Web 2.0 - Conceptual Model (Part 2)

In my previous post, I had demonstrated the conceptual model of web 2.0 that shows all objects and their relations. It is high level visual representation of web 2.0 object graph. In continuing with the concept, I am trying to map these objects with web 2.0 principles and technologies in this post.


The key principles of web 2.0 are:

1. Web as a Platform - It is a large single market place with over a billion people using it. It is primary global store for the software and data. Over last few years more and more product and services are getting integrated and available on the web. The web grew at the same rate as the technology advances in network bandwidth over the period of time. The higher network has become faster and cheaper, has been widely adopted during this period. Now more and more software are available on the web as services and are getting integrated with main stream applications.

2. Services Agnostic of the Device - In web 2.0 era, the applications and content are designed to be delivered across devices so that it can be accessed from anywhere, anytime. More so now the content and services resides in the cloud. In web 2.0, device does not constraint the services but embraces it.

3. Data is the Competitive Advantage - Organizations are leveraging the data and content for creating new business models. Now not just the software but also data is great market asset. "Data is the the new intel inside". Companies like Google, Youtube, Linkedin leveraging the data to create new innovated services and business models on the web.

4. Harnessing Collective Intelligence - Next generation application are now more user centric rather process centric. End user is no longer just a consumer but also a partner, empowering them to improve the products and services. The focus has been shifting from command and control enterprise culture towards collaboration and teamwork. The end users create the network effect.

5. New Web Business Model - Web 2.0 advocates opening your platforms to others, integrating other applications to bring more value to en users and business.

Other than those mentioned above, there are additional principles which are more pertinent toward delivery and user experience. Though these existed in web 1.0 era but were not that important and were not major constraints to the apps. For instance..

1. Rich User Experience
2. Continuous and Incremental Releases

Now I will classify the web 2.0 technologies with respect to the conceptual model, where and how these technologies fit together.


Web 2.0 application can be classified into following:

1. Social - The social apps can further be classified into collaboration and social networking. Some of the collaboration applications are blogs, wikis, forums, chat, podcast etc. Some of the social networking applications are social apps, folksonomy, social bookmarking. Though I have seen lately these applications are merging into a single platform.

2. Syndication and Aggregation - Some of the apps in this category are RSS, REST, OpenSocial, mashups, web widegts, RIA, gadgets.

Please let me know your comments about the web 2.0 conceptual model and its mapping with principles and technologies.

Additional Links

1. Web 2.0 - Conceptual Model

Web 2.0 - Conceptual Model

There are as many definitions of web 2.0 as number of people. Everyone creates their own definitions based on their requirements, understanding and budget at hand. Initially Tim O'Reilly defined web 2.0 as applications that leverage network effects and proposed seven
principles. Those principles still remain the governing definition of web 2.0 even today. That said, how about defining web 2.0 in a conceptual model? A definition which everyone can understand, has one language and is visual.

There are some interesting concepts I came across to define web 3.0 at Sramana Mitra's Blog. It talks about web 3.0 in terms 4C's, P and VS. 4C are content, community, commerce and context. P is personalization and VS is vertical search. Very interesting explanation of the
concept.

I have tried to come with a conceptual model of web 2.0. This is still working document and I plan to extend it with some feedback from you all. The conceptual model consist of set of objects and their relation, governed by web 2.0 principles and enabled by web 2.0 applications.



Web 2.0 advocates "data is the Next Intel Inside" i.e. Content is processing power of the web. User pulls the information all the time, anytime and anywhere. User views the content in Context of his intent. User also personalizes the information based on his interest.

Content resides in the cloud and is agnostic of the Device. It can be created and viewed from any device. Content should be used as competitive advantage for the Commerce. For example, Google search engine uses indexed content as an advantage in monetizing through adsense and adwords. In 2.0 era, web is seen as a Platform that enables Applications, repository of data and enables integration with other systems.

