In a fascinating piece on the amazing growth of the photo-sharing site Fotolog, Jason Kottke clearly articulates a growing problem in design:

“Fotolog…relative to Flickr…has changed little in the past couple of years. Fotolog has groups and message boards, but they’re not done as well as Flickr’s and there’s no tags, no APIs, no JavaScript widgets, no “embed this photo on your blog/MySpace”, and no helpful Ajax design elements, all supposedly required elements for a successful site in the Web 2.0 era. Even now, Fotolog’s feature set and design remains planted firmly in Web 1.0 territory.”

How do sites with sub-optimal visual design and technology grow so big and become so successful? How are MySpace, Fotolog, and Craigslist so popular in an age that values stunning visual design and amazing technology above all else? Conversely, how is it that Flickr, full of beauty and Ajax, is being overtaken by a site as boring as Fotolog?

Aye, there’s the rub…a rub that defines the current state of web design.

First off, a little throat-clearing. We’re dealing with Alexa stats here, so there are no guarantees that anything is accurate. Just because Alexa shows that Fotolog gets more traffic than Flickr doesn’t mean that it is…it’s kind of like listening to a reporter who usually covers political news tell us what’s going on in Silicon Valley. Suspect, to say the least. But for the sake of argument let’s assume that the trend is right, and that Fotolog is overtaking Flickr in terms of traffic.

Page views and Ajax…a match made in Hell

Well, one reason why Fotolog might appear so successful is the very technology that Jason mentions: Ajax. Page views are a metric that Alexa uses in its traffic calculation. But when you switch to an Ajax interface, your page views plummet. For example, when people want to add a tag, change a headline, or edit a photo set on Flickr very few page views occur. You’re simply interacting with a single screen that doesn’t refresh, but sends and receives requests in the background. This undoubtedly has a huge effect on the page views on Flickr.

Fotolog, on the other hand, gets a page view anytime a person wants to change anything. Therefore, less efficient bandwidth consumption and server usage actually gets Fotolog much higher traffic numbers…which is pretty damn ironic.

What’s more ironic is that this is an increasing problem on huge advertising sites and few people want to talk about it. What’s at stake? Billions of dollars that are wrapped up in page-view models where money changes hands depending on what “traffic” a site receives. And for years that traffic depends on page requests to a server, which of course happens even when people are doing simple things like changing a photos headline. So while companies realize that using an Ajax interface, when done well, can literally save millions in bandwidth costs and actually provide a faster, easier-to-use interface, they also realize that their advertisers only know one metric: the page view.

I’ve talked to some folks at Yahoo about this, and they say that their discussions on this topic get pretty tense. This is a huge problem for them because so much of their revenue is advertising based but they know that the future of interface design is elegant Ajax. This problem has been known for some time, but we’re still at the start of the huge effort in migrating away from the page view as a valuable metric for anything.

Technology doesn’t a great value make

Jason makes a strong case that technology is over-valued. I think he’s exactly right when he says:

“Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.”

This is the exact problem I’ve been talking about lately: in some cases visual design and/or technology are trumped by other aspects of design.

In my Social Design talk, which I most recently gave at the Web App Summit, I ask this question: What are the most successful web sites in the world? The answers are the ones you would expect: Google, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, Craigslist, Amazon, eBay.

But then I ask the question slightly differently: What are the most well-designed web sites in the world? Outside of a minimalist Google, there is no overlap for most folks. None of the others on the list are “well-designed” in their minds…they’re simply successful, poorly-designed sites. They attribute the success of these sites to other factors: being first in the market, having economies of scale, etc.

From a visual design standpoint they might be right: these sites aren’t going to win any visual design contests. But the value of these sites goes so far beyond the visual that to judge them by the way they look is to completely miss the boat. In our testing at UIE, for example, we’ve never had anyone refuse to shop at Amazon because it doesn’t look great…in fact people are most passionate about Amazon because of the value they get from reviews…and the rest of the socially-focused features there. People love Amazon, and it has nothing to do with its visual design!

And people are passionate about the other very successful sites, too. To Jason’s point, the major value of all of the successful sites doesn’t rest on what specific technology they use or whether they have tagging. Instead, the major value rests on social aspects of the design…take away the interaction of the communities on these sites and there is very little value left in them. Take away the reviews from Amazon and you’ll hear a great big sucking sound of folks rushing out to buy their wares on some other site…

Similarly to Amazon, Fotolog relies heavily on social interaction, in their case sharing photos with friends. This is the primary value of the site, not how they do it from a technological standpoint.

