1.web 1.0 basically adopts the leading mode of technological innovation, and the change and application of information technology has played a key role in the rebirth and development of the website. Sina started with technology platform, Sohu started with search technology, Tencent started with instant messaging technology, and Shanda started with online games. These websites are in their infancy, and the traces of technology are quite heavy.
Second, the profit of web 1.0 is based on a * * * connection point, that is, huge click traffic. Whether it is pre-financing or post-profit, it depends on a large number of users and click-through rates, and listing or developing value-added services based on click-through rates. The audience base determines the level and speed of profit, which fully embodies the striking economic color of the Internet.
Third, the development of web 1.0 appears the phenomenon of merging into a comprehensive portal. Early Sina, Sohu, Netease, etc. Continue to adhere to the road of portal websites, while upstarts such as Tencent, MSN, GOOGLE, etc. Everyone went to the portal, especially the news and information, and they were very interested. The emergence of this situation lies in the wider profit space of the portal website itself, more diversified profit methods, occupied website platform, more effective realization of value-added intention, and extension of various services outside the main business.
Fourthly, the integration of web 1.0 has also formed a clear industrial pattern combining main business with part-time business. Sina focuses on news+advertising, Netease expands games, Sohu extends the portal matrix, and each family takes its main business as the breakthrough point and part-time job as the supplement point, forming a development model of fist and palm.
The verb (the abbreviation of verb) web 1.0 is not based on html. In the era of 1.0, dynamic websites have been widely used, such as forums.
web2.0
The bursting of the internet bubble in the autumn of 200/kloc-0 marked a turning point of the internet. Many people think that the Internet is over-hyped. In fact, the internet bubble and the subsequent stock market recession seem to be the common features of all technological revolutions. A great stock market recession usually indicates that booming technology has begun to occupy the center stage. The counterfeiters were expelled, and the truly successful stories showed their strength, and people began to understand what made one story different from another.
The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a meeting and the brainstorming part of O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, the so-called Internet pioneer and vice president of O'Reilly, noticed that, unlike the so-called "crash", the Internet is more important than ever, and exciting new applications and websites are appearing with amazing regularity. More importantly, those companies that survived the Internet bubble seem to have some similarities. Then, will the bursting of the bubble of Internet companies mark a turning point of the Internet, so that the voice of "Web 2.0" is meaningful? We all agree with this view, so the Web 2.0 conference was born.
In the year and a half after that meeting, the word "Web 2.0" has been deeply rooted in people's hearts, and more than 9.5 million links can be searched from Google. However, there are still great differences about the meaning of Web 2.0. Some people belittle Web 2.0 as an unquestionable marketing slogan, while others interpret it as a new traditional concept.
This article is trying to clarify the original meaning of Web 2.0.
In our initial brainstorming, we used some examples to illustrate our understanding of Web 2.0:
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
Double-click Google ads
Ofoto Flickr
Akamaibit torrent
Mp3.com Napster
British online Wikipedia (Wikipedia)
Personal website blog
Everett upcoming.org and EVDB
Domain name speculation search engine optimization
Page browsing cost per click
Screen capture network service (web service)
Release participation
Content management system wiki
Table of Contents (Classification) Tab ("Popular Classification")
Viscous polymerization
This list will continue. But what makes us call one application or method "Web 1.0" and the other "Web 2.0"? This problem is particularly urgent, because the concept of Web 2.0 has spread so widely that many companies are adding this word to their marketing hype, but they don't really understand its meaning. At the same time, this problem is particularly difficult, because many startups that like slogans are obviously not Web 2.0, and some applications that we think are Web 2.0, such as Napster and BitTorrent, are not even really suitable network programs! Let's discuss some principles first, which are embodied in some successful cases of Web 1.0 and some of the most interesting new applications.
1. Internet as a platform
Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 has no clear boundaries, but a gravity core. We might as well regard Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices, and form a network system similar to the solar system from remote or near-core websites. These websites more or less embody the principles of Web 2.0.
The diagram 1 is a "simulation diagram" of Web 2.0, which was made at a seminar of a conference called "Friends of O'Reilly (Foo)". This diagram is basically still in the development stage, but it depicts many concepts derived from the core idea of Web 2.0.
