Check out it’s Clearspring home page too.

I’m glad to be a part of helping to organize what should be a super fun local DC tech event: WidgetDevCamp DC. Come one, come all, and let’s talk about modular web applications (psssttt it’s not just widgets anymore), Facebook, start pages, blog sidebars, and the rest. Want to write code? Want to design some UIs? Want to learn what the heck we’re talking about? Join us! Check out the site or join the mailing list.

I’ll be heading up the developer platform outreach side of things, and blogging at the Clearspring Community Blog. Drop by if you’re into it.

• the things you may know about VCs but don’t want to really admit to yourself, here here and here
• on personal productivity, nice change-up from heady investment talk
• on web 2.0, and bubbles, from someone who’s been there — we agree web 2.0 is more about getting into the groove of what web 1.0 really is (I’ve had various takes on this, including this devil’s advocate argument)
• his rich assessment of Facebook, though I debate some of it (as I’ve written, I think the API is way more compelling over time than having your app built into someone else’s (Facebook’s) product, and this is where it gets a bit closer to Marc’s other thing, Ning).

Nice work, anxious to see how it all moves forward.

• Embedded Facebook applications still run externally. This seems to get missed quite a bit by folks that have not actually looked at the FB technology offering. Whether in an iframe or via FBML, Facebook “applications” are still essentially executing in an external website — when you are interacting with a 3rd-party application via your Facebook account, you’re interacting with an external site (integrated at the presentation layer). This is a very efficient way for Facebook to balance the extensibility they want to get for their platform, with a relatively (actually, very) simple technical solution. Of course, it does mean the user experience of Facebook is beholden to some extent to the external application developer — if your app goes down, then the user’s Facebook account is impacted. This is the right gamble to make, kudos to them for doing it — the carriers could learn a thing or two about balancing control and openness from this.
• The Canvas concept is cool, and FBML is not “their own language”. I would attribute that quote except for the fact that I have seen it so many times I wouldn’t know where to start. The concept of the Canvas is essentially that Facebook can render your own application pages within the context of the rest of their UI, by virtue of the Facebook platform sucking in your presentation markup, combining it with the rest of the Facebook presentation, then sending it down to the browser. They do the iframe thing too, but the canvas goes a step beyond in that you can use additional markup tags, referred to as Facebook Markup Language, to make your application share more of the look-and-feel of the rest of Facebook. It’s obvious why they did this — to allow application developers to build a look and feel that closely resembles the rest of the Facebook experience. Custom tags are nothing new on any large web project, it’s amazing that this has gotten so much negative attention for standards non-compliance. Aside from the presentation-vs-data argument, which you could make to a degree, reverse engineering some CSS to get your app to look like something else is a tried-and-true tactic, and what Facebook has done here is offer something much more compelling and convenient for the developers. Custom tags are a form of modular ui development, and they work, and if they hadn’t done this we’d all be hacking up our styles to try to match the Facebook controls anyway.
• The Facebok Profile elements are not truly dynamic. When you have your application add something to a user’s Facebook profile, you’re basically just injecting a piece of static markup into their profile. This makes a ton of sense for performance reasons (you’d hate to see the core “view some user’s profile” operation get bogged down with external server access). It does, however, get interesting when you’re trying to put some dynamic content in there. No timers, etc., the only way I’ve found to really do this is to have your own server responsible for initiating the periodic updates on its own, which means your own server has to deal with persistent user authentication sessions and such. Look at all the Facebook apps for example that don’t update your status until you actually go and interact with the app, and give it a chance to run something to update your profile markup, or the abundance of “refresh now” buttons on third-party profile elements. Anyway, I point this out to draw the distinction that Facebook profile elements are not really dynamic application components a-la some other widget/nugget/snippet systems, and this is very much intentional.
• Development lifecycle management services are weak. Down the road, it’ll be nice to see the way you manage applications, associate them with developers, etc., improve. This is the one area where I think the model really falls down right now. You need to be able to easily share API access keys and application ownership (from the developer standpoint) between users, make the app available to multiple users for testing without opening it publicly, put it through test/release cycles, and all the rest. This will get better, it’s one of 80/20 things right now.
• The Facebook API, separate from the embedded “Facebook Application” experience, is powerful. A set of web services (REST) offering the ability to manage friend data, interrogate it, etc. , whether or not you’re actually building an application design to be experienced through the context of your Facebook account. And this leads us to our conclusion.

