystack group and the User Interface Design group at MIT CSAIL, and maintained by the SIMILE project.

If you are building a solution that is more than a simple content site; that will serve up a large amount of content, data, records and grow significantly over time; you need to look into leveraging Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, EBML, OWL, SPARQL, XSL, GRDDL etc.

In Conclusion

With low cost hardware and storage and new technology frameworks allowing rapid development there has been the equivalent of a land rush of new technologies and concepts. The result has been an explosion of new solutions and it’s a matter of time before patterns evolve and standards emerge. It’s important that business owners and IT managers analyze trends and plan solutions that will provide the longest life for the investment. Considering the speed of technology today by the time you have read this conclusion this far less than complete list may be in need of an update. What do you see as potentially disruptive forces in the near future?