Category: Badges
August 11th, 2009
Pragmatic new models for enterprise architecture take shape
The best outcomes result naturally from self-organizing thought leaders in an organization that seek each other out and collaborate on shared solutions to their problems.Hear the words “enterprise architecture” and many people will turn away automatically. It’s not that they aren’t aware that technology drives so much of the modern world, they just think it doesn’t apply to what they do. The famous IT/business divide is too often kept this way because of mutual incomprehension, not-invented-here thinking, and apparently incompatible mindsets. However, this is beginning to change.
High technology continues to relentlessly pervade practically every aspect of today’s business world, prescribing what is potentially possible and often conferring enormous leverage when harnessed fully. But it has been the advent of the Web 2.0 era and its inexorable movement (some might even say infiltration) into the workplace that is making traditional IT — and the master planning version of it, enterprise architecture — an entirely new beast by popularizing simple, egalitarian tools and approaches that can be understood and applied more easily and quickly by a broad audience across most organizations.
Increasingly, in some IT departments and business units around the world, a closer new relationship is forming in which technology is deeply interwoven into continuous joint business processes of creation, change, and adaptation. Like so many grassroots tech culture movements, this one doesn’t yet have a formal name, but increasingly some are calling it emergent architecture.
The first seeds of this change began to be felt with advent of agile development processes a few years ago along with the subsequent rise of software mashups, and the popularity of user-distributable widgets, badges, and gadgets. These technology approaches combined with emerging business trends such as tacit interactions and pull-based systems driven from with bottom-up within organizations, particularly when co-existing with social computing and Enterprise 2.0.
The result: A new environment for creating technology-driven business solutions using different, more open communication channels with richer information and ground truth as well as significantly more adaptive technology elements often strongly influenced by the Web 2.0 world.
Meeting in the middle: Emergent Architecture
In recent years enterprise architecture has been moving from a discipline that provides top-down, a priori technology blueprints to the business side to one that articulates key, strategic possibilities and only the most critical high-level constraints (such as security standards) and then operates as a conductor, promoter, problem solver, and evangelist across the organization through the vehicle of a cohesive community to co-develop needed solutions.
When I wrote that most organizations were badly in need of a technology and software process “angioplasty” a few years ago, I highlighted the trends that will increasingly drive the agenda for new initiatives and projects when it comes to the strategic application of technology to business:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration (internal or external) over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
This is more true than it’s ever been and has been contributing to a growing discontinuity in the way that enterprise architecture will be conducted in the future. Going away are overly formal procedures, detailed technology prescriptions, complex software frameworks, and dreaded compliance checks. Replacing them are highly collaborative, adaptive processes, technology opportunism, simple (frequently Web-oriented) technologies, and dynamic — even spontaneous responses — to organizational and marketplace needs.
Enterprise architects of the near future will still dispense clear guidance that carries the requirements of the entire organization with it, but it will be appropriately broad and EAs will actively help tailor it to local needs across the organization. Self-service IT will become much more common as workers are comfortable using today’s extremely easy-to-use, adaptive, and flexible tools, many of them using Web 2.0 ideas such as simple, open architectures and malleable pieces and parts, especially open APIs, and even new, open business models such as crowdsourcing and community-based involvement.
While organizations such as Gartner are just beginning to map this trend, there’s increasingly little doubt that the infamous chasm that often disconnects IT and business is being crossed in many quarters by business users unafraid of today’s populist technologies combined with IT practitioners that strongly desire to solve immediate and important business problems. That today’s collaborative and communication technologies in the workplace are much more open, social and collaborative than they were even a couple of years ago are likely to be
May 30th, 2009
The enterprise implications of Google Wave
Google has launched many communication services since its inception yet none of these have had such obvious business utility or attempted to reinvent the collaborative process from the ground-up.Google announced their forthcoming service known as Wave this week to widespread coverage in both the press and blogosphere.
Created by many of the same team members that developed the highly successful Google Maps, the preview of the service itself on Thursday was quite compelling, resulting in a rare standing ovation at a tech conference according to ZDNet’s own Sam Diaz. Its egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009.