Web 2.0 encourages team work, collective intelligence and building Communities. We have seen applications like Facebook, MySpaces etc. have so many communities, networks and groups. Building of communities can leverage data from user Profile, his Behavior, his personalized information and his information context. Communities enable team Collaboration and Communication , knowledge sharing and team workspaces.

I am working on this web 2.0 conceptual model and will map this model with the web 2.0 principles, and technologies and applications in next post.

Additional Links

• Web 2.0 - Conceptual Model (Part 2)
  

Enterprise Mashup Market expects to grow to $700 million by 2013

A new report released by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 Mashups technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years and expect to grow to $700 million by 2013. This means that there is plenty of money to be made selling mashup platforms, it will affect nearly every software vendor. Mashup platform will get lot of attention and vendors are gettingready to get their pie of share in growing mashup market. The mashup platforms will leverage new emerging mashup technologies and data provider APIs to provide next generation enterprise applications. Now it is time to vendors to quickly work on new strategies, new technologies and new partnership alliances to come on the top.

Report distinguished between enterprise mashups and those in the consumer space. Consumer mashups typically are built by a individuals or consumer space vendors. In the enterprise space, mashup be lot more challenging since it needs to pull data from diversified portfolio of applications. The challenge would also be able to provide this information in a meaningful and intuitive way. It will be difficult for the enterprises to build these mashups on their own without the help of mashup platforms and mashup experts. According to the researchers, vendors will provide tools for business users to build a mashup on their own with no programming experience.

In April 2008, IBM announced the beta version of IBM Mashup Center. The IBM Mashup Center consists of two tools — Infosphere MashupHub and Lotus Mashups. This announcement follows an earlier one made on 3 March 2008 about WebSphere sMash. The three offerings are related, but enterprises can purchase and use them separately.

Some of other mashup platforms are JackBe, Kapow Technologies, Microsoft, Serena Software, Strikeiron, and Xignite

Folksonomies - Collaborative Tagging

This posts explains the user-defined collaborative tagging and how it is applied to organize and share information. And it will also provide ideas around the information classification to achieve search and retrieval faster and more efficient and relevant.

Metadata by definition is "data about data", basically adding more intelligence to data and establishing better relation between pieces of information. Metadata is usually created either by professional taxonomy experts or content authors. First method is very expensive since it involves formal taxonomies and controlled vocabularies. Besides it's even impossible when you have large legacy data which is yet not tagged. Second method overloads the authors with additional tasks and requires an understanding of metadata tags. These approaches are still disconnected with the end users because it does not understand the intent and context of the end user. Though the methods help in searching the relevant information faster and easier through search and taxonomy navigations.

Third form of tagging is called user created collaborative tagging i.e. folksonomies. It is also call community classification of information another aspect of social networking. Google has used an approach of collaborative classification in page ranks using PageRank algorithm. The number of links pointing to a web page allows Google to optimize its search relevance and rank the page appropriately. It is another form of implicit user created collaborative classification of information. Amazon has used customer reviews effectively to add intelligence to catalog, another implicit form of classification.

Social Bookmarking employs explicit form of user created collaborative tagging. Sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon etc. provides ability to bookmark your urls or sites and create additional tags to the urls. These tags are created by end user in context with the intent and usefulness of the site. They also allow users to describe and organize content with any vocabulary they choose. It is completely disconnected with the owner and author of the information. In addition to automatically generated chronological ordering of bookmarks saved to the system, the tags are used to navigate the bookmarks within a user’s collection. Additionally, these tags are also used to collocate bookmarks across the entire system, so for example, looking at the page http://del.icio.us/tag/web2.0 will show all bookmarks that are tagged with “web2.0” by any user. Functionality of these social bookmarking sites varies from one another but the basic idea is the same, ability to tag the urls and be able to share across the system.

Although folksonomy is not a controlled vocabulary, and does have limitations, there have lot of advantages that bring lot of value in sharing, collaboration and social networking.