The usual red herring: judging a book by its cover

Ignoring visuals and technology (at least temporarily) is a big change for many designers and technologists. Why? Because technology and visuals often get the credit when things go well, but aren’t really talked about when things go contrary to our assumptions. That’s exactly Jason’s point: why is it that Fotolog uses inferior technology and visual design and still succeeds?

I think the answer is that the differentiator on the Web right now isn’t great visual design or technology, although those help out tremendously (don’t get me wrong!). An analogy might be in order here because so many people think I’m trying to denigrate visual design…I’m not! Here’s an analogy:

Every time George Bush makes his State of the Union Address he speaks very clearly, his words are well-chosen and his speechwriters are obviously top-of-the-class. They communicate very well, and for the most part every single person who listens or watches the address knows exactly what George Bush is trying to say. Speechwriters learning the craft would do well to emulate the skill and technique of Bush’s speechwriters. Even so, the address is a bunch of statements that most people disagree with: most people want the U.S. out of Iraq and observe that the efforts there have largely been a failure. Even Bush’s own party is now alienated. But the State of the Union Address itself is well-executed: it’s clear communication…Bush is just sending the wrong message.

(update: several folks are angry with me that I used a political analogy…I’m certainly open to suggestions for future analogies where the communication is clear and well-executed but fails to deliver the right message to the audience)

This is the same with visual design: you can execute beautifully but if the message you’re sending isn’t the one the audience wants to hear then the overall design will be a failure. I believe this is what Jason is talking about with his repeated references to “Web 2.0″. He doesn’t see the value in the majority of so-called Web 2.0 services…they might look great and have interesting technology but if they don’t actually improve our lives…then what good are they?

Visual design is about communicating a message well…getting the point across. The problem comes when the message being communicated isn’t the right one…and that’s exactly what we’re seeing so much of…so many sites have great visual design and great technology but just aren’t sending a valuable message…

Where are all these sites? They’re everywhere: they’re the ones you’re NOT using.

There are two primary aspects of design: communicating the right message. Why is this two aspects? Because one aspect is communicating a message well and the other is making sure it is the right message in the first place. Perhaps this second part is what is called design strategy these days. I don’t know, but I know that one needs the other in each and every design project.

Preventing valueless design

We need a new way of thinking to prevent valueless design. Valueless design is like a George Bush speech: well-executed but wrong. While it may be communicating beautifully on one level, the impact on society may be minimal or, even worse, negative. We need design that provides real value to humans.

The new model as I call it is social design: a focus on the social lives of users, the context of how people live, and the connections they have with their family, friends, and loved ones. It’s about the daily activities that people care about, that make their lives richer, more fulfilling, and that have very little to do with how a piece of software looks or works behind the scenes.

But that’s just how I see it. I’m sure that other ways to get people in the right design mindset. I believe the best designers not only execute technically well, but have the mindset to discover the right design. They’re open to new ideas, passionate about what they do, and focused on the lives of their users in order to prevent sending the wrong message.

This is the definition that got me interested in Web 2.0 in the first place. It makes sense, easily contrasts with “desktop as platform”, and is accurate: we are seeing a tremendous platform move to the Web.

Unfortunately, sometime after Tim used this definition way back when, it went haywire and eventually ended up meaning nothing more than the Web itself. And really, that’s all it is…just a trend on the Web. In addition, O’Reilly went the VC route, focusing on business people while alienating technologists.

I don’t harbor negativity for someone who has a meme that helps people understand what’s going on. Ajax, web standards, SAAS, P2P, and other things are all figments of the imagination…they’re just other words for technologies that do certain things. And holding events is fine, too. People make the choice to come, let them come. Everybody has a flag to fly.

So, I applaud Tim returning to the original definition, after all this time. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.

However…it’s still not nearly as compact as it *could* be, and it’s not really a business revolution…it’s a technological trend.

In addition to “leveraging” this or that, how about focusing on building stuff that people love? Could that be part of all this? Or does it have to be about “network effects applied to user contribution”?