This is clearly a tall order, but the Internet leader provides plenty of substance to back up this vision despite growing evidence that individual companies may be losing the capacity to drive the agenda for the world when it comes to establishing successful new Internet standards and technologies. While the ultimate destiny of Wave itself is far from clear, it’s both intriguing and open enough that it will likely emerge on the radar of businesses large and small when it becomes widely available later in the year.
Wave’s relevance to the enterprise might seem premature with so many of the early and current Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter-style social messaging, mashups, etc.) still — often arduously — making their way into the workplace years after their inception. Though we seem to finally be hitting a tipping point with 2.0 tools at work, Wave itself seems credible enough to get on our watchlists, at least to understand the implications.
The real question is whether there are really such significant gaps in the current state of Web-based communication that we need something new like Wave. With Google’s tendency to emphasize the consumer world first and the enterprise later, it’s also valid to ask if Wave will really have much impact on businesses. Interestingly, you might be surprised at some of the answers, so let’s take a look.
Wave: A communication and collaboration mashup
Google Wave itself consists of a dynamic mix of conversation models and highly interactive document creation via the browser. Using simple, open Web technologies (Google makes much of the fact that most of Google Wave is a open set of formats and architectures that is jointly developed with the Web community) Wave combines many of the key features of e-mail, instant messaging, media sharing, and social networking into a seamless experience and data set that are eponymously known as waves. All of this is opened up to developers via the Google Wave API.
The demonstration at the introduction of Google Wave (link below) showed how users can interact in real-time, collaboratively creating structured conversations that contain rich media, instant notifications, simultaneous user editing of the conversation, and live integration with server-side resources such as spell-checking and language translation. Most interestingly, while waves are relatively self-contained and use their own types of servers and data formats, they are easy to embed elsewhere or to build extensions for, enabling virtually infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. In fact, a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about. And as we’ll see, this has implications for the enterprise world, not only with SOA but also with social communication in general as well as Enterprise 2.0 specifically.
See Waves in action: Watch the introduction keynote at Google I/O on Thursday.
What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven’t changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user’s contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more.
The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that’s a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we’ve come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology.
As the original announcement post explained, to fully understand Google Wave, one should appreciate the separation of concerns between the product Google is offering and the protocols and technologies behind it, which are open to the Web community:
Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:
- The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
- Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
- The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.
The key here is that Google is expecting many more front-ends for creating and editing waves, depending on the individual requirements of various entities. Google Wave is their own front-end application for doing so and using HTML 5 in their wave client shows they are planning more for
November 4th, 2008
Open APIs reach new high water mark as the Web evolves
Late last week an important milestone for the Internet was quietly reached as the number of available open Web APIs crossed the 1,000 mark, according to the popular API tracking service, Programmable Web.
We are nearing the time when opening our supply chains across the Web isn’t just a good idea, it will be essential for competitive survival. While still seemingly small in number compared to the number of traditional Web sites that exist, open APIs have become an increasingly vital story for Web startups and traditional firms alike to cost effectively partnership, expand the reach of their products (and especially their data), and drive their network effect deeply across the Web.
It’s now almost uncommon to see a new Web product that doesn’t sport a shiny new API so that other online products can integrate the pieces they like into new experiences and offerings. In short, APIs allow a Web application or online business to have thousands of points of presence in other products, instead of just one.
Though APIs were pioneered by many of the original, successful firms on the Web including eBay and Amazon, which can both cite considerable returns for their efforts, it’s only been in the last couple of years that APIs have been taken seriously in a widespread way by the Web community and have become a new competency area.
In my discussions with many companies, one of the biggest obstacles to adopting APIs is a lack of understanding of what a non-visual Web presence looks like and how to build a business model around it. Business leaders are much more likely to understand investment in a traditional Web site, which they are familiar with and understand somewhat, than in an online software development kit, which is more developer-centric and which they are much less likely to fully appreciate, even though APIs can often have more strategic value than a Web site.
The good news is that emerging case studies and the impressive numbers from Amazon earlier this year are showing the the way and there has been a noticeable change in attitude and uptick in interest since cloud computing became such a big topic over the summer.
Yesterday, Programmable Web’s John Musser summarized some of the more interesting findings
March 20th, 2008
Standards support for mashups emerge
The announcement earlier this week that IBM has put together an open approach for making user data secure inside of Web mashups, known as SMash, was the most recent step in an unfolding story about the way the industry is trying to bring structure and order to the rapidly growing and frequently unruly world of Web mashups.