In general, the power of the Facebook platform is NOT in the Facebook-resident applications, but in the non-Facebook applications that use Facebook services. There has been some discussion on whether Facebook apps are widgets, whether they offer better extensibility than MySpace (here, here, and here are some good examples), and related. There are some good thoughts here. Personally, though, I think the compelling point isn’t that Facebook is a new platform into which you can inject dynamic application content (widgets or otherwise). It is that Facebook offers a platform API that you can use to build social networking functions into your own, separate, application. This is clear, but this is not what everyone is talking about. Even though Facebook is the cat’s pajamas right now, and yes it’s a cool destination that a lot of people go to, over-time it’d be hard to imagine a single destination where everyone in the known universe would go to use all kinds of disparate applications integrated only though their set of “friends”. Social networks, over time, are inherently too interested-oriented for this to be a viable model. The brilliance in this overall move by Facebook is not as a super-extensible, friend-to-all-developers application container, it is in its ability to, through the APIs and not just through hosted canvasses, offer a core social-networking library to web developers. How relationships are managed, navigated, etc., is value Facebook can add. Being a one-stop shop for all of your application needs is interesting at the moment, but not going to be the long-term success of Facebook.

“The advantage of this approach is that it makes it relatively effortless for users to access a world of information that is both increasingly comprehensive and personal to them. Even if all this information were available through search (and it’s not), search actually requires work; the user must know what they’re looking for and type it in. Then they must parse the results to determine which are valuable, labor which is not shared and reused by others. By contrast, Facebook requires no work once your network is set up. Your friends push information to you that is likely to be useful, and if not you can tune your preferences until it is. Facebook promises a kind of Socratic knowledge: it tells users things they didn’t even think to ask.”

Read the post.

Web 3.0 seems to have entered the lexicon of the blogosphere, though it remains undefined. Well, a lot of folks define it as the semantic web. This is cool from a CS perspective, but the 2.0 nomenclature wasn’t fundamentally a technology designation, so it doesn’t really seem right that 3.0 should be. The semantic web should really be web 2.0 in that sense, but anyway. I’m a little more interested in the web’s evolution through usage and business models. So in that sense, what’s 3.0? I play the part of a psyched-about-the-future geek all day, so I’ll make the devil’s advocate argument for the sake of contributing to the discussion — whether I believe it or not is sort of a separate question (I don’t). It’s good to argue against yourself once in a while, right?

The premise is what I’ll call the American Idolization of the web: The next phase of the web experience will look more traditional , with a standard blend of “mainstream” and “alternative” content powered by a federation of a small number of large players, than any of us geeks want to admit.

The Groundwork

Taking an industry/social-trend view, rather than a technology-centric view (semantically-aware, user-mashupable, etc), of the web’s next phase, we’re closer than we might think to the point of being able to use Tim O’Reilly’s “this is qualitatively different; let’s call it web 3.0″ rule. Whatever we call it, the point at which the current 2.0 version of web hits critical mass with the mainstream is a big enough deal that we should call it out, it’s already happening, and it may not be as cool as we all thought.

So where have we been?

• Web 1.0 was about connectivity, access, publication, and commerce. People got connected, content and commerce showed up, and while there were some mistakes, we saw some value in it.
• Web 2.0 is about technical, societal, and commercial experimentation — community networking and user-generated content as business opportunities, widespread technical shifts to service-orientation, decoupling, and the web as a rich platform for applications and services.
• Web 3.0 will not be about user-driven aggregation of services, social networking platforms, or end users remixing application services — it will be about the transparent consumption of these services as provided by more traditional-looking aggregators, and will follow a long tail model.

We’ll focus on these as (one guy’s version of) practical reality in terms of how the industry and the technology have developed — we could talk all day about the original intent of TBL and others, whether “web 2.0″ was a useful name, whether what we call web 2.0 now was simply what was really intended from the start, and whether there were social networks 15 years ago. Here is a good jumping off point to a relevant set of discussions with O’Reilly and Tim Berners Lee, two smart guys.