For example, at the first Web 2.0 meeting in June 5438+1October 2004, John Battelle and I listed a set of preliminary principles in our respective opening remarks.
The first of these principles is "Internet as a platform". This is also the battle cry of Netscape, the darling of Web 1.0, which fell in the war with Microsoft. In addition, our two earlier models of Web 1.0, DoubleClick and Akamai, are pioneers who regard the network as a platform. People often don't think this is a kind of network service, but in fact, advertising service is the first widely used network service and the first widely used mashup, if we use another recently popular word. Each banner advertisement is used to collaborate seamlessly in front of two websites and provide integrated pages to readers on another computer.
Akamai also takes the network as a platform to build a transparent cache and content distribution network at a deeper level to reduce broadband congestion.
Nevertheless, these pioneers provide a beneficial contrast, because when the latecomers encounter the same problems, they can further extend the solutions of the pioneers, thus having a deeper understanding of the nature of the new platform. DoubleClick and Akamai are both pioneers of Web 2.0. At the same time, we can see that more applications can be realized by introducing more Web 2.0 design patterns.
Let's study these three situations in depth and explore some essential differences between them.
Netscape vs Google
If Netscape can be called the standard bearer of Web 1.0, then Google is almost certainly the standard bearer of Web 2.0, just look at how their initial public offering (IPO) reveals their respective times. So let's start with the differences and positioning between the two companies.
Netscape uses the traditional software copy to outline its so-called "Internet as a platform": their flagship product is an Internet browser, a desktop application. At the same time, their strategy is to use their dominant position in the browser market to build a market for their expensive server products. Theoretically, the standards for controlling the content and programs displayed in browsers give Netscape a dominant position in the market, just as Microsoft enjoys in the personal computer market. Much like Horseless Carriage describes the car as an extension of familiar things, Netscape once promoted a webtop to replace the traditional desktop, and plans to develop and popularize this Webtop with the help of information updates and various small programs pushed by information providers who buy Netscape servers.
In the end, browsers and web servers have become "daily necessities", and the value chain has also risen to services provided on the Internet platform.
In contrast, Google is a natural network application. It never sells or packages its programs, but delivers them as services. Customers pay Google directly or indirectly for the services they use. The defects of the original software industry are gone. There is no regular software release, just continuous improvement. There is no license or sale, just use it. Users can run software on their own devices without platform migration. All they need to do is to build a huge and extensible network composed of many personal computers, on which the open source operating system and its self-developed applications and tools will run, and no one outside the company can ever touch these things.
Fundamentally, Google needs a capability that Netscape has never needed: database management. Google is much more than a collection of software tools, it is a specialized database. Without these data, those tools will be useless; Without these softwares, the data will be out of control. The software licensing system and the control of the application program interface (API)-the magic weapon of the previous era-are irrelevant, because Google's software only needs to be executed and never distributed, and because the software itself is useless without the ability to collect and manage data. In fact, the value of software is directly proportional to the size and activity of the data it helps to manage.
Google's service is not a simple server, although its service is provided through a large-scale collection of Internet servers. Its service is not a browser, although this service is experienced by users in the browser. Google's flagship product search service doesn't even host the content searched by users. Much like telephone conversation, it happens not only at the two ends of the call, but also in the intermediate network. As an intermediary between users and their online experience, Google moves in the space between browsers, search engines and ultimately content servers.
Although both Netscape and Google can be described as software companies, it is obvious that Netscape belongs to the software world composed of companies such as Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, which originated from the software revolution in 1980s. Google's partners are Internet companies such as Yi Bei, Amazon, Napster, DoubleClick and Akamai.
Double-click Overture and AdSense
Similar to Google, DoubleClick is a veritable product of the Internet age. It regards software as a service, which has the core competitiveness in data management, and as mentioned earlier, it was the forerunner of service as early as the name of network service did not exist. However, DoubleClick is ultimately limited by its business model. It realizes the concept of the Internet in the 1990s. This concept revolves around publishing, not participation; Manipulation around advertisers rather than consumers; Around the scale, it is believed that the Internet will be dominated by the so-called top websites under the scale of online advertising evaluation companies such as MediaMetrix.
