Web 2.0 services: these objects are closer than they appear EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee Malcolm Brown, Dartmouth College [email protected] September, 2006
What is it?
Web 2.0 services are a very broad range of network-based, cross platform services. This is an area that is expanding rapidly, so rapidly in fact that columnists and bloggers are drawing parallels to the dot com boom. The diversity of these services and their relentless pace of evolution make it challenging to define this evolving technology succinctly. A useful O’Reilly article1 suggests that the “Web 2.0” is less of a standard and more of a “gravitational core,” drawing applications into a common technology and functionality space rather than riveting them in place by means of a firm engineering standard.
Much has already been written about these services, so there is no need to recapitulate that here. The O’Reilly article provides an excellent overview. But what may not be apparent unless you are following this technology closely is that it is evolving, expanding, and diversifying at an astonishing rate, and it is coming—has come—to a campus near you.
While it might be difficult to define web services in a sentence or two, we can try to get a handle on it by identifying the technology’s key characteristics.
They are diverse. Emily Chang’s eHub site2 provides an excellent overview of Web services. At last count, she documents 1,066 web-based resources using 64 categories, including business, Internet phone and TV, audio and music, collaboration and management, mashups, social web, travel, e-learning, e-mailing (and many more).
They are collaborative. The collaborative, “folksonomic” nature of many of these services is well established. Not just blogs and wikis, but on-line “malls” and collections such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, del.icio.us and all the others take collaboration and sharing as a central theme. Even the replacements for Office are quick to tout their support of collaborative work, holding that it is easier to collaborate on-line than it is shuttling Word and Excel documents back and forth as enclosures.
1 Tim O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0, Design Patterns and Business Model for the Next Generation of Software,” Cf. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web- 20.html. 2 Cf.
They use thin, cross-platform client technology. In many cases all you need to access these services is a web browser. Even those services that employ client-side technology such as Ajax are light weight relative to Microsoft Office and email applications.
They are thinking big. In addition to all the services that the Web 2.0 has invented, it is now aspiring to provide office and computer desktop functionality as well. Ajax, again, is a good case in point. The name is constructed from two of its components, asynchronous Javascript and XML. It is an attempt to smooth out the usual start/stop/start/stop web experience, making it “feel” more like a traditional computer to the user. It does so by introducing a layer of programming (usually Javascript) on the client desktop. These scripts perform asynchronous communications with servers as well as enable user interactions. The result is a browser-based experience that is more like a desktop application such as Word. Google Maps is a good example: instead of waiting for maps to load from the server when you scroll, the scrolling is most often continuous and fluid, more like a desktop application. Ajax and technologies like it make it possible for Web 2.0 services to aspire to offer operational continuity much like an operating system. And, indeed, some have already been talking about the “WebOS.”
They are free. Hard to beat the price, especially when a gigabyte or more of storage is part of the package.
They are constantly upgraded. Standard applications and operating systems have significant intervals between versions (Windows Vista perhaps being the most notorious and ponderous). Often the new version offers substantial differences in the interface, which sometimes takes some getting used to. Web services are constantly being upgraded in smaller increments, and most often these changes are largely invisible in the interface. Web services sites are constantly in beta, using traditional terminology, or constantly in gamma, using a Web 2.0 term (meaning “substantially complete, but still under test [Wikipedia]).
They are layered and can be customized by the user. A primary characteristic of the Web 2.0 is the repurposing of its content and services to create hybrid, or new, services. Far from resisting such repurposing, the “cool” Web 2.0 applications and services invite it. There are two principal flavors of this repurposing: one is the selective recombination of information and resources collected from other web services to create a new one. An example is diggdot3, which funnels material from digg, Slashdot, and del.icio.us4 into a single web site. The other is the mashup, which the Wikipedia defines as “a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.” As an example, many mashups involve the use of a maps database (such as Google Maps or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth) to enable the view to find things such as running routes, fast food, and WiFit hotspots.5
3 Cf.
How is it evolving?
This technology is expanding rapidly into areas that have, for years, been dominated by standards, many of these from Microsoft. Web 2.0 services are now in a position to be considered a viable alternative to the old standbys. Let’s look more closely at a few of these developments.
WebOS and the web desktop. Already there is much talk about the WebOS, a web- based operating system. Indeed, there is more than just talk: a good number of start- ups are developing something they call a web operating system. Examples of these include YouOS, EyeOS, Orca, Goowy, Fold, and XIN. These sites describe their application also as a portal or start page. They are sometimes likened to an operating system because of the range of services they aspire to provide. This from EyeOS’s main page: “Make your life easier with the virtual word processor, calendar, file manager, messenger, browser and other applications.” Goowy proffers things like “Manage your email, contacts and calendar (2GB FREE)” and “Upload, manage and share your files online (1GB FREE).”