My guess is that if you focused on one and not the other, you’ll be much more successful than vice-versa.

The most recent controversy happened on September 5th, when someone named jesusphreak posted Digg the Rigged?, an in-depth article exposing some of the curious details of recently-popular stories on digg. Many of the stories, jp pointed out, were dugg by members of the Digg Top 30, or the 30 most popular digg members (popular being measured by number of stories submitted that were promoted to the frontpage). The Top 30 includes Digg founder Kevin Rose.

This was not the first time that someone has pointed out this phenomenon. On April 18 of this year Macgyver at ForeverGeek posted Digg Army, which included screenshots of who dugg two recent articles on the site. Each article had the exact same 16 people digging it in the exact same order. Of the first 19, 18 were the same. Included in that list of people was, again, Kevin Rose. ( for an in-depth history see Tony Hung’s excellent: A Brief History of the Digg Controversy)

These incidents, taken together, are more than coincidence. They strongly suggest that Digg is being gamed by a small number of users, artificially inflating the value of stories that might not deserve such attention. This flies in the face of the democratic ideal of the site. And so far, nobody has claimed that the two articles I mentioned are false: Digg exposes most of the voting activity for all to see. A small group of users is definitely having a large effect on popular stories.

But before we get outraged at the corruption of it all, we should give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt and consider how this might have happened without evil influences.

Don’t blame the users

The users of Digg aren’t to blame. They’re simply playing by the rules as outlined by what they can and cannot do on the site. They’ve figured out how to play in the environment they find themselves in, and that’s OK. Jason Calacanis, creator of digg-clone Netscape.com, said in his post One User, One Vote: “The top users earned their spot and they should be reward for their contributions–not penalized.”. I agree with that…it’s not like there were any rules to follow.

Blame the design

Instead of blaming the users, blame the design of the site. From the ranking system, to the friends feature, to the display of content, to the ease with which users vote, the design of Digg.com conspires to make it haven for gaming. Not only is the pile-on digging activity possible on the site, it is actually enhanced and made easier by the very design of it!

Here are the features in question:

• Rankings list
  If you want people to compete, rank them. This is a big part of the reason why there is gaming on Digg. Getting a higher ranking becomes an incentive to game because if you do then others will notice and you’ll get recognition. (that’s important to people, even in social software) In addition, with the recent offer by afformentioned Calacanis to pay people for this type of work, high rankings may also be a source of income.
• Friends feature
  The Digg friends feature is the means by which the top users promote stories so quickly and with such synchronicity. In particular, the friend’s history page shows the stories that friends have dugg in reverse-chronological order, so that the newest diggs are at the top of the page. By refreshing this page often, top Digg users (who are all friends in the system) can stay up-to-the-moment with each other. During waking hours, a quick 30 diggs will draw further attention to any story, making a pile-on more likely.
• Exposing who diggs what
  At the bottom of each dugg entry is a list of people who have dugg it, and serves as the evidence that the two articles above used to expose the issue going on at Digg. This is a perfect example of what in psychology is called “social proof”. Social proof is something that is “proved by society”. In other words, the mere fact that others are doing makes it seem like it is what should be done. We learn that way, by mimicking the actions of others. So, when we see someone else digging something, we would be much more likely to digg it ourselves. Or, to put it another way, we let others influence our decisions and help make them for us.
• Stories at a distance
  It is very possible to interact on Digg, digging stories and burying others, without actually reading a story. That’s because Digg only shows summaries of posts. If you want to read a post, you actually have to click on them and go to the external site to do so. Many people will make this extra effort. But many people won’t.

  In It’s all a Farce Anyway Tara Hunt recounts an interesting (and scary) conversation with people who game digg. They submit stories and ask their friends to digg them. After a post reaches a certain digg count they say: “people just hit digg if they are remotely interested in the topic.”. This, again, is the effect of social proof, exacerbated because the stories are at a distance and it is extra effort to read them.

• Ease of voting
  While it takes extra effort to read posts, it takes almost no effort to digg them. This might be backward…digg is essentially making it possible to vote without knowing what you’re voting on. Although the digg feature is amazing, an excellent example of technology that makes our lives easier, it is also in danger of trivializing them.