Therefore, DoubleClick proudly cited "more than 2,000 successful applications" on its website. In contrast, Yahoo! The company's search market (formerly Overture) and Google's AdSense products have been serving hundreds of thousands of advertisers.
The success of Overture and Google stems from the understanding of Chris Anderson's so-called "long tail", that is, the collective strength of many small websites provides most of the content of the Internet. DoubleClick products need a formal sales contract, and its market is limited to thousands of large websites. Overture and Google know how to put advertisements on almost all web pages. Furthermore, they avoid the advertising forms that publishers and advertising agencies like, such as banner advertisements and pop-up advertisements, and adopt the text ads form with minimal interference, context sensitivity and user-friendliness.
The experience of Web 2.0 is to make effective use of consumers' self-service and algorithmic data management, so that we can extend our tentacles to the whole Internet, to all the edges, not just the center, and to the long tail, not just the head.
Not surprisingly, other Web 2.0 success stories show the same trajectory. EBay acts as an automatic intermediary, which makes it possible for individuals to make occasional transactions of several dollars. Napster (closed for legal reasons) built its network on a centralized song database, but it turned every downloader into a server, thus gradually expanding the network.
Akamai versus BitTorrent
Similar to DoubleClick, Akamai's business focuses on the head of the network, not the tail; Face the center, not the edge. Although it serves the interests of individuals on the edge of the network and paves the way for them to visit high-demand websites located in the center of the Internet, its income still comes from those websites located in the center.
BitTorrent, like other advocates in the P2P trend, has adopted a radical approach to achieve the goal of Internet decentralization. Each client is also a server; The file is divided into many segments, so it can be provided by many places on the network, and the downloader of the network can transparently provide bandwidth and data for other downloaders. In fact, the more popular a file is, the faster it downloads, because more users are providing bandwidth and various fragments for this file.
BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key principle of Web 2.0: the more users, the better the service. On the one hand, Akamai must increase servers to improve its service, on the other hand, BitTorrent users will contribute their own resources to everyone. It can be said that there is a hidden "participation system" built into the cooperation standard. In this participating system, the service mainly plays the role of an intelligent agent, connecting all the edges on the network and making full use of users' own strength.
Use collective wisdom
Behind the success stories of the giants who were born in the era of Web 1.0 and survived, and will continue to lead the era of Web 2.0, there is a core principle, that is, they used the power of the network and the collective wisdom:
-Hyperlinks are the foundation of the Internet. When users add new content and new websites, they will be confined to a specific network structure, which is discovered and linked by other users. Just like synapses in the brain, as the connection between them becomes stronger and stronger through replication and reinforcement, the Internet will grow organically as a direct result of all activities of all network users.
Yahoo! It is the first great success story, born in classified catalogue or linked catalogue, and it is the summary of the most wonderful works of tens of thousands or even millions of Internet users. Although later Yahoo! It has entered the business of creating all kinds of content, but its role as a portal to collect collective works of network users is still its value core.
-Google's breakthrough in search lies in PageRank technology, which has quickly made it the undisputed leader in the search market. PageRank is a method to achieve better search results by using the link structure of the network, not just the attributes of documents.
-Yi Bei's products are the collective activities of all its users. Just like the network itself, Yi Bei grows organically with users' activities. The role of the company is to act as a promoter of a specific environment, and users' actions take place in this environment. More importantly, almost all of Yi Bei's competitive advantages come from a large number of key buyers and sellers, which makes the products of many competitors less attractive.
-Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and these companies get the same product descriptions, cover pictures and catalogues from sellers. The difference is that Amazon has created a science about motivating users to participate. Amazon has more than one order of magnitude higher user evaluation than its competitors. More invitations allow users to participate in almost all pages in various ways. More importantly, they use users' activities to produce better search results. Barnesandnoble.com's search results are likely to point to the results of the company's own products or sponsors, while Amazon always starts with the so-called "most popular", which is a real-time calculation based not only on sales, but also on other factors called "traffic" around the products by Amazon insiders. It is not surprising that Amazon's sales exceed its competitors when user participation is one order of magnitude higher than its competitors.
Now, innovative companies that have this insight and may expand it are leaving their mark on the Internet.