As I’ve covered here in the past, mashups have enormous potential to allow more rapid and much less expensive development of online applications by emphasizing assembly over development, economies of scale by enabling high levels of reuse, and the consequent ability to rapidly get software solutions with the right data in the right place at the right time.
However, all is not rosy in the mashup space as I wrote last fall; there are significant challenges remaining before end-user or enterprise mashups can become a widespread reality despite the numerous offerings that exist today. Since then, I’ve only have one major new item to add to the list of adoption issues, namely that fact that most leading mashup solutions don’t provide a good enough SaaS delivery model. Consequently Yahoo! Pipes remains the best example of a mashup tool that has the requisite low barrier for use for widespread adoption, despite far more sophisticated and capable brethren from the likes of JackBe, Serena, and soon, Lotus, the latter which appears to be repackaging everything it learned with the impressive QEDWiki into an enterprise-class product.
Fortunately, good news is on the horizon for many of the issues I raised last year. It now appears that the mashup industry is heading in a direction which may make the space much more viable indeed over the next year. For example, two my biggest concerns, both non-starters for organizations that want to adopt a mashup model (21% of all organizations reported that they were interested last year), was 1) the lack of serious security and identity support and 2) not having a common standards for the assembly of Web parts such as widgets, gadgets, and other Web applications. Without knowing how to secure mashups, safely handle sensitive user and business data, or know where to make infrastructure and tooling bets, most organizations were likely to sit on the fence and wait until these risks were addressed.
IBM’s announcement this week about SMash was just one of many solutions now being offered resolve these two issues not only in the mashup space, but across the Web industry, as our personal and professional data gets more and more federated across the Internet and within our organizations. Efforts in this area include range from Google’s OpenSocial initiative to the push for adoption of DataPortability.org’s and OpenFriendFormat’s support which are all improving the world of data safety, security, and mobility in the mashup world as well.
But the most comprehensive and detailed plan for bringing standard approaches and techniques to mashups has to be OpenSAM, which leverages many existing standards such as WebDAV, openid, LDAP, and also subscribes to DataPortability.org’s standards to create a consistent and well-organized design and interaction model for offering complex, heterogeneous mashups to both the consumer and business community. Even more importantly, they cite a good number of companies already offering Web applications that support OpenSAM. The OpenSAM vision is broad and focused across the usage spectrum and the OpenSAM folks say that “once OpenSAM is added to an application, it can immediately join mashups with all other OpenSAM applications.”
While there is still a lot to sort out and the mishmash of standards can seem Read the rest of this entry »
October 16th, 2007
The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups
The promise of remixing existing online services and data into entirely new online applications in a rapid, inexpensive manner, often referred to as mashups, has captured the software industry’s imagination since the release of first major example, HousingMaps.com, in early 2005. Since then, mashups have offered the potential to finally make widespread software reuse a reality, enable SOA initiatives to achieve positive ROI, and radically drive down the cost of application development while satisfying large applications backlogs that plague organizations almost everywhere.
Applying mashups in a business settings is often referred to as “enterprise mashups” and recently we’ve finally begun to see the tools emerging to bring real mashup capabilities to consumers, business users, and IT professionals.
However, though anecdotal evidence seem to abound — there are a good number of stories about businesses creating isolated mashups here and there — and mashups are again getting placed on hot tech trends lists for 2008, we’re clearly still not yet seeing the flood of mashup-based apps inside of organizations despite their consistent and steadfast growth on the consumer Web.
ProgrammableWeb’s mashup graphs (left of page) currently reports that over 2,400 mashup-based apps currently exist.
The public Web of course has been a global laboratory for innovation for 15 years and it’s not surprising that experimentation and creativity in such a large pool of resources of people and services would generate some interesting outcomes like the several thousand mashup applications currently available. But the question has been: Where is the same result inside our organizations? Those same organizations that often desperately need software to solve a business problem for which software simply isn’t available — at least without extensive customization — because the typical business problem’s unique, situational nature. In previous posts I’ve discussed how spreadsheets are often the only end-user development tool available to the average person to meet this need today.