  This reminds me of a story by Derek Powazek in his book Design for Community, where he makes the point that the harder it is for someone to comment on something, the better the comments are. In other words, people who jump through hoops (or pay attention long enough) to comment are the ones who really care about the subject matter, they’re invested in the story and see value in taking the time to respond.

Other factors

The Digg community is protective. Stories that are about digg get a lot of positive attention there. If you want to get noticed, for example, simply write a post entitled “10 Ways to Get Dugg”. That will get them interested. However, it has also been noted that many Digg community members react strongly to anti-Digg content, often burying it when it reaches the front page of the site, effectively censoring it. This has the unintended effect of making it seem like Digg the service is censoring all non-Digg content (which isn’t necessarily false, either).

Also, people use Digg in many different contexts. I’ve dugg stories myself that I just want to read later…stories that I don’t have time to read right now but that seem valuable to me and I want to be able to find them later. It could be that others do this activity as well, causing votes where none should happen. When you give people tools, they don’t always use them as prescribed.

The result: no independence in voting

The result of all these factors is that Digg breaks the cardinal rule of voting: independence. As outlined in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, independence arises when a person makes a decision (votes, diggs) without the direct influence of others, on their own, by making up their own mind. Of course, there will always be influences on that decision…what others have said, where their political party is leaning, their current situation, but in the end they need to have the privacy of their vote. On Digg, no votes are private, and when you make them you can’t help but notice the way others are voting.

If we compare this to how people vote in Presidential elections, we see how different it is. In those, we anonymously vote. The anonymity of the vote is key…once we start exposing who voted on what we’re gaming the system because we are inevitably influenced by others votes. And the ranking of voters just solidifies this…imagine if we could see how others voted over time in Presidential elections…

Digg vs. Del.icio.us

The voting on Digg is in contrast to a site like Del.icio.us, where voting (saving a bookmark) is done more independently, often without having any idea whether or not someone else even viewed it, let alone voted on it. Del.icio.us isn’t immune to gaming, however, as there is a popular list, and it’s very easy to simply copy those bookmarks into your own, driving up the numbers just like on Digg.

So far, however, Del.icio.us seems to be more immune to the outcries of gaming. This may result from a smaller user population, as it is nowhere near the size of Digg. But I think it has more to do with the nature of the tool. On Del.icio.us, the main value is personal, as people use it to store bookmarks that are valuable to them. On Digg, the bookmarking utility is secondary to the voting, in both the interface and the wording used on the site.

Digg’s response

Later this past week, Digg responded to the controversy by changing its algorithm:

“This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.”

I think this is the wrong approach. By keeping the above features the same…Digg is asking for gaming. As gaming occurs, they’ll have to change their promotion algorithm. Then more gaming will occur to override the new algorithm, which they’ll then have to change. In any social system gaming will occur, but I think Digg’s problems are much more basic: their features simply beg to be gamed. Better to focus on the independence of voting, not on the algorithm. By making much of the ranking and voting hidden, the diversity of the site would increase. It’s exposing information that leads to sameness.

What would change mean?

Even if Digg were to change, however, to alter some of the features above to make voting more independent, we still couldn’t be sure that they would work. People test the boundaries of all social tools, finding every which way to bend them to do something useful. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it really does hurt the quality of the site.

Digg couldn’t just say “let’s move the digg voting widget somewhere else” and be done with it. That would introduce a new set of problems, based on the new context. However, they did add a new feature lately whereby the Digg widget shows up right on the posts themselves. That could potentially solve a lot of these problems, getting the voting mechanism much closer to the content people should be reading before voting on. Though it isn’t clear whether or not this is part of the solution, it seems like a step in the right direction. (I’m trying it out below – you may not see it if you’re in an aggregator that strips scripts)

I’m not one to believe that we’re in a Bubble 2.0 or anything like that (aren’t we always bubbular?), but here are a few ideas about why some of the web apps out there fail.