Back to the premise. We all love to talk about AJAX, tagging and folksonomies, microformats, user-generated content, personalization, widgets, social networks (or social networking platforms), and the rest. I love Clay Shirky and David Weinberger and their views on structuring information, and the debate over the semantic web, strongly vs loosely defined taxonomies, RDF, etc. I love Marc Canter’s Digital Lifestyle Aggregator concept, which presents a view of the class of services that will tie all our crap together and help us make sense of it. I love the distributed computing paradigm that simple widgets and start pages will evolve to. I love this stuff because I’m a geek. But I love to talk about it in the same way that those crazy Spanish cooks love to talk about foams and airs and their influence on world gastronomy. We’re the Dean (or Obama?) supporters, and its great to be there, and great stuff happens, but Bush still won. It’s easy to forget about the poor old mass-market user, and what’s reasonable or unreasonable to expect that they will do (and pay for), in the midst of this debate.

I’ll use my lovely wife as a use-case. She has a highly-successful corporate career, a huge professional as well as social network (offline), and couldn’t give a damn about del.icio.us or the Facebook platform. She’s an email/calendaring user, an e-commerce shopper, an online bill-payer, even watches stuff on YouTube — she’s like a lot of “regular people” in her use of the web. She likes geni.com not because it’s a social network play for the family or because it has a cool Ajax UI, but because it’s an easy way to create a family tree. What does she really care about “web 2.0″? She doesn’t, and neither do most people. And by most people I mean most people in a certain set of socio-economic bands, which still represent a minority of the population — we’re not even talking about the rest of the world.

Web 1.0 (and prior) kicked off a massive cultural shift — it really was, and is, something revolutionary. All of a sudden people began to communicate with one another in totally new ways, began to take advantage of daily-life convenience services never before thought possible (my parents tell me that balancing a checkbook on Sunday evening used to be a major event), gained access to new amounts of information about themselves, their health, their communities, and their governments. Parts of the world began to open up with new definitions of access, and average folks got their feet wet with the concepts and some of the basic tools (e.g. an email client, a browser).

This has been a continuing journey over the last several years — more and more applications, better and better interfaces, delivered via greater and greater penetration of broadband and PC access. Personalization in e-commerce is just one of many great incremental technical achievements we’ve seen large groups of “regular” users benefit from. Developers and technologists have been feeling their ways around the workings of these things — learning how to take a service-oriented view of the world, how to build richer user interfaces in a browser, the virtues of content syndication, and how to collaborate with one another more and more effectively. Similarly, users have been experimenting. It will be clear in the final analysis, if its not already, that the emergence of the blogosphere, of big-S-big-N Social Networks, and of user-generated content in general over the last few years were seminal events, but they were just very introductory baby steps. Web 2.0 is really about slight technical paradigm shifts and and online social experimentation, and makes sense in the long run only as a necessary interim step to what comes next. Again, not in terms of what the formal definitions may be, but in terms of mass-market adoption, end user behaviors, and business applications (valley VCs don’t count as representatives of modern global business).

The Next Wave

What’s next, then, what we might call web 3.0, is when the participants collectively hit their stride with what are now more accurately seen as anomalous events, and when the real money starts coming in. Take a look at the distribution of information across the web today, how even though there are millions and millions of nodes on the web, it’s a small number that get most of the traffic, hold most of the data, and provide most of the widely used applications. Though there are millions of blogs you can read to get news and opinion, users don’t read millions of blogs, they read a few (not including mine) or, more likely, they read a summary view that is aggregated by someone else, and someone that looks a lot more like mainstream media (my hero Dave Winer has some other thoughts on MSM in web 3.0 here). They listen to NPR, maybe watch FOX. They don’t surf all the Technorati results, they go to a few aggregate locations. They don’t use feed readers or start pages to assemble their own custom dashboard of applications and content from across the web. They watch video online, but they still sit down to watch American Idol as-its-broadcast and spend more time with a set-top box than with a PC hooked up to the TV. Again, keep in mind we’re speaking about general population here, not us technophiles.

Web 3.0 is where we’ll see the convergence of MSM outlets, main-stream portal providers, and big enterprises sucking in all the cool stuff that came on in the scene in web 2.0 — that’s where the vast majority of users will experience media, get and share opinion, accomplish the tasks of life and work, and be entertained. There will always be a huge current of leading-edge users that embrace the full spectrum of services available to them, in real-time, and remix them to their needs, but in the grand scheme of things this is a tiny minority of users. It isn’t until the user numbers on these things increase that these concepts get really interesting. People consume Digg stories indirectly because the interns at CNN read Digg and then feed them up for the main coverage, people participate on message boards of major TV networks to talk about their favorite character’s hairstyle, and enterprise users start to see more Wikis and blogs deployed internally.