Finding the information faster - In order to find the a relevant content, one has to browse the websites or search through the web search engines. At times exploring the bookmark tags in the social bookmarking sites, one can find many recent resources from a wide variety of authors and sites that likely would never have been visited before. There is a fundamental difference in browsing the tags to find interesting content, as opposed to searching to find relevant documents in a query. The other users have found these content items or sites relevant and useful, so it is higher in relevance optimization.

User centric vocabulary - most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of end users. End user can tag the information based on intent and context of the information, not based on the intent of author. In fact it is not derived from taxonomy expert or intellectual property producers or information owner, but from the consumers of the information. In this way, it directly reflects their choices in terminology and language.


Limitation of folksonomies are mostly user centric and system confined, and by no means limits the use of the system.

Uncontrolled vocabulary - Ambiguity of the tags can emerge as users apply the same tag in different ways. There are no explicit systematic guidelines and no scope notes.

Structure of tags - structure is usually single word with no spaces, sometimes makes it difficult to merge various tags. For example web2.0, web2, web20 means the same tag but would show as separate taxonomy nodes.

Semantic tags - There is a limitation of synonym words in the system as tags are user generated. For example, web and www should be classified under same tag.


Social Bookmarking sites have extended functionalities of folksonomy with social aspects like commenting, rating, community building etc. In Digg, one can start a feedback loop on tagged content and also see who all have tagged this content. In addition, communities can be build using data collected on the social bookmarking sites.

The folksonomy can be used in enterprise 2.0 to supplement existing taxonomies and provide additional access to materials by encouraging and leveraging explicit user generated tags. If enterprises begin to incorporate user-centric information management systems, the folksonomies developed by the users have great value in information sharing and retrieval systems.

What Is Enterprise Web 2.0 Software?

Interestingly someone asked this question on linkedin. This question has been asked to me by many people who have limited understanding of web 2.0 and trying to adopt web 2.0 in the enterprise environment. Some of them even ask how many softwares they need to buy or build to enable enterprise web 2.0. Then I have to explain them the basics of web 2.0 and what is required to adopt web 2.0 within the enterprise.

Before we get into enterprise web 2.0 software, we need to understand what is web 2.0. It is not just a technology, it's a trend. Web 2.0 is built on set of principles that differentiates it from legacy paradigms. The principles including using web as platform, using company data as business advantage, having apps which are device agnostic, apps with rich user experience, apps harnessing collective intelligence, and apps that are lightweight ever evolving enabling new business models. They must leverage network effect. Web 2.0 applications need to provide business value, either in additional revenue or reducing costs. If one looks at these principles, any application which is build on one of these can be classified as "Enterprise Web 2.0 Software".

For example, one of the principles is harnessing collective intelligence, it is basically team collaboration, knowledge sharing and team workspaces. Wikis are one of the most widely adopted web 2.0 collaboration technology. Its been used for knowledge sharing, project management, task management and online collaboration with team members. Wikis can be classified as "Enterprise Web 2.0 Software". Wikis such as eTouch SamePage, Confluence, MediaWiki, ClearSpace have got lot of traction from the enterprises. Another example, in search domain there are products like Baynote which enables relevance optimization on the legacy search engines. They leverage end users behavior and their clicks, to generate better relevance on search engine results. They are also classified as "Enterprise Web 2.0 Softwares".

There is no single product that claims to solve all business problems and at the same time enable web 2.0. It is how you implement and deploy these applications and bring value to your business. It all depends on your problem and the business.

Implementing Web 2.0: Practical Approach

Knowledge of web 2.0 is key for decision making and strategy building for embracing, provisioning and adopting web 2.0 within the enterprise. But knowing does not always translate into doing it. Web 2.0 is not just about technology, it is about people, processes, cultured and, change and adoption. It is about business strategy, value proposition, and competitive advantage. It is very critical for organizations to implement right and effective implementation methodology to deploy web 2.0 applications in the portfolio, measure return on investment (ROI), and build and sustain competitive advantage.