While is clearly premature to consider these sites to be operating systems on the level of Windows XP or Mac OS X, they nonetheless are beginning to feel like the operating system’s desktop. The key is that they are offering an ever-larger percentage of the services offered by the traditional OS. It may be more accurate (or at least more traditional) to think of these services as desktops rather than operating systems. That call depends on which perspective you are viewing from. These services want to offer many of the desktop services that operating systems such as Mac OS X and Windows offer—and for most users, the desktop is the most visible and tangible aspect of the operating system.
Unlike traditional OS desktops, these systems can be used to invent new, mini- applications. Fold proclaims that, using its “containers,” users can embed “virtually any website within Fold.” As the point of organization, storage, and a collection of office and collaboration functions, these start pages begin to take on the appearance of an operating system. And how long until our clients, especially our students, begin to approach our help desks seeking assistance with a WebOS?
Replacement for Microsoft Office? Imagine that somebody came to you or one of your constituents and said: “I can give you at no cost an online word processor that enables you to access your documents from any web-equipped device; that imports Office documents; that can share documents on-line and so avoids the hassle of sending attachments; posts automatically to major blog engines; generates PDF, .doc, and .html files; and provides multilingual support.” We or our constituents might give that a very close look. This feature set is not at all uncommon for the web services offering partial or full Office replacement. The above list of features is taken from the Zoho Writer site. Others (such as Writely) offer collaboration functions and revision history tracking. All in all, it is a compelling list of features, and for those weary of continually paying for Microsoft applications, it is priced attractively. Brown, Web 2.0 Services page 4
A Writely document, with the Collaborate menu pulled down
Some sites are offering alternatives to only one of the three main office applications. Examples are the above mentioned Writely and Zoho for word processing, iRows for spreadsheet, and Thumbstacks for presentation. But now ventures such as ThinkFree are offering all three applications, hence a full-fledged alternative to the main office applications and their vendor.
The Ajax desktop. These applications aspire to be our users’ on-line desktop, very much in the way Windows and the Mac offer desktop. Once you have a Netvibes or Pageflakes account, you begin to assemble your own personal arrangement of functional, mini-windows from a palette that might proffer dozens of possibilities. Generally you can select them, arrange them, re-size them, custom configure them, and in some cases arrange them across tabbed pages. A desktop is a point of convergence for on-line feeds, access to web applications via Javascript, as well as HTML-based content.
If you detect a similarity between the functions of the Ajax desktop, a portal, and things collected under the label WebOS, then you are paying attention. They are powered by a coordination of technologies. If you are a Mac user, imagine leaving the normal Mac desktop and steering your computational life entirely by widgets. The Ajax desktop widgets (or “flakes” or “containers” as they are sometimes called) aren’t Brown, Web 2.0 Services page 5
just little bits of information. These applications aggregate data as well as offer windows to full-fledged web applications, such as word processing and spreadsheets.
An iRows spreadsheet.
Aren’t these just toys?
These are more than just mere toys if our future will be at all like our recent past. Consider: at their inception, applications such as Skype and the Wikipedia were novelties. Who would have possibly considered using Wikipedia when one had the Brown, Web 2.0 Services page 6
Encyclopedia Britannica available on-line? And would our users really use Skype instead of the campus phone system? The answer is they would and do. 6
These web services tools are important as they are driving innovation at all levels: enterprise, academic research, teaching and learning, as well as campus life. The examples of Skype (VOIP) and the Wikipedia are only the most well-known examples of this phenomenon. Other examples include Basecamp, SurveyMonkey, and the heavy use of outside blog and wiki engines.
It is a mistake to dismiss this nascent technology as a mere sideshow. All successful technology begins in an early, semi-functional state. These Web 2.0 applications are just starting up and exhibit many of the limitations of applications coming up to speed. Nevertheless it remains rather easy to scoff at the notion of entrusting our institutional documents and spreadsheets to a vendor we don’t really know and whose longevity is far from established. After all, it seems unlikely that our constituents would abandon PowerPoint for Thumbstacks, or Excel for iRows? And would they really choose to use an Ajax-based desktop like Pageflakes or Netvibes over our campus portal?
The answer is that, over time, they very well might. We need only recall the adoption of Google, Wikipedia, and Skype to realize that these web services phenomena can and will be adopted if they provide sufficient value. One IBM executive pointed out that “instant messaging and other lightweight collaboration tools seem to come into the enterprise through individual use, and can rapidly spread virally, without any official sanctioning.”7 This means that functions such as chat, if they come in through the back door, can eventually enter the mainstream. If central IT clings too tightly to its traditional standards of Windows and Office, it could find itself bypassed and, in part, irrelevant.
We have seen a startup like Writely (online and collaborative word processing) move decidedly towards the mainstream via its acquisition by Google, and the stampede by major Internet service vendors to have their own version of MySpace. Imagine that ThinkFree does succeed in their twin goals of offering most of Office’s functionality while achieving document compatibility. We can imagine, further, that the OpenDocument Foundation’s open XML standard gains adoption and its ODf Plugin is successful.8 These are by no means far-fetched assumptions and if they “come true” then a service such as ThinkFree could see a great deal of adoption.