And with respect to social networks, we are talking about big numbers already. But we’re also talking about hugely transient models. We’ve seen a few networks now come and go. We’ve seen that there is a high degree of tolerance for, and interest in, people having individual presences on the web, that they can interact with and connect to others and to their interests. We’ve also seen that while that’s interesting, there’s not a whole lot that’s new in the grand scheme of things — it’s just a tech-powered societal update to hanging out at the mall, going to a tupperware party, whatever. It’s not the same level of transformation that took place when the web first began to see widespread use in the 90s. The real transformation there will be about the long-tail networks. Some of the longest-lived communities on the web today still exist as collections of people that email one another, or maybe even hang out on some crappy old bulletin board implementation.

So wrapping up this devil’s advocate view of what mass-media Web 3.0 will be, some trends we’ll see:

• Consolidation in the software space will continue, with the big players getting bigger and even more boring.
• Mass-market media outlets will dominate in the entertainment segments — not exclusively as content providers, though mainstream content production will continue to dominate over Mentos & Diet Coke from a revenue perspective, but also as centers of influence for the communities of independent content. That is, the user-generated-content sphere will be a huge influencer of mainstream media, but mainstream media will still be the gateway, and the filter, for most of the distribution.
• Advertising will naturally continue to become more ubiquitous, and following the transition to product-placement in the mainstream content segment, in-place advertising will become increasingly the only way for innovative software solutions to see wide adoption. Sponsored content integrated into RIAs, not just sidebars and on search results.
• Enterprises will start to turn their substantial infrastructure dollars to next-generation “collaboration” tools in the web 2.0 style, resulting in enterprise web applications becoming more and more usable, and enterprises will incorporate external web services more and more into their architectures. However, they won’t do this without the usual gang of integrators in tow, which may undermine the move to open source in the enterprise. In other words, if enterprises think they already have what software and systems they need, and can focus on decreasing cost and improving maintainability and performance of such systems, they look to open source alternatives to their current solutions. However, as they think they identify new software needs, they will resort to their SOP and start paying integrators for “web 2.0 stuff”. This is analogous to what is already happening in the enterprise in regard to SOA investments. Just when it seems the enterprise has what it needs and can start incrementally improving their effectiveness, they identify something new to spend money on.
• Users won’t be remixing the web Pipes-style, they will be using applications provided for them by a common cadre of “trusted” sources. The technorati fringe will continue to steam ahead, and we’ll continue to see incredible innovation, but again, it will increasingly be delivered to the mass market by aggregators rather than directly to end users. It is within these aggregator applications and services where the remixing will occur, and it will be upstream of the average end user. This will be a new era for the portal — the solution will look far different from an old-style portal in capability, in terms of personalization, end-user configurability, and startpage-like behavior. But it will be largely familiar as it relates to how power is centralized in the industry with a few key, large-scale players that mediate the majority of the experience.   Providers of great DLA-type solutions will be the new portals, and widgets will evolve into solutions for content delivery into these one-stop DLA solutions.  
• Lastly, crops of new innovators will turn their attention to green and other new opportunity spaces, as the pure web per-se becomes commoditized by the dominance of big players, traditional media, and the entrance of the enterprise.  There will continue to be a strong push on the web itself, but we will see other industry segments taking back some of the enthusiasm, and capital, that has recently been poured into web 2.0.

So What Now?

Nothing — remember we’re just playing devil’s advocate here, and I’ll probably post the opposite side of these arguments at some point soon . If you read all this you get a gold star.

There’s plenty on the web about web 3.0, the semantic web, and other people’s opinions on where it’s all going. Here are a few posts I personally find interesting:

• Nova Spivack
• Sramana Mitra
• Dave Winer
• Phil Wainewright
• Danny Ayers
• Scott Rafer