People drive the vision, commitment, change, and culture. The organizations can only create environments to realize these visions. Vision is not just aligning the thoughts with business drivers, but also introducing new ideas and new initiatives. Not all initiatives see the light, success and adoption, commitment is the black bone of all implementations. Web 2.0 is also intertwined with the change in processes and culture. It is destructive model requires realigning to newer processes, technologies and business strategies. In order to be accomplish your vision, you need a well-thought proven methodology to succeed.

Many organization have adopted web 2.0 principles not as a business strategy but more as an experiments to get on the web 2.0 technology map. These companies are plying low risks strategies and trying to gauge its adoption with respect to business model and corporate culture. Others are still in wait and watch mode, closely monitoring the web 2.0 adoption and success within the enterprise, waiting to see if the Web 2.0 bubble is bursting. If the bubble does not burst as it looks like, these organization will lag behind others who adopted it whether successfully or not.

The web 2.0 implementation methodology framework consist of six stages. It is education, strategy, planning, implementation, adoption and measure & improve. Though it is typical of any methodology to have these stages, but it is important to understand each of the stages in web 2.0 implementation.



The key activities in each of these stages are listed below:

Education

•

• Understand Web 2.0 principles
• Enterprise 2.0 Trends
• Applying Web 2.0 to your Business

Strategy

•

• Formulate Web 2.0 Vision
• Assess Competitive Advantage
• Strategise Business Transformation

Planning

• Implementation Roadmap
• Technology Selection
• Project Methodology

Implementation

•

• Software Design
• Application Development
• Deployment & Support

Adoption

•

• Community Engagement & Mgmt
• Leading Organization Change Mgmt
• Executive Management Commitment

Measure & Improve

•

• Measure Web 2.0 Maturity
• Gap Analysis & ROI
• Review & Plan

Each of the activities can further be divided into tasks with guidelines and finite deliverable.

Please feel free to comment on this posts.

Expect $4.6 Billion In Spending By 2013 As Large Companies Embrace Web 2.0

A new report released today by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. According to the report, enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. Enterprise web 2.0 tools will be adopted, provisioned and embraced by the enterprises over the next five years overcoming all the challenges of technology, monetary benefits, business market and corporate cultures.

Web 2.0 market place is divided into consumer and enterprise services. Consumer services includes Myspace, FaceBook, twitter etc., targeted towards consumers, monetized through ads and evaluated based on traffic. The consumer services are part of enterprise services.

Enterprise services have two aspects - Internal and External. Internal aspect is aimed at the employees, internal communication, knowledge sharing and product innovation. External aspect is geared towards customers and partners, marketing and sales, product development, customer services and retention, and new opportunities.

This reports covers some of the most compelling questions. What Is Enterprise Web 2.0 Software? Can Software Firms Make Money Selling Enterprise Web 2.0 Tools? And talks about external and internal facing markets and how it will be driven.

Overall the reports align with the trends in the market place. Enterprises are keen in adopting web 2.0 principles in both external and internal aspects. Knowledge Management is being replaced with web 2.0 collaboration and social networking applications. The executives understand the need, but knowledge of web 2.0 and how to implement is still missing. They are opting for less risky web 2.0 pilot applications instead of realigning their business strategy with web 2.0. But I am sure success of pilot applications will lead to bigger initiatives. It is just a matter of time and confidence.

There is lot of scope of ideas, technology and services for all product companies, service providers and enterprise IT teams in coming years. The web 2.0 products who have not yet seen the light would reap benefits from the enterprise adoption. Service vendors who have knowledge of web 2.0 and their challenges can take advantage of web 2.0 deployments and create a niche market for themselves. The enterprise IT team will either have to consolidate their ideas and resources or outsource the new initiatives in web 2.0. But in the end, it will be win-win situation for all players in the web 2.0 space.

Web 2.0 - Challenges in Enterprise Deployment

Web 2.0 offers business opportunities, but brings challenges in how corporations embrace community, approach the sharing and protection of proprietary information, and identify and exploit its value. The challenges and issues that web 2.0 presents to enterprises can not ignored before deciding on adopting it. Web 2.0 still inherits all the challenges of traditional web application development and delivery. That includes project management challenges i.e. requirement, budget, schedule, resources, qa etc. and also technology limitations like scalability, interoperability, security, development methodologies etc. But if the challenges would have been same as that of any web application development, why web 2.0 applications have not yet been widely deployed in the enterprises.

