Doing more with less
In my last blog post I will discuss O´Reillys web 2.0 pattern of doing more with less. In the pre- web 2.0 era the business model was to “get big fast”, but with the dot-com bubble bursting there was obviously a need to think new when creating profitable web sites.
The new method is based on having lightweight models and cost-effective scalability, which includes some of these principles:
• Development process: Adopt agile development processes with highly iterative and incremental product cycles, reducing time, risk, and development-cost.
• Using open source software and pre-built components, reduces time and cost, also adding possibilities for users and other 3rd-parties to further improve on your product.
• Scale with demand: your business should start as small as possible, and expand exponentially with customer growth.
• Syndicated advertising and exploiting the network effect for marketing and promotion.
One example of doing more with less is the ancient Craigslist. Starting up before the web 2.0 era back in 1995, it was originally an email distribution list among friends. Craigslist quickly evolved though, and as word of mouth rapidly increased subscribers a web interface was launched in 96. Craigslist relies purely on the community to provide the content and moderation, making it a truly user-driven website of trust.
As Craigslist grew larger throughout the late 90´s and early 2000´s more and more categories were added. Craigslist is today a portal for buying and selling merchandise, job listings, personal ads, real estate, discussion forums, and numerous community services and social event listings.
From its humble beginnings 15 years ago, Craigslist has seen continuous growth in both traffic and revenue (main source from job ads). In the year 2000 they had nine employees working out of the founders apartment, and as of today they only have a staff of 32, despite having 20 billion page views a month and over 50 million users in the U.S alone. Although it doesn´t really evolve beyond adding new categories and such, Craigslist with its philosophy of simplicity (it still looks like a 90´s website with just html and css) stands out as a great example of doing more with less.
References:
Leveraging the long tail
The emergence of e-commerce has drastically changed the retail business in many ways. The low cost of production, distribution, and marketing, have along with the infinite shelf-space of the Internet brought sustainability to markets that previously weren´t profitable.
This phenomenon is described in O´Reillys pattern of “Leveraging the long tail”. The term was coined by Chris Anderson in 2004 and refers to the graphical representation of products and their popularity, where the largest portion of the product range are the relatively unpopular ones i.e. the niche market:
By focusing your business on the niche markets one can avoid heavy competition, which in time can strengthen your business´ position. In addition, the Internet lacks the geographical constraints of a traditional store so that one can reach the entire market of a particular niche. However, it must be pointed out that this concept of the long tail doesn´t mean that one must focus purely on low-volume niches, having a wide as possible range like Amazon or Audible does exploits every piece of a given market.
One website that takes advantage of the long tail principle we´ve discussed is Australian movie rental site Quickflix. Quickflix offers an extensive range of more than 36000 titles including movies, TV-shows, documentaries, and concert DVD´s. The vast amount of titles offered by Quickflix is unmatched by any physical video store. I tried searching for several movies and concert DVD´s that are concidered very unknow and they actually had most of them.
Quickflix certainly exercises some of the best practices of “leveraging the long tail”, such as using an architecture of participation involving user-reviews, rating etc., and leveraging customer self service by letting user manage their own accounts. It is also worth mentioning the user-friendliness of Quickflix, involving logical categorization of titles, a comprehensive search function, and many different top-rated categories that I always find useful when browsing for titles worth watching.
The next step for Quickflix would probably be complete digitalisation of their inventory like Netflix, which could drastically lower shipping and storage costs. But I suppose preliminary there may be some issues with a streaming service here in Australia, due to the common download-limits and mediocre bandwidth?
References:
– What is web 2.0? O´Reilly Media
Perpetual beta
In the previous decade, we saw the emergence of agile lightweight development models as a reaction to heavy system-development theory in the last 40 years. Heavy development models such as the dreadful waterfall-model and Unified Process were deemed inappropriate for the demands of the new web-era, where continuous software improvement and heavy user-involvement are critical factors of success.
Perpetual beta is yet another of O´Reillys core patterns for Web 2.0, where “devices are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services”. Part of the success of software companies like Amazon, FlickR, and Google, can be accredited their implementation of agile development models such as Scrum, eXtreme Programming (XP), or Rapid Application Development (RAD).