So what exactly is holding back enterprise mashups from becoming a more popular phenomena inside our organizations? This has been in contrast to many other aspects of Web 2.0 inside the enterprise, where openness, network effects, and radical power and simply are often driving extremely fast uptake and adoption of new apps and technologies. By many indications, mashups — particularly in the enterprise — have so far fallen short of their potential and the question is why?
I’ve discussed this with a various people in the mashup community and analyzed a number of the leading mashup platforms and have boiled the outstanding challenges down to Read the rest of this entry »
July 26th, 2007
A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise
For well over a year now we’ve seen reports and announcements from a major industry analyst firms and others tracking the movement of Web 2.0 ideas into the enterprise. Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, and many others have all weighed in on the trends or made recommendations, sometimes cautious and sometimes optimistic, that organizations should start heading down the Web 2.0 path. And public interest in Web 2.0 in the enterprise is widespread too, not in the least exemplified by the fact that Web 2.0 trends of all kinds — business and consumer both — are tracked closely here in many blogs on ZDNet.
This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been.We’ve also seen that the term itself has moved from passing familiarity in the leading edge of the technical community to nearly universal recognition in both IT and mainstream business circles. That Web 2.0 is a complex topic there is little doubt since it’s often described as a grab bag category of the latest ideas and movements that include — but are by no means limited to– wikis, blogs, RSS, podcasting, content tagging, mashups, and social networking.
The big question? What do you really need to know today about Web 2.0 in the enterprise?
Reducing all of these ideas into an underlying set of principles is what people like Tim O’Reilly have been doing for several years now. It’s generally understood by most people that the Internet has changed considerably in the last half-decade and that those changes have reached a tipping point that’s enabling brand new business models, unleashing a wave of innovative products, influencing public behavior on a large scale, and in particular, resulting in entirely new types of online businesses. But as I discussed in last year’s discussion on Web 2.0 reductionism, trying to get at the core motive force behind things as disparate as rich user experiences and collective intelligence is no small task.
Fortunately, we are indeed as an industry starting to get a handle on how all the pieces of Web 2.0 fit together. For instance, it’s now clear that having hundreds of millions of people globally connected together pervasively via one single high speed two-way network (aka the Internet) will result in many of the things we’re now seeing in the marketplace. It seems a fundamental new widespread focus on leveraging that two-way aspect of the network deeply in our online products, as well as increasingly playing to the fundamental strengths of the network that is the Web, is teaching us invaluable lesson after invaluable new lesson for our businesses. The result is that the living laboratory of the Web is now the source of the greater part of our innovation in business these days. Today’s World Wide Web is a larger ecosystem and with far more brainpower and activity that any single organization could ever hope to match.
Web 2.0 Transforms The Business Landscape
The story of Web 2.0 began with things like open source software, which is nothing more than entire products created ad hoc by volunteer armies of contributors that now outnumber — by virtue of the sheer capacity the network — the world of commercial software efforts. It’s not lost on careful watchers that open source software tends to be more feature rich, secure, and bug free that commercial software, despite being created by thousands of loosely coupled, self-selected contributors. Since then, this idea of commons-based peer production of products on the global Internet has spread through just about every other type of product that can be delivered over the Web from marketing, advertising, collaboration, news, customer service to banking, investment, fund raising, disaster management, and dozens of other types of business and civic activities. This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been. We’ve tinkered for a couple of decades to build good networked software that took advantage of this fact but we didn’t yet have enough knowledge of the best techniques for creating them. That things like peer production are now moving to the center of the design of online products finally shows a maturing realization that our older, more traditional views of networked applications were just not effective as they could be.
Combine the rise of peer production with the Web growing up into a true software platform as part of the rise of rich user experiences and SaaS. Then witness the movement of the Web out into the world in the last few years and exploding into thousands of types of new Internet devices, mobile and otherwise, that deliver — and just as importantly if not more — capture value in every corner of the globe and in every conceivable setting.
An overarching and compelling new business vision
And while there more trends beyond these that are driving Web 2.0, the upshot is that the productive capacity of the world is increasingly wired into the Web and can be leveraged by building online products that encourage the close cooperation and involvement of those at the edge of the network. You can get now people on the Web en masse to build innovative software applications or help you accumulate vast and almost infinitely rich databases of information and even foster enormous online populations for which you are the preferred intermediary and of which you can tap the combined intelligence.