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
   Following up on my Del.icio.us Lesson post, this is a critical reason why web apps fail. Many apps focus on being the new social killer-app when, in general, people don’t have time to worry about what other people are doing, and will only use software that benefits them personally at every step. You could call this selfishness or laziness, but I would call it optimization. For example, we simply don’t have time to tag things for tagging sake. Instead, we might tag things if we think that it will help us in the future, but adding tags to an app does not a solution make.
2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
   This is when the buzzwords rear their ugly head. If you’ve got a list of problems you’re solving with an application, it stands to reason that you can’t solve any one of them fully. Instead of trying to solve more than one, focus like gangbusters on one problem and really nail it. If you think about the successful web apps out there right now that have garnered impressive mindshare, it should be easy to line up the one problem (or activity) they really get right. Flickr: photos. Del.icio.us: bookmarks. Facebook: college. Myspace: identity. Gmail: email. Plaxo: contacts. Tailrank: news. Etc…
3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
   So much focus is on aggregation right now that it is easy to overlook the happiness of users. Many services, such as Technorati Tags or Google Sitemaps, exist solely to make the aggregators happy, and not the user themselves. They sell themselves on incentives that sound like what a movie agent might say to an aspiring actor: “We’ll make you famous, kid. You’ll get found!”. First of all, this is all talk directed at the developer, who is not the user. That’s a huge tip-off right there. Second of all, if the aggregators had their way everyone would be using these formats, which simply dilutes the value for everyone else and only serves to lock the site into some weird relationship with the aggregator. This is not how it should be. That’s why I stopped using those two services ages ago. Instead, focus on adding features that make the user happy, and when that happens everyone else can be happy, too.
4. They sell it the wrong way.
   Web apps are not about Ajax, tags, Web 2.0, SOA, REST, or any other technology. Why do so many startups and web pundits focus on these terms when talking about a product? To get a better frame of reference, talk about how your app empowers users to improve their life. Think about how the long-term successful companies sell their stuff. They relate it to some bigger idea. So, for example, Nike has always embraced the hero archetype. They might talk about how great their foam arch is, but that’s always secondary to how buying their shoes makes you a hero. Their commercials are often amateur runners out running in the rain. How cool is that? Way cooler than double-density shock foam. A good example of this in web apps is the messaging from 37signals. They’re not selling software, they’re selling rebellion.
5. Not in it for the long haul.
   If you build it, they will not come. There is too much competition right now, so another wiki-type application isn’t going to set the world on fire. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about web apps that became successful only after they adapted to their user base over time (short periods of time, but over time nonetheless). Their initial effort didn’t work, or was too similar to another one, but they were in it for the long haul and they adapted to what their users wanted. Flickr is a great example of this. Flickr started out as a game called Game Neverending. That didn’t work, but their second attempt did. Many web app makers would never make it to the point of seeing the light (or admitting the failure).
6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
   One of the big promises of aggregating the wisdom of crowds is building systems that use the input from huge user populations to come up with value. However, as people get used to how the wisdom is aggregated, they figure out how it all works, and the more public the mechanism for aggregation, the easier it is to figure out. That’s why gaming is such an issue with Digg. The voting on Digg is public, so you can see which items have the most votes before you submit your vote yourself. This goes against one of the principles of the Wisdom of Crowds, which states that in order to successfully harness it, each member of the crowd needs to be making an independent vote.
7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.
   Most business strategy is about making money. However, this is a short term goal. If you focus only on ways to make money, then you’ll make decisions that in the short term seem good for the balance sheet but in the long term actually work against it. Take the case of LLBean. Where everyone else is trying to get away from call centers and move all of their customer interaction to a web site, LLBean actually allows you to talk to a human being almost instantaneously. Their phone number is easily found on their web site/app. This probably does cost them a lot more than if they had some contact forms or an instant chat room, but it sure does make it quick and easy to give them money. My sister worked at LLBean for a time, and I was always impressed by the way that they empowered her to handle customers. It probably cost them money in the short term, but people remember when you make their lives easier, not harder. Many companies, unfortunately, see the Web as a way to reduce direct communication with customers, when in reality it should cause an increase in communication if you’re successful.

Update: 7 More Reasons Why Web Apps Fail

Flash or Ajax?

A common view is that technology drastically changes the way that we live. It does to an extent, but upon deeper inspection we observe that most of that change is actually gains in efficiency concerning things we already do and not really a change to our core activities: communicating, listening, watching, learning, comparing, contrasting. Our bodies haven’t changed much at all. But our expectations have. We want more, more, more. More of what we already have.