• Social networking platforms (Facebook).  This is all over the blogosphere, so let’s just say it’s interesting that they are taking this kind of aggressive position to grow their business as, arguably, a hedge against the obselescence that eventually plagues most pure social network plays.  Acknowledging that a one-stop social network is not a long-term strategy, better to be a provider of social network infrastructure that the more niche networks can leverage as the usage model moves past the “hang with your friends” paradigm and heads down the long tail of community interests.  This is a bold, and impressive, move for Facebook.
• API management & mediation platforms (Mashery).  The offering here is really interesting — as a developer who’s always focused on APIs, the concept is compelling. I’d argue however that the most effective positioning for this kind of an offering at this stage of the industry is in regards to the enterprise.  Enterprises spend a lot of money on software, use big integrators, and deploy lots of fat enterprise packages — huge (usually bloated) J2EE infrastructures, for example.  Though there’s a separate argument around all of that, there is a gap in the market represented by an enterprise’s need to efficiently leverage existing web services from the public web, but not being able to stomach the SLAs that are typically associated with them.  Enterprises can’t afford critical business processes to go down when a web 2.0 API they are using goes down, no matter how cool it is.  If an enterprise had a way to leverage the functionality of all of the great API services that are out there, but could could get enterprise-class SLAs (security and data protection, uptime, supportability, version management, etc.) around them, they would pay for it.  No amount of internal ESB infrastructure, and no amount of external mashup tools like Pipes or CSF-powered NetworkedMashups, will do this on their own.  This is somewhat analogous to the enterprise open source movement — how companies like Cygnus have moved through the world and exemplified, for a different class of services anyway, by things like IBM’s Enterprise Linux strategies.  Take the best stuff from the community and repurpose (wrap) it for the enterprise, and get paid handsomly for that added value. Many others have argued for this as well, and I wonder how this does or doesn’t factor into Mashery’s (and others) view of the world.
• Web application infrastructure services (Amazon).  Not much new to say here, other than that personally I’m an admirer of the fact that they made a risky and forward-looking move in this regard — always exciting to see entrenched players placing bets.  Are the services perfect?  No, but lots of folks are being productive with them.  It will be interesting to see how Amazon’s earnings in this space unfold and how the strategy evolves — lots of folks are looking to them to prove out whether this kind of a model can be profitable in the long-term, even when it’s based on pre-existing core assets. 
• Widget syndication platforms (Clearspring).  Clearspring is still under the radar a bit with their upcoming community offering, so the full strategy is not totally revealed, but there is a tremendous opportunity in managing the deployment and traceability (which seems to be a primary focus of Clearspring’s) of dynamic, micro-application content as delivered into all kinds of container environments.  Widgets is almost a limiting word — the general opportunity space isn’t just web-based widgets but includes dynamic content modules within virtual environments (SL, WoW, etc.), on in-dash automotive systems, on mobile device homescreens, and many more outlets.  While there are players at some level in each of these domains, their unification for the purposes of multi-channel micro-application/content distribution and multi-pronged online campaigns will be the killer.  There is a lot to be gained by whomever can figure this out and come to the table with the compelling toolset and support ecosystem as we move beyond MP3 players and photo viewers, and this seems to be at least some of what Clearspring is up to. 
• Carriers as mobile internet application platforms.  I’ve written about some of this before.  I’m a big believer in the potential for carriers to move in a platform direction, rather than remaining so focused on controlling the handset UE and the associated revenue streams.  There are compelling services carriers can offer to the next generation of mobile web applications (and we’re not just talking about better J2ME APIs and HTTP headers), if they would just get off the pot and start doing some of this stuff.  Parlay/X, SDP, IMS and the rest have got them churning on their own weight rather than focusing on the principles of real platform ecosystems.  There are platform services that developers will pay to access, and we could figure out exactly how much if someone would do some experimentation and give it a shot in an incremental way.  Full openness may not be the right strategy, but without market testing some initial examples the carriers have no choice but to keep doing what they’re doing.  “More of the same” is never a good move for a pressured segment.  I’ve always thought that the MVNO space is where we might see more of this type of thing, and who knows, maybe this is what Google has in mind. 
• The micro platform as Trojan Horse.  In addition to the big plays, there are any number of what I call micro-platforms — extremely focused solutions to extremely focused, and sometimes transient, problems.  A favorite example is addthis.com.  While things like this may not be the drivers of the transformation of the industry, they add substantial value and, without a lot of overhead, build for these companies a real ecosystem.  The smart ones then leverage this ecosystem — not only users and developers but press, investors, advertisers, etc — for expanded solutions over time.  It’s easy to forget, but search as trojan horse, whether it was intended that way at the time, was more or less how Google all got started.  Single-purpose internal platform, single-purpose external platform, multi-purpose external platform, FOG.

Parting thoughts: two great “classic” pieces on platform strategy for your reading pleasure:

• Those Harvard folks on two-sided networks, but you gotta pay for it
• Our old pal Joel Spolsky on platforms, free from the blogosphere