Agile software development emphasizes concepts such as:
• Frequent and continuous software improvement
• Iterative and incremental releases
• Close cooperation between developers and users
One application that coincides with this pattern (among others) by being in constant development is the online presentation application Prezi.
Prezi was launched in 2009, as a reaction to slideshows like PowerPoints limited ability to develop and explain ideas. Contrary to traditional slide-based presentation tools, Prezi uses a single canvas that contains all the material you wish to present. When running the presentation, Prezi simply pan around the canvas within your defined sequence and framework:
Prezi also offer a neat collaboration feature called Prezi Meeting, where multiple participants can work on the same presentation simultaneously, adding a sensation of being in the same creative space together.
More relevant to the topic of perpetual beta, Prezi is under constant development. Being a purely web-based tool every update or bug fix is implemented directly into the online application continuously, leaving no need for the user to actively update the application.
The users are still very much involved with the development however, and Prezi seem to appreciate collective intelligence. They have their own blog where every new or updated feature is posted and subsequently discussed by the community. And by the looks of it most of the changes made to this exciting application is based on the feedback of users.
Prezi´s alternative to the old school slideshow is definitely worth a try, and if you´re comfortable with making your presentations available to all users it is completely free as well.
References:
Software above the level of a single device
In the modern web-era, applications are no longer restricted to a single device like a laptop or a desktop. This is described in O´Reillys pattern of ‘software above the level of a single device’, in which developers should strive to achieve ubiquitous access to their application, while utilizing the strengths and weaknesses of both a desktop-computer and a mobile device like we´ve seen with iTunes.
Spotify is an Internet music-streaming application released back in 2008. Although not an application you can run in your browser (you´ll have to download a lightweight C++ coded application), Spotify coincides with several of the patterns we´ve discussed earlier and is simply too ingenious to be left undiscussed.
Ever since the beloved Walkman became popular in the early 80´s, many of us have discovered the convenience/necessity of portable music. The creators of Spotify are naturally aware of this. Besides the obvious support for Windows and Mac OSX (for Linux you currently have to run it under Wine), it is currently available for 
iOS (iPhone, IPod touch, iPad), Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Palm.
Every song you added or listened to, playlist you´ve created, or even resent searches, is instantly synchronized with your account that is stored in Spotify´s ‘cloud’. This means that regardless of the device you wish to access Spotify with, all your settings and tracklists will appear the same as the last time you used the application. Spotify even offers the service of allowing you to store your favourite playlists locally (very useful in the terrifying event of being offline), making access to this application truly ubiquitous.
One of Spotify´s strength lies within its hard-to-replicate data source. Their comprehensive database of over 13 million tracks is not user generated as we all have come to praise, they´ve rather payed record companies tens of millions of euros to keep this service legally accepted. They also pay royalties to artists, but that is merely pocket-change making this the biggest controversy with this application.
Social support: Spotify also offers integration with Facebook and Twitter as well as its own social function. With Facebook-support activated, sharing is never more than a click away. You can subscribe to your friends’ playlists, see who is subscribing to yours, view and listen to their top rated songs, and even collaborate on playlists which is neat if you have friends with the same taste in music.
There are lots of other stuff to mention, like the purchase feature and third party apps like the mash-up with last.fm, but I’ll leave that to you to check out as this post is growing long and boring. However, Spotify is currently only available in a few countries in Western Europe as legal issues are being discussed elsewhere. Regardless, Spotify is worth emigrating for.
References:
Rich User Experiences
Background:
When the World Wide Web first emerged back in the 90´s, the general experience was merely a static display of information, involving the user in little or no degree. Web pages that required some kind of user-input was characterized by inefficient methods of interactivity. Some input would typically result in reloading the web page to display this new content, applying excessive toll on bandwidth and disrupting the user-experience.
The WWW was however intended to deliver different types of user-involving dynamic content from early on, starting with languages like JavaScript and DHTML. Today, the degree of user-involvement and the manor of which it is being performed has greatly improved. As described in O´Reillys pattern of Rich User Experiences, we are now bridging the gap between traditional desktop applications and online-based ones like GoogleDocs.