It’s this more comprehensive and integrated vision of Web 2.0 and its ingredients consisting of Read the rest of this entry »
May 14th, 2007
Mashups: The next major new software development model?
At last week's Mashup Ecosystem Summit held in San Francisco and sponsored by IBM with an invited assemblage of leading players in this space, I gave an opening talk about the current challenges and opportunities of mashups. And there I posed the title of this post as a statement instead of a question. The reason that it's a question here is entirely driven by the context of who is currently creating the majority of mashups these days. Because even a cursory examination of what people are doing every day on the Web right now tells us that mashups — also known as ad hoc Web sites created on the fly out of other Web sites — are indeed happening in a large way, albeit in simple forms, by the tens of thousands online every day.
The consumerization of the enterprise as younger workers bring their Web 2.0 skills and habits to work has already begun.But inside our organizations, both in the IT department and in business units, mashups are a much rarer phenomenon. And in fact, this is one of the classic hallmarks of the Web 2.0 era; the much larger community of the Web as a major source of innovation and leading edge behavior that subsequently moves across the firewall and into our workplaces.
However, the topic of this blog is aimed at the application of Web 2.0 to the enterprise and so whether mashups will be a significant new model for application development inside our businesses anytime soon is still somewhat of an open question. It's worth noting that McKinsey's recent global executive survey of Web 2.0 in business said that a whopping 21% of large businesses across the board are planning investment in mashups in 2007, but a sobering 54% of business executives also said mashups were not even under consideration. Understanding the timing on mashup adoption therefore is important along with the challenge of communicating their potential.
Since the mashup story is primarily being driven by spontaneous activity at the edge of the Internet, an accurate and updated picture of what's actually happening with them is harder to make out than if it was being driven by a centralized industry effort. And as it turns out, this makes what's happening richer and more exciting than it would be otherwise while at the same providing significant challenges for those that want to take these compelling ideas and apply them deliberately to solve business problems.
So in the interest of making sure we have the broadest industry discussion we can about mashups — and to make sure there is some kind of snapshot of what we think we're seeing in this space — I thought I'd summarize the notes from my talk at the Mashup Ecosystem Summit.
To bring folks that are just joining the mashup conversation up to speed on why mashups are so exciting, I'll start with my take on the key aspects of mashups from a value proposition perspective.
Key Aspects and Benefits of the Mashup Approach
- Effective leverage of Web parts and the Global SOA. Mashups are generally built out of the bits, pieces, and services of other Web applications that already exist, adding code only when it can't be sourced from internal or external suppliers or to provide integration "glue" between the parts. This reuse can quickly and easily leverage millions of dollars in previous investment and results in a
April 27th, 2007
A tale of two Web 2.0 conferences and mashups
I've just come off a whirlwind conference tour that started in San Francisco last week with Web 2.0 Expo and ended with the Web 2.0 Kongress yesterday in Frankfurt. I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at both conferences and it was fascinating to see the differences in focus between the two events, as well as some of the apparent trends they had in common.
Given the estimates of the size of the crowd at Web 2.0 Expo, anywhere from 10,000 to 16,000 people depending on who you talk to, there's little doubt it was one of the leading events this year around the next generation of the Web. In contrast, the Web 2.0 Kongress was a smaller and much more business focused affair with a lot of focus on integration and SOA. Yet it was abundantly clear at both, based on my conversations with numerous attendees, that we're now well clear of the early hype of Web 2.0 and much more on how to exploit the opportunities that it maps out for us.
Another key trend I saw was the attendance of mainstream business people who were very much in evidence at both events, something that I've noticed has been increasing at Web 2.0 events lately in general. I met attendees from major corporations, federal and state government, and many others from medium to small size businesses. And a good percentage of them were business people and not from the technical side of things. This doesn't come so much as a surprise if we take into account indicators such as the McKinsey global survey on Web 2.0 which I covered in my last post.
The boundaries of the Web are blurring
The other hot trend, besides of course of just about anything social to do with the Web, that was explored at both events was
February 25th, 2007
Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 2: Mass customization, mashups, and recombinant Web apps
In my last post, I took a look at the recent proliferation of Web widgets, which are modular content and services that are making it easier for anyone to help themselves to the vast pool of high value functionality and information that resides on the Web today. Companies are actively "widgetizing" their online offerings so that it can actively be repurposed into other sites and online products. And as we discussed in the last post, it's believed that letting users innovate with your online offerings by letting embedding them in their own Web sites, blogs, and applications can greatly broaden distribution and reach, leverage rapid viral propagation over the Internet, and fully exploit the raw creativity that theoretically lies in great quantities on the edge of our networks.