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, and its implementation is based on a seemingly impossible concept. The idea is that any Internet user can add an entry and anyone can edit it. Undoubtedly, this is an extreme experiment of trust, applying Eric Raymond's maxim (from the background of open source software): "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" to the creation of content. Wikipedia is already one of the top 100 websites in the world, and many people think it will enter the top 10 soon. This is a far-reaching change in content creation.
Websites such as del.icio.us (delicious bookmark) and Flickr, whose companies have recently gained extensive attention, have become pioneers of the concept of "folksonomy" (different from traditional classification). "Focus classification" is a way of collaborative classification of websites by using keywords freely selected by users. These keywords are generally called tags. Labels use multiple, overlapping associations like those used by the brain itself, rather than strict classification. For a classic example, on Flickr website, a photo of a puppy may be labeled as "puppy" and "cute", so that the system can search in a natural way generated by user behavior.
Collaborative spam filtering products, such as Cloudmark, collect many independent decisions of email users about whether email is spam or not, which is better than those systems that rely on analyzing email itself.
It is almost an axiom that people who have achieved great success on the Internet will not actively promote their products everywhere. They adopt a "viral marketing" approach, that is, some promotions will spread directly from one user to another. If a website or product is promoted by advertising, you can almost conclude that it is not Web 2.0.
Even many Internet infrastructures, including Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP or Python codes used in most web servers, rely on open source equivalent products. It contains the wisdom given by the collective and the network. There are at least 654.38 million open source software projects on SourceForge.net website. Anyone can add a project, and anyone can download and use the project code.
At the same time, as a result of being used by users, new projects migrate from the edge to the center. The organic acceptance process of software depends almost entirely on viral marketing. At the same time, as a result of users' application, new projects move from the periphery to the center, which is an organic software adoption process and almost completely depends on viral marketing.
The experience is that the network effect from users' contributions is the key to dominate the market in the Web 2.0 era.
The platform always trumps the application.
In every competition with competitors in the past, Microsoft has successfully played the platform card and even defeated the most advantageous applications. Windows platform allows Microsoft to replace Lotus 1-2-3 with Excel, WordPerfect with Word and Netscape with Internet Explorer.
But this time, the conflict is not between platform and application, but between two platforms. Each platform has a completely different business model: on the one hand, independent software vendors have a broad user base, and closely combine the application interface with the operating system to control the programming mode; On the other hand, it is a system without owner, which is linked by a set of protocols, open standards and cooperative knowledge.
Windows system represents the pinnacle of proprietary control of software program interface. Netscape tried to compete with Microsoft in the way that Microsoft used to deal with its rivals, but it failed. However, Apache, which has an open Internet standard, is booming. The war situation staged this time is no longer an isolated software of platform confrontation with great disparity in strength, but a platform confrontation platform. The question is, which platform, or more profoundly which system, and which business model can best adapt to future opportunities.
Windows is an excellent solution to the problems in the early PC era. It unifies the stage of program developers and solves many problems that plague this field. However, this one-size-fits-all approach controlled by a single supplier is no longer an appropriate solution, but has become a problem. Communication-oriented systems need cooperation, so does the Internet as a platform. Unless the supplier can control the two terminals of each interaction, it is unlikely to lock the user through the program interface of the software.
By definition, any Web 2.0 provider who tries to promote applications through the control platform loses the advantages of this platform.
This is not to say that the opportunity of lock-in and competitive advantage no longer exists, but we believe that this opportunity is not obtained by controlling software program interfaces and protocols. New rules of the game are emerging. Only those companies that can understand these new rules of the game, rather than trying to return to the old rules of the PC software era, can succeed in the Web 2.0 era.
Blog and popular wisdom
One of the most popular features in the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogs. Personal homepages have existed since the early days of the Internet, and personal diaries and daily columns that express opinions have a long history. So what's the fuss about?
After all, a blog is just a personal webpage in the form of a diary. But as rich skrenta pointed out, the time structure of blog "looks like a trivial change, but it drives a very different distribution, advertising and value chain."
One of the major changes is a technology called RSS. Since early computer experts realized that CGI (Common Gateway Interface) can be used to create database-based websites, RSS is the most important progress in Internet infrastructure. RSS enables people not only to link to web pages, but also to subscribe to them, so that they will be notified when the web pages change. Carunta called it "incremental network". Others call it a "live net".