The increasing popularity and useability of these Rich Internet Applications could largely be credited technologies like AJAX and Silverlight, along with improvement in browser-technology. Also, we must not forget the widespread and affordability of broadband, which is imperative for RIAs to function smoothly.
Gliffy is an online competitor to desktop-applications like Visio. Gliffy is built using something called OpenLaszlo, while the application is enabled in your browser using Flash.
Gliffy – A full-scale online application
With Gliffy, the user can create various types of flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, and such. Personally I’ve used it mostly for creating UML sequence and use-case diagrams etc. with great success. It is a typical drag & drop experience. Starting with a clean sheet you simply drag a desired shape or template onto it, and add text-descriptions and entity-relationships to your likings.
Gliffy has a large shape-library ranging from your basic UML and flow-charts to Venn-diagrams and floor plans. You can export as SVG like Visio, or XML, JPEG or PNG.
Gliffy coincides with the best practices of RIAs in many ways, like offering rich interactivity and user-engagement, quick performance, platform-independence, and instant loading of the application. All is executed within an as simple and user-friendly GUI as possible with this type of task.
Half-collaboration:
Gliffy does however have flaws. The major one is it´s lack of real-time collaboration like GoogleDocs, where multiple users can edit the document while the changes are pushed over to the other collaborators in real-time. Although not tested it myself, I´ve come to understand that LucidChart offers seamless real-time collaboration within a similar GUI. Have anyone used it or can recommend similar online diagram-making tools?
References:
What Is Web 2.0 – Tim O´Reilly – http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=5
Wikipedia – Ajax – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29
Wikipedia – RIA – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application
Gliffy review (Check out first comment from Gliffy-CEO) –
Innovation in assembly
Innovation in assembly is one of O´Reillys interesting web 2.0 patterns, in which the essence is creating a web-service by integrating (or assembling, hence the name) several existing ones, rather than creating it from scratch. These services are also referred to as ‘mash-ups’, similar to how music mash-ups are blends of two or more different songs.
Tripwolf.com is an example of a web 2.0-application that coincides with this ‘assembly-pattern’. Tripwolf is a social travel guide with its own community. It combines professional editorial travel reviews from renowned travel guides with user-generated content.
What separates Tripwolf from other travel-applications such as Tripadvisor, is the vast amount of features and content, lots of which generated by 3rd parties. Tripwolf combines APIs from FlickR, GeoNames, Google Maps/ Google Maps Flash, Wikipedia, and Panoramio. All those APIs combined with the collective intelligence of the community, makes this application very extensive and inspiring to use. It even has an iPhone-app.
Features:
• Search within more than 50,000 destinations, and read reviews and tips from friends, professionals, and other users.
• Write you own journal posts, and discuss in the community.
• View and rate over 500,000 sites, restaurants, and attractions.
• View tons of photos, or upload your own.
• Create and print out personalized travel-itineraries, or download pre-existing travel-guides.
• Get inspiration by browsing through other users´ profiles.
• Book flights and hotels.
• Much more…
In use:
Sign up, and you can easily begin planning your journey, rating your favourite or least favourite destinations, and engaging in discussions with the community. Tripwolf.com is well categorised and user-friendly. When looking through continents, countries, cities and so forth, you can select top things to do and places to visit ordered by that geographical area. Along the way you just click a button to add your desired destination/attraction to your trip-planner.
What makes Tripwolf.com an application worth checking out? It is engaging, rich in features, offers a tremendous amount of both general and detailed information, and it is easy to use and to share with friends, making it a very comprehensive travel portal.
References:
What Is Web 2.0 – Tim O´Reilly – http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1
Data is the next ‘Intel Inside’
In this weeks blogpost i´ll be discussing the importance that strategic data-usage has on a given web 2.0 application. The term ”data is the next Intel Inside” comes from media-mogul Tim O´Reilly, and the meaning is that in order to create a significant web 2.0 application, the challenge is really to create a hard-to-replicate data-source.