After working with some of the large enterprises in last few months on web 2.0 initiatives, I have some ideas on challenges that have been faced by these companies. These challenges are very specific to web 2.0 and its principles, and can not be applied to traditional web development.

The biggest challenge of web 2.0 application delivery is adoption. Adoption by the corporate, technology and people.

Every corporate has it own culture, way to doing things and getting the things done. The culture is deep routed and depends upon the how old the company is. The old corporate houses have more issues with the culture and the changes in comparison with new startups. The new initiatives face cultural resistance from some class of users, for example, clinging on e-mail and other traditional tools for collaboration rather than switch to new Web 2.0tools. The biggest challenge is overcome this cultural resistance. Some employees feel insecure whenever there is change, be it fear of loosing their job or working additional hours on new technology, while some do not want change since they fear it may be effect their efficiency or they are contented with their way of working. Now question is how to overcome this resistance. Web 2.0 evangelist and proponents have suggested both top-down and bottom-up approaches for corporate adoption.

Technology selection plays an important role in any application deployment. Which technology should I use? What is life span of this technology? Am I locking myself into a vendor proprietary technology? One needs to answer these questions before selecting any technology. Now in last few years there are two distinct perspectives that have emerged and are conflicting. One perspective is selecting technology from a vendor who has not only pioneered but also has sustained business, for example, say Microsoft or Oracle. Other perspective is using open source technologies and building stack of products on top of that. Both have pros and cons, depends on where and how it is being used. Thanks to web 2.0, now more and more products remain in perpetual beta. Would you choose a tool or technology for an enterprise that is in perpetual beta? Would I be able to convince my management to invest in technology that is not yet officially released? Companies are confused in selection of technologies, option to choose from vendor proprietary or open source applications and frameworks.

The second biggest challenge is adoption by the employees of company. These days employees spend more time with web 2.0 applications, for example, FaceBook, Linkedin, MySpace outside the office environment than they do within the office. They are smart and intelligent people. They are aware of social networking application features and are also aware of engaging user experience that consumer web 2.0 applications provide. Their expectations have gone up and now they want similar applications to be deployed in their office environment. They will not accept anything that is not close to the application they use.

Web 2.0 advocates moving away from command and control towards collaboration and teamwork, from push to pull model, from process-centric to people-centric business model. The organizations that believe in command and control culture would require self assessment and strategic change toward collaboration and teamwork culture. It requires executive sponsorship and corporate cultural change.

The popularity and adoption of web 2.0 and agile development methodology happened around about the same time. There is a reason for it. In the Web 2.0 era, products and services are really never finished and must continuously improve to compete. They remain in perpetual beta. This is against the definition of the project, it has a starting date and fixed end date. Web 2.0 applications are continuously evolved and improved and end user are part of large testing team. This requires change in development methodology of web 2.0 applications. Some call it web development 2.0 but it is nothing but agile or scrum methodology. The scrum methodology has become very popular in last few years and has seen widespread adoption in the enterprises.

Security is also a major challenge in web 2.0. The issues around privacy information, corporate asset protection, spam protection and digital rights management are very critical and need to be addressed. This requires additional budget and policy formulation, which are additional overheads for the company.

The question that is asked so often is, what will happen to the existing applications and how those can be leverage in web 2.0. It is not possible to replace all the existing applications with web 2.0 and it does not make any sense. Not all applications needs to be upgraded to web 2.0 since they do not add value of the network effort. But there is possibility where the data from these applications may be required in new web 2.0 apps. The challenge is how to integrate these applications. The mashups and API integration are two ways in integrating existing applications besides conventional url integrations.

I am sure there are other challenges in web 2.0 deployment within the enterprise. These are some which I heard from clients and web 2.0 pundits. Please let me know if you know of others.