Of course, the so-called "dynamic website" (that is, the website driven by database and dynamically generated content) has replaced the static website ten years ago. The vitality of a dynamic website lies not only in pages, but also in links. The link of an online blog actually points to a constantly updated webpage, including the "permanent link" of any article and the notification of each update. Therefore, RSS is much stronger than bookmarks or links to individual web pages.
RSS also means that web browsers are no longer just tools for browsing the web. Although RSS aggregators such as Bloglines are web-based, others are desktop programs, and some can be used on portable devices to receive regularly updated content.
RSS is now used not only to push notifications of new blog posts, but also to update various other data, including stock quotes, weather conditions and pictures. This application is actually a return to the origin of RSS: RSS was born in 1997, which is a fusion of two technologies: one is Dave Winer's "Really Simple Syndication" technology, which is used to notify blog updates; The other is the "rich site summary" technology provided by Netscape, which allows users to customize Netscape homepage with regularly updated data streams. Later, Netscape lost interest, and the technology was taken over by Werner's blog pioneer company Userland. However, in the current application implementation, I see that their functions are the same.
However, RSS is only part of the reason why blogs are different from ordinary web pages. Tom Coates commented on the importance of fixed links like this:
"Now it looks like an ordinary function, but it effectively transforms the blog from an easy-to-publish phenomenon to cross-community dialogue participation. This is the first time to make it so easy to express and talk about very specific posts on other people's websites. The discussion appeared, and so did the chat. At the same time, the result is a friendship or a stronger friendship. Fixed link is the first and most successful attempt to build a bridge between blogs. "
In many ways, the combination of RSS and fixed links adds many features to HTPP (Internet Protocol). The so-called "blogosphere" can be regarded as a new peer-to-peer phenomenon in the sense of peer-to-peer compared with the early news groups and bulletin boards on the Internet. People can not only subscribe to each other's websites and link to specific comments on a page, but also know that anyone else has linked to their page through a mechanism called trackbacks, and can respond by linking to each other or adding comments.
Interestingly, this two-way link was the goal of early hypertext systems such as Xanadu. Hypertext purists hail citation notification as a step towards two-way linking. However, it should be noted that the citation notice is not a real two-way link, but a symmetrical one-way link that (potentially) achieves the effect of two-way link. This difference seems subtle, but in fact it is huge. Social networking systems, such as Friendster, Orkut and LinkedIn, need the confirmation of the receiver to establish a connection, so they lack the scalability of the Internet architecture itself. As Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, a photo sharing service, pointed out, attention will only be rewarded when it happens. (Flickr therefore allows users to set a watch list, that is, any user can subscribe to photo stream of all other users through RSS. The object of attention will be notified, but it is not necessary to identify this connection. )
If the essence of Web 2.0 is to use collective wisdom to debug the Internet into a so-called global brain, then the blogosphere is the chatter in the brain, the kind of voice that we can hear in our whole mind. This may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but it is equivalent to conscious thinking. As a reflection of conscious thinking and concern, the blog world has begun to have a strong influence.
First of all, because search engines use link structures to help predict useful pages, as the most prolific and timely linkers, blogs play a disproportionate role in trimming search engine results. Secondly, because the blog community quotes itself too many times, bloggers who pay attention to other blogs broaden their horizons and abilities. In addition, the "echo chamber" criticized by critics is also an amplifier.
If it's just an amplifier, then blogging becomes boring. But like Wikipedia, blogs use collective wisdom as a filter. The law of "group wisdom" put forward by James Suriowecki is effective. Just as PageRank technology produces better results than analyzing any single document, the collective attention of the blogosphere will filter out valuable things.
Although the mainstream media may regard individual blogs as competitors, what really makes them nervous will be the competition with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not only the competition between websites, but also the competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also what Dan Gill called "we, the media". In this world, it is the so-called "original audience" that decides what is important, not a few people in the secret room.
3. Data is the next Intel Inside.
Now every important Internet application is driven by a special database: Google's web crawler, Yahoo! Catalogue (and web crawler), Amazon's product database, Yi Bei's product database and suppliers, MapQuest's map database, Napster's distributed song library. Like Hal Varian,