Software Models Human Behavior

Similarly, the most innovative software doesn’t give humans something new to do, it models something we already do better. Look at the most popular software of the moment:

• Skype models phone conversations.
• iTunes models music listening.
• Google Search models the way we value content.
• Flickr models the way we share and view photos.
• Amazon models the way that we talk about books.
• Del.icio.us models the way we save things.

The innovation in these applications is not that they let us do something new, but that they allow us to do what we already do better, more often, in more places, and more quickly. It’s in how they model human behavior. Some aggregate selfish human activities, like Del.icio.us does with bookmarking and Google Search does with links. Some aggregate public human activities, like Amazon does with reviews. Some simply give tools to communicate more efficiently, like Skype does.

Enablers and the Real Innovation

The terms being thrown around concerning Web 2.0: web as platform, architecture of participation, web as OS, these are not the real innovations. These are enablers of the real innovation: a social revolution brought on by an incredible leap in the creation of software that allows humans to be, well, more human.

At UI10, the attendees aren’t working on start-ups. Most are working in entrenched applications for universities, Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and other places that don’t need to be cutting edge. They just need stuff to solidly work. Usable applications are a must.

That’s why I’m surprised that so many people are talking about and using Ajax. In most cases when a new technology comes along, it takes years to get into the mainstream applications. Ajax, it seems, doesn’t fit that model.

Many companies are throwing their bets into the ring, and several have released word processor type applications recently. One recently one was the minimalist Writeboard, released by the 37signals crew, riding an always excellent marketing job by those guys. One that seemed to have even more buzz here at Web 2.0 is Writely, which toats a more sophisticated interface and exports to Word format (a critical feature, in my opinion). There’s also Jotspot and many others.

The folks at TechCrunch have kept good tabs on the product announcements, and one of their latest reviews started a heated argument among the competitors (hat tip: Richard). Michael Arrington of Techcrunch wrote a review about a new word processor called Zoho Writer, and got replies from both the creators of Writeboard and Writely that it’s basically a ripoff of their software. (see comments after the review). They suggested that Arrington not write about people who copy their software.

All gossip aside, this signals an interesting turning point concerning all this new web-based software: direct competition. I dare say that none of these companies can lay claim to anything as their own idea, given that even I thought of a web-based office suite as a good idea many, many moons ago. (if I thought of it, then many other people thought of it many months before that). It’s not a large leap, to be sure. However, I would say that what got Jason and Sam (of Writeboard and Writely) upset was the fact that they were two of the first into the web-based app ring with their products. But whatever advantage they enjoyed being a first mover is largely gone.

I don’t mean to sound be flippant, but didn’t they expect this? Hadn’t they seen the writing on the wall, pardon the pun? This is what software development is all about (just ask Visicalc, Wordperfect, and Konfabulator), who largely innovated their respective products to usefulness and then were effectively killed off by competition from OS makers, forcing them to alter their initial strategy. Many mourn their demise, but most recognize the simple fact that there are many other software makers in the world, and far fewer obviously good ideas.

That said, their main point in rejecting the review was that Arrington hadn’t done due diligence in his analysis of Zoho, which seems correct. (It was more of a “look at this” sort of review.)

Even still, given this heated competition, there really hasn’t been any existing word-processing companies to enter the fray. When this happens, you can bet that competition will get even more fierce. Just ask any of the Blog reader makers how they felt when Google released their Google Reader software yesterday. There had to be at least an “Uh Oh”, despite all their assurances that Google is “just another competitor”.

It is safe to assume, I think, that over the next year competition in the web-based office arena will only get more heated. When this happens, I’ll still root for Writeboard and Writely because they were two of the first and most innovative, but honestly I think they have a steep hill to climb. Perhaps the comment by Sridhar , the Zoho Writer creator, seems most prescient. He responds to Jason and Sam (Writeboard and Writely), saying:

Zoho is not your threat. Wait till Google and Yahoo and Microsoft show up for the Web 2.0 party. If you believe they are not coming, I have a bridge to sell you.

Closely related to the popularity decay idea is the idea of emergent tags. Emergent tags are those tags that become more popular over time.

The interesting thing about emergent tags is that they’re rare, but hugely valuable.

Why are they rare? Well, because human activity is slow to change: we do a lot of the same things that we’ve always done. Therefore, tags like “wedding” or “cameraphone” or “web” will be popular for a long time, because those tags represent certain ideas that are central to many people’s lives right now.

