Web 2.0 Services

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. <http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub/> Brown, Web 2.0 Services page 2 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. <http://diggdot.us/> 4 Cf., respectively, <http://digg.com/>, <http://slashdot.org/>, <http://del.icio.us/>. 5 Cf. <http://www.walkjogrun.net/>, <http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/>, <http://www.personaltelco.net/static/map/>. Brown, Web 2.0 Services page 3 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.

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