Indeed, if web services are successful in making the OpenDocument Foundation specification a true interchange standard, it would mean some degree of liberation from Microsoft Office. Such a development would, of course, be of major importance
6 At a general session of the most recent ELI conference, the audience was asked to indicate, by show of hands, who used Skype and the Wikipedia routinely. At least two-thirds of the attendees raised their hands. 7 Adam Gartenberg of IBM, in a conversation with Stowe Boyd. < http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2006/05/adam_gartenberg.html>. See also Richard MacManus, “Web-based collaborations apps invade the enterprise,” cf. < http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=181> 8 The OpenDocument Foundation:
to the way that higher education does its work. We in IT might also be asked by our fiscal officers why we need to continue to shell out big bucks to sustain our Microsoft campus agreement when Office alternatives are available on the Internet.
A Zoho Show presentation, with the notes field
Another area of potential major impact could be the Ajax-based desktop. There are a number of these in the web services space, such as Netvibes, Live.com, Pageflakes, and of course the Google desktop. Might these make the institutional portal page irrelevant? There is no simple answer, but certainly they might. It is safe to say that they will be definite competitor, especially for the new wave of NetGen students who might have used such desktops for years as their own personal portal to the Internet. Clearly we ignore these desktops at our risk. Much of this will depend on the value our clients perceive in these portals: how flexible/re-configurable they are, how well they tie into relevant network-based services, and their overall ease of use. The Ajax- based module is an opportunity for us: why not create a Netvibes or Pageflakes module that ties directly to the course management system or the library catalog?
The IT press is also actively tracking much of the activity in this space. Indeed, the publication InfoWorld, in its list of “15 Tech Startups to Watch,” lists several companies in the web services area, including Zimbra (email and collaboration) and Brown, Web 2.0 Services page 8
Jotspot (wikis and mashups).9 If they are taking these applications seriously, then we in higher education best take them seriously as well.
Conclusion
It is still too early to predict just how far all this will go. There are aspects that are reminiscent of the dot com boom and we all recall, all too well, the dot com shakeout of 1999 and 2000. Yet the shakeout was certainly not a failure of the Internet; instead it was a consolidation, leaving as a legacy the current expectation that companies do business on line as well as in person. And some concerns, such as Amazon, managed to navigate the shakeout to become fixtures of the networking landscape.
It will important, over the coming months, to keep a close eye on developments in this space, but also to stay in close touch with our constituents. These services are evolving at a rapid pace. They are attuned to the spirit of the Web 2.0 in that many of them feature traditional office and desktop functions while adding collaborative features that the Internet and the Web naturally make possible.
We might scoff at the notion of putting documents that count into the free 1 and 2 gigabyte “lockers” that many of these vendors are offering. There are legitimate questions concerning reliability, longevity, and security. However, again, if we scoff for very long we just might be left behind. The Web 2.0 is all about a collaborative online experience, as opposed to one that is based on a thick client PC. More of our students are tumbling out of high school and onto our campus with an on-line and social frame of mind, developed through the use of web applications such as Facebook and MySpace. If the disparity between what they are looking for and what our portals offer is too great, they may well choose to stay with their on-line options.
In the long term there may be opportunities for us. If the functionality of these web services are what our users need and are looking for, then we might consider hosting them on campus. This would address the concerns about the storage of documents on a third-party server whose security we cannot vouch for. Just as many of us are running Google search appliances on our campus, perhaps an option is to run a web- based Office suite using servers we operate.
One ZDNet columnist summed up the value proposition for the Ajax desktop as follows: one stop; accessible anywhere (perhaps even by hand-helds); easy integration of data sources; engaging, fun, and fast; open platforms allowing a fast rate of development; access to “real software” such as word processing; and a highly personalized environment.10 This could be convincing for many of our users.
9 InfoWorld, May 15, 2006, Issue 20. Cf. http://www.zimbra.com/ and
By way of conclusion here is a final illustration. A recent column11 reviewed the staggering success of MySpace. At the time the article was written, MySpace was second only to Yahoo in page views and in March 2006 it had almost five percent of all web site visits, putting it ahead of Google. A more recent posting on eWeek12 documents that MySpace has since become the most-visited single web site, moving past both Yahoo's email gateway and Google.
MySpace has some 73 million subscribers worldwide. All this despite the fact that the technology and design of MySpace has been, relatively speaking, rather behind the times. What brought in—and continues to bring in at the rate of 250,000 new subscribers a day—is the functionality of the site. While perhaps not the “best in show” with respect to technology, its functionality has been right on target. This suggests that this is what our users are looking for: something that works for them. The Web 2.0 offers a lot that is often lacking in our traditional offerings: a tailored network experience, a social venue, and the opportunity—through blogs, tagging, and voting— to shape their environment. These are key factors and we need to think about and if need be create opportunities to bring this to our users. Rather than dismissing these resources, perhaps our task is to help guide our users to make the best choices. If we don’t, there’s a good chance that Google, Netvibes, or ThinkFree will.
11 J. C. Perez, “Analysis: MySpace becomes phenomenon, faces challenges”; cf.