But take a tag like “Ajax”, which emerged over the last few months after Jesse James Garrett dreamt it up around the beginning of the year. This tag didn’t exist before that, or if did it meant something other than Asynchronous Javascript and XML.

Why are emergent tags valuable? Well, they’re valuable because they show trends of change. To give you an example of how useful this can be, Tim O’Reilly said in his opening talk that by watching the emergence of the Ajax tag they could predict that if O’Reilly published books about Ajax, readers would gobble them up. And judging by the number of people at this Conference who are building applications in Ajax, and the number of folks I’ve talked to who have shiny new Ajax books, this certainly is the case.

• Recommendation Systems are an end goal of Web 2.0 applications. This is done by collaborative filtering over user-supplied data. Examples of interfaces include Del.icio.us Popular, Movielens Movie Recommendations, and iTunes Music Store Top Songs.
• More semantic Data Formats. Joe Reger’s new tool highlights what will be a growing trend: uploading XML Schema or RelaxNG files to your blog tool so that you can write posts in any genre you want. Movie reviews? 5 paragraph comps? News articles? Yes.
• Monetizing the Tail. Chris Anderson is documenting the economics of today, today.
• Web 2.0 is about Sharing. Sharing our data with others so that we can remix it with other, shared data. Remixing is the catalyst of innovation.
• Openness doesn’t mean free. Companies will provide APIs to their data that most people can use, which means that its open. Commercial interests are murky.
• Ajax Vs. Flash. This is a topic upon which I’m sure there will be much future discussion. Parts of Flash are going open source. Ajax is standards-based. Both have their proponents.

In addition, we have many new questions:

• How do you build an architecture of participation?
• Is collaborative filtering only possible on large data stores?
• What is the difference between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web?
• Is Ajax a Web 2.0 technology? Does the distinction matter?
• Is there a future for a web-based Office suite?
• How long will the distinction between a search engine and a blog search engine last?
• Will RSS or Atom supercede XHTML as the display format of choice?
• Who controls content?
• What’s the difference between an application, a platform, an API, and an interface?
• How do you monetize…X?
• What are the limits of social software?
• What will Microsoft do?
• Who’s Buying Who?
• Is Web 2.0 a marketing ploy, or something real?

Lots of questions, huh? And I’m sure I’m missing a ton of them, these were the ones I thought of in the last 5 minutes. Got an answer to or a viewpoint on any of them? Drop me an email at bokardo at bokardo daught com or add a comment.

By the way, the posts I linked to in the top section are ones that I’ve written since my first post about the Era of Interfaces, which I did on August 1, 2005, less than 2 months ago! Is the Web changing fast, or what?

• It is standards-based
• It is degradeable with unsupporting browsers
• It is relatively easy to implement
• The benefits of a one-screen interface (no disruptions for page refreshes)

The Side Benefit of Ajax

But there’s another side benefit, that I think might be as influential as any of the above. When you build an Ajax application, you need to break down your server calls into smaller chunks. You’re no longer requesting complete web pages when you hit your server, you’re requesting information via a simplified API that you create (something as simple as a PHP script, perhaps).

This is yet another step toward microcontent, or pieces of data that live on their own and are called together to form applications screens or web pages. If you weren’t planning on accessing your content in this way before you decided to use Ajax techniques, you will definitely have to if you move that way.

This seems to be an overall trend, however. First we gain granular access to our own content for our own needs, and then we provide public access to others after we see how useful it is.

Last night I led a talk for the Macromedia Boston Users Group called “Web 2.0 Interfaces, the Future of Design”. I used Keynote for the first time, and I can definitely say that it’s better than Powerpoint. Here is my slide deck:

Web 2.0 Interfaces, the Future of Design (1.8MB pdf)

You’ll notice that I don’t put all that much text on my slides. This is taking a page from Seth Godin’s playbook, in an attempt to show one thing and then tell a story about it. I find that if I have my story on the slides then I become too dependent on them. Sometimes I even start to read them. This way forces me to have it in my head.

Going into the talk I was slightly nervous for several reasons:

• I hadn’t given this talk before, so I had no idea what to expect.
• I was at MIT, which can be intimidating because everyone is so intelligent. Not everyone was an MIT student, but just being there seems to make everyone smart.
• I was using the term “Web 2.0″ in the title of my talk. Lots of folks think Web 2.0 is just a buzzword.

