It’s easy to assume that Web 2.0 is a technological revolution, with acronyms like RSS, APIs, Ajax, and XML floating around. However, I think though technology has a central role to play, the real revolution isn’t technological, it’s people-based. Web 2.0 is a social revolution. A common view is that technology drastically changes the way […]

Continue Reading: A Social Revolution by Modeling Human Behavior

The following bit emerged out of the What’s in a Tag session at the Web 2.0 Conference. One of the great features of tagging is seen when tags are aggregated. Then, we can see trends in what people are tagging: valuable bookmarks on Del.icio.us, cool pictures on Flickr, for example. These trends are trends of […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Popularity Decay in Tagging

I now have veritable proof that Web 2.0 as a term is working to describe the changing web. How do I know? People told me so. 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 […]

Continue Reading: Talking about Web 2.0 with Designers

Doc Searls in Talking Markets:

“The Powers that Were are no longer the only ones with the power to communicate, influence and change culture as well as prices. Look how the market for (actually the category of) photography has changed, thanks not only to what Nikon, Sony, Canon and Flickr have done, but to what any of us can do with tagging.”

After writing a Greasemonkey script accessing Flickr’s photo API, Daniel Kim thinks the API is too restrictive for his remixing needs. He writes:

“Another point to consider is that as these mash-ups get more sophisticated they will no longer be pure mash-ups. Instead of merely exploiting existing relationships between data in different web sites, they will allow for the creation and storage of new relationships amongst data that is globally distributed across the web. These applications will need to have write access to their own databases, built on DBMS’s designed for the web.”

His whole post is Web Databases vs. Web Services/API’s. It’s a long one, full of lots of interesting points.

Jason Kottke has some interesting ideas about the Web as OS.

He thinks the setup will include three pieces:

• Browsers (like we have now)
• Web apps like Gmail, Flickr, and Yahoo 360 (like we have now)
• Local web servers that deliver local content in the same way that we get web content (we don’t have these quite yet)

In other words, he’s thinking that we’ll add APIs (programming interfaces) to our local content that will effectively make it equal to web content, so much so that we might not know where our data is coming from.

If you read Bokardo at least a little bit, you’ll recognize the two kinds of interfaces involved. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for the content servers (both web and local), and an AIIs (Application Interaction Interfaces) for the browser.

Stewart Butterfield of Flickr responds to the post: Interface Remixers will Pay for Privilege of APIs by pointing out that they usually do want interface remixers to make money with their applications, because in most cases they’ll be helped out, too.

He also explains that there are cases in which Flickr won’t give out developer API keys: those cases in which it isn’t good for Flickr users or the Flickr service. I found this most interesting, and I presume that over time there will be interesting cases in which APIs are given that shouldn’t be given or revoked after being given to someone who abuses it.

So, like I said in the post, open doesn’t mean free. And, since you need an “API key” to play, you could argue they’re not that open…

It will be interesting to see how much the openness of an API influences adoption of it.

Thomas Vander Wal makes some great comments on my latest post: Technorati Tags: What Are They Really?. He points to something that has been nagging at me, that the most useful tagging being done is selfish… It’s not nagging me because it’s selfish. I’m not sure selfish is even the word, because it implies a […]

Continue Reading: Selfish Tagging

Jonathan Boutelle brings up an interesting point after attending the BayCHI Web2.0 panel the other day: the Web 2.0 companies heavily promoting their APIs (Technorati, Flickr, Google) are glad to have developers create interesting new interfaces out of them…unless you want to make money from that interface. This discussion is just the tip of the […]

Continue Reading: Interface Remixers will Pay for Privilege of APIs