DIY on the Web is looking to be a major trend; Newsweek recently speculated that 2007 will be the Year of the Widget.
Looked at this way, letting thousands and even millions of users build Web sites and apps out of your Web parts and then monetizing it with advertising, usage fees, or subscriptions sounds great in the abstract. But one of the big outstanding questions is if widgitizing is mostly useful for gaining fast user adoption and market share, and not for building the fundamentals of a viable, long-term business online. While this last question is still very much an open one, part of the answer will come from the way that the consumption side of DIY develops. The question is this: Are environments emerging that will enable rich and sophisticated DIY scenarios that are usable by most people?
So while my last post looked at the recent growth of available Web parts, now we'll look at the consumption side of the DIY phenomenon. Specifically, beyond the simple copy-and-paste of snippets of HTML, what is the current state of capable tools that will let all of us assemble useful apps beyond the widget encrusted dashboards that are most likely outcome possible today? Because without tools that enable real integration between all these portable Web parts, services, and feeds, we don't have useful new software, we just have fancy information displays.
Like the emergent, DIY usage currently being explored and increasingly embraced with Enterprise 2.0, the idea of DIY is to get developers and IT departments out of the demand loop and letting users self-service themselves. Like spreadsheets and desktop databases have been used for years by end users to build simple apps, with the rise of reusable, portable Web parts and feeds allows the assembly of an entire spectrum of Web apps that don't require true software development skills. Given the right tools that guide users down the right paths (palettes of pre-tested, approved parts, built-in security, versioning and configuration management), DIY might become a major force for leveraging the largely untapped The Long Tail of software demand, instead of becoming a giant support headache for public Web companies and internal IT departments.
Of course, what I'm referring to here is
February 19th, 2007
Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 1: Widgets, badges, and gadgets
One of the hallmarks of a good Web 2.0 site is one that hands over non-essential control to users, letting them contribute content, participate socially, and even fundamentally shape the site itself. The premise is that users will do a surprising amount of the hard work necessary to make the site successful, right down to creating the very information the site offers to its other users and even inviting their friends and family members to use it. Web 2.0 newcomers MySpace and YouTube have shown how this can be done on a mass scale surprisingly quickly, and of course older generation successes like eBay and craigslist have been doing this for years.
There's little question that the Web is increasingly turning into a sort of online Home Depot with its shelves lined with thousands of useful, off-the-shelf parts of every description and utility.As part of this, users are getting increasingly accustomed to the ease of which they can customize their own corners of the Internet, whether it's a blog, profile page, Web site or even Web application. While skinning and customizable layouts have been with us on the Web for a long time, increasingly users want to share — or particularly important to this discussion — even repurpose the content and services they find on the Web in locations and forms of their choosing.
Particularly younger, Web-savvy users have been encrusting their blogs and MySpace profiles with things like badges and widgets for a while now, especially now that a significant number of Web sites have opened up their content to let users do this. In fact, these increasingly portable visual parts are now becoming quite commonplace, easy to consume by regular Web users, and are becoming richer and more useful all the time. In fact, the spread of widgets, and badges — also called gadgets by the big Web players like Microsoft and Google — has been very clear in the last year and there are now hundreds of them readily available to use after a minute or two of configuration.
Motivation, Benefits, and Business Models
It seems obvious that portable Web parts, which I'll call widgets from here on out since that seems to be the growing consensus on terminology, confer a lot of benefits to those that use them. Widgets let anyone put the high value services and content of the Web's leading companies right on their own site, for anyone to use. There are widgets readily available that offer customized local Google search, weather maps, instant messaging, social bookmarking, site meters, games, and even entire software applications. And most of them can be installed with a bit of GUI configuration and a cut and paste. There's little question that the Web is increasingly turning into a sort of online Home Depot with its shelves lined with thousands of useful, off-the-shelf parts of every description and utility.
So while it's clear that there's a lot of value to end-users to repurpose the valuable functionality and information from elsewhere on the Web for their own needs, what does this confer to the Web sites that offer them?
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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