The talk, however, went very well. I’m very happy with the discussion we had. I learned a lot. At the beginning of the talk I asked folks what they thought of the term Web 2.0, and I got two answers: one was that it was “web services, but open”, and the other was an explanation of remixing. Both of these ideas are definitely in the spirit of Web 2.0. Most of the other folks said that it meant little to them. So I had some explaining to do…

The biggest surprise of the night for me was our discussion about Del.icio.us. People love this service, and they seem to love talking about the implications of folksonomies and architectures of participation. We could have discussed Del.icio.us for the entire 2 hours easily.

Another thing that surprised me was how interested people were in the business side of Web 2.0. They wanted to know really specific details about how Google is making money with Google Maps, and if Paul Rademacher is seeing any of it with Housingmaps.com, and if people who use the Flickr API will have to pay for it.

In response to these questions, we got to talking about how services are slowly beginning to charge for access. Someone brought up that Craigslist has been charging for placement of job ads in New York and L.A. Here’s a report of it happening as early as a year ago. This surprised all of us who didn’t know.

Also, a month or two back I wrote Interface Remixers will Pay for Privilege of APIs, picking up a meme from Jonathan Boutelle concerning Stewart Butterfield’s comments about access to Flickr’s API at a BayCHI meeting. Stewart came and responded, saying that Flickr is about openness and they want developers to use their API, but they also want to make sure that it’s not being used for evil. In short, you need to obtain an API key before you can use it.

I shared this with the group, and the first comments were slightly cynical. A common response was: “Yeah, but now they’re owned by Yahoo they’ll be charging soon”. This seemed to be the general feeling about that topic.

I talked quickly about Ajax, and was surprised to learn that there is quite an effort going on to open-source parts of Macromedia Flash. I quickly got in over my head by saying that the major problem with Flash is that it is proprietary and suggesting that Ajax is more attractive because it is built on open standards. Some agreed, some disagreed. We had a good discussion about that.

We talked about Skype being sold for billions of dollars to eBay, and everyone who hadn’t heard that gasped in amazement.

We talked about movie ratings and the architecture of participation, like my post yesterday, and everyone got involved. If there is one topic on which everyone has something to say, it’s movies. Talking about movie recommendations was really fun!

So, at the end of the talk I re-asked the question about what Web 2.0 means to people. I felt like there was a general consensus: that Web 2.0 is a big deal, especially the architecture of participation. We’re turning to new methods to find value for us, and those methods are systems built upon the notion that users add value.

All in all, I was extremely happy with the talk. I think Web 2.0 as an idea is working even for folks who don’t blog about it every day!

It’s not server-side, though, from what I can tell. It’s simply a way to manipulate things client-side in a familiar way.

Here’s an example:

<html>
<body>
<% var hello = "Hello World"; %>
<%=hello%>
</body>
</html>

Check out the tutorial to see how it works.

The article he was writing is now online: Battle lines drawn again between browsers. In it Fontana provides an overview of the current browser tension between Firefox and IE.

You’ll find a short quote in the article from me (and thankfully it is one that I still agree with):

“I would say going forward that AJAX is going to have a ton of focus and support behind it,” says Joshua Porter, research consultant and director of Web development for research firm User Interface Engineering. “Because it is built on open standards, it is going to be the next plateau that we reach on the Web, like with HTML.”

On this note, I was listening to a podcast earlier today called The Platform Revolution that included Kevin Lynch of Macromedia. He talks about HTML not being robust enough for most web application needs, and suggests that Flash is becoming the front-end application tool of choice.

I think that developers will soon prove Lynch wrong, as they (WE) value open, de facto standards over proprietary tools.

Update: similar discussion going on here: (via Scoble): Jim Moore has an in-depth post about RSS as brand. He compares “RSS” to “Kleenex”….odd at first but after a while it becomes the de-facto standard.

Some of you may find this stuff uninteresting and boring. I think it is important for several reasons. First, it is always good to make sure that everyone is on the same page, that when one person says “feed” the other person knows exactly what they are talking about. Second, we all learn this way, by pushing and pulling the language of something brand new. Third, when we take a higher level view of all this we can see better the areas for improvement, where we need extra work.