Participation Literacy

O’Reilly’s description of the content (the last figure in Starting a Position) captures some qualities in Web 2.0. His analysis follows loose thoughts I had before hearing about the concept. My own entrance to the Web 2.0 concept is via concepts such as collaborative filtering, social navigation and folksonomy. I recognized that many of the new applications and services I liked had several things in common, such as tagging abilities, design contents in the form of tag clouds, RSS, and they seemed to work together quite well. The concept works since it functions as a magnet for creativity when it comes to Web applications and services. There is by no means consensus about the meaning of Web 2.0, yet most people involved tend to point to the same concepts, phenomena and services when they use the expression Web 2.0.

One of the first concepts to be connected to Web 2.0 was The Web as a Platform. According to Paul Graham, Web 2.0 simply denoted to “The Web as a Platform” in the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004. With the second conference the term changed meaning:

The story about “Web 2.0″ meaning the web as a platform didn’t live much past the first conference. By the second conference, what “Web 2.0″ seemed to mean was something about democracy. At least, it did when people wrote about it online. The conference itself didn’t seem very grassroots. It cost $2800, so the only people who could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies.(Graham, 2005)

The Web as Platform is the core in Web 2.0. Figure 3 (the last figure in Starting a Position) describes it as strategic positioning. The Web is the environment for Web 2.0 applications. It was one of the large Web 1.0 companies framing the phrase “The Web as Platform”, namely Netscape (O’Reilly, 2005). In their sense the phrase meant taking control over the browser in the same manner as Microsoft had control over the PC. I can see their vision of the pc application “the Web browser” as a pilot navigating over the world discovering exiting places to steer their aircraft to. Perhaps they did not see their Web platform as a means to discover places on the Internet, but more as an information and advertising channel. This was the time when certain companies, such as Netscape, tried to market the push technology, as they called it. The point being that the desktop was to be replaced by the webtop, where information was pushed from providers who used Netscape’s servers. I would rather call this “the Web browser” as a platform, and not “the Web as a Platform”.

As a contrast to Netscape, Google landed directly in a Web 2.0 Webscape. They started as a native Web application, delivered as a service, with paying customers, directly and indirectly. Google is a striking example of the “perpetual beta”, with no scheduled software releases, just constant improvement (some might argue). Google is everything else but encapsulation and would not be able to function at all in environments with growing encapsulating strategies. The first line in Google’s “Company Overview” says much about their expertise and strivings within the field of database management: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. This is similar to Netscape’s goal with the “Web as Platform”, and Microsoft’s unspoken goal of making every computer-thing on earth dependent on Microsoft software. There is a thin thought difference. As I see it, Google strive to be the best actor on the market, and thereby gain control; Netscape/Microsoft strived/strives to gain control by being the only actor on the market. This difference is one of the important markers in differentiating between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

In a few years “Web as Platform” will describe a world where most or all local applications move out to the Web, talking to each other and creating cooperation phenomena impossible on the PC-platform. Jason Kottke had a quite humble vision in that direction in the beginning of the Web 2.0 mindset:

To put this another way, a distributed data storage system would take the place of a local storage system. And not just data storage, but data processing/filtering/formatting. Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad to write a weblog entry; Flickr to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your .Mac account); use GMail for email; use TypeKey or Flickr’s authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai; you let Feedburner “listen” for new content from all those sources, transform/aggregate/filter it all, and publish it to your Web space; and you manage all this on the Web at each individual Web site or with a Watson-ish desktop client.(Kottke, 2004).

In a lecture I gave recently, at the Media Technology Programme at BTH, I asked the students if they would like to have all their applications on the Web instead on their PC or Laptop. One of the students was absolutely against it, arguing that he would feel insecure about not having control over his information. Some students were worried about security matters if someone for example would be able to read your office documents. Most students seemed to like the idea, although I am not sure if they really cared. Since I got my first PC in the middle of the eighties, I have had wishes, demands and visions about what I and my computer should be able to accomplish. These wishes, demands and visions have been quite far away from what the computer actually have been able to do, at a certain time. For many years now, since the Web became a parallel world for many of us, I have envisioned the Web as a Platform as Kottke describes above, with the difference that my vision includes all applications I use today as office applications, image editing, music editing and so on. That vision is probably some years away, but I will not be sorry when my computer has transformed into a Web portal.

In each of its past confrontations with rivals, Microsoft has successfully played the platform card, trumping even the most dominant applications. Windows allowed Microsoft to displace Lotus 1-2-3 with Excel, WordPerfect with Word, and Netscape Navigator with Internet Explorer.

This time, though, the clash isn’t between a platform and an application, but between two platforms, each with a radically different business model: On the one side, a single software provider, whose massive installed base and tightly integrated operating system and APIs give control over the programming paradigm; on the other, a system without an owner, tied together by a set of protocols, open standards and agreements for cooperation. (O’Reilly, 2005)

There are of course merits with the tight API (Application Programming Interface) control in Microsoft’s software family, such as speed, but these merits might be obsolete if software development on the Web platform will take over the PC platform. When software development becomes as decentralised as the anti-monopoly O’Reilly describes, then the APIs of the operating system become obsolete. A full scale Web as Platform would mean that I could use every Internet connected computer in the world to reach my digital “things”. But this is not only about location. The scenario lets me choose freely among actors such as Microsoft, Mac, Linux, Palm. This is about power to the user, and democracy. The only application the operating system would have to look after would be the Web browser, which could lead to a merge between the operating system and the Web browser. In the best of worlds this could mean lots of hardware and software (OS + Web Browser) to choose from. The scenario suggests that all hardware could have totally different OS software, as long as it follows the standards for Web communication.