Earlier in the computer-age, programs and applications were more dependant on which operating system one ran, and performance of that given computer in relation to the components inside(hence the slogan ’intel inside’).
Today, for most users(and maybe especially non-professional users), the web and its various applications is the dominant and most desirable way of spending time on computers. Furthermore, since that area of usage requires little more than a cheap computer, a browser, and a broadband internet-connection, it is said that a good data-strategy is of the highest importance for a web-application to succeed.
Now on to an example to this weeks pattern: Expono
Launched in 2008, Expono is an online sharing, storing, and picture-management site much like FlickR, Photobooth, and other popular applications. But Expono also add many neat features and functionality in pretty much every category, making this application well worth a closer look.
Privacy:
One of Exponos strengths lie within security and control over your own data. Expono have implemented what they call portable privacy, which means that the user can customize access-rights of single photos or entire albums. One can choose between sharing within the Expono-community, sharing with a friend or group of people, or via 3rd party-services like Facebook or MySpace.
Free version:
Although theres is an annual fee of 49$ a year for the unlimited service with extensive functionality, the free version also enjoys rich features such as:
• Full-quality photo-storage in original size and format
• Full integration with Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed
• Automatic location tagging if picture contains GPS-info(who can see that information can also be defined in your privacy settings)
• Manual location tagging with Google Maps
For the full list go here
Is the full service worth it?
So-called power-users or users who just have extensive needs of storage space, should definitely consider the premium-service. In addition to unlimited storage-space and more custom groups, the premium package offers:
• Even tighter privacy-control with password-protected photos, and control over who can download originals
• Authenticated RSS-feeds making it possible for digital photo-frames and other tools to access your photos with custom privacy
• Detailed statistics-page and view-count
By offering the user complete and custom control of their data, along with a vast array of useful features to manage and share that data, it looks like Expono may have chosen the right data-strategy to gain an edge in the crowded media-sharing market, perhaps especially given the rise in data-security awareness the later years.
References:
http://www.expono.com/go/features
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/expono_flickr_picassa_and_the_kitchen_sink.php
What Is Web 2.0 – Tim O´Reilly – http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1
StumbleUpon
In this weeks blogpost(actually my first real blog-post ever), i´ll be evaluating a web application which makes benefit from harnessing collective intelligence.
Why StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a discovery search engine which was founded as early as in 2001, and according to their own webpage enjoys almost 15 million users. As of today it is well integrated into every popular browser like FireFox or Safari, as well as social networks like Facebook. The name of the app itself is pretty self-explanatory, it´s purpose is helping the user stumble upon things of their interest. Anybody who at some point in their life has had internet-access and too much time on their hands, may have had like myself, the feeling that you´ve read every last page on the web. And this is where StumbleUpon comes in handy.
How does it work?
StumbleUpon(or SU for short) creates social networks of web-surfers who share the same interests. Each user has their own profile in which a library of your favourite or least favourite sites builds as you use the application. The more pages you like or dislike, the more accurate SU becomes which makes this application amplify itself upon usage.
StumbleUpon is a powerful and accurate application due to its collaborative filtering algorithm, where it combines human opinion with automated machine learning. Besides linking and sharing your SU preferences with your friends, SU matches your interests and likings with all other like-minded peers in their vast database, thereby harnessing collective intelligence to create the ultimate tailor-made entertainment portal.
Privacy issues?
As with most other social networking apps, and especially when combining SU with all your personal details from facebook, you as a user can be more prone to ”intelligent marketing”. As stated in their privacy section under ”use of information” they may contact third parties with your usage patterns(leaving out sensitive information though) and so forth.
But then again it´s really up to each and every user to configure privacy settings rather then just accepting the horrendous default settings. Furthermore, as with other applications that incorporate social networking one can choose complete anonymity, perhaps with the side-effect of compromising the social aspect of it.
On a side note; because of SU this blogpost took me a good 4 hours to complete. Don´t miss out, you´re probably spending too much time outdoors anyway. Sign up here
References:
What Is Web 2.0 – Tim O´Reilly – http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1
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