Red Door Interactive's technology director gives you a run down of the top Web 2.0 -- or, X Channel -- applications and how advertisers can leverage them.
Today I'm going to nerd out on you. But first, a story.
In 1998, I was working at a dotcom incubator in Los Angeles as a software engineer taking business plans by the dozens and helping to translate them into code. Not a single company of the 30-plus that I helped survived past June of 2001.
The work experience was typical dotcom. It was my first job out of college. We grew fast and folded faster. There were long hours, new faces every day and many a bean and cheese burrito for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But perhaps more than anything, those few years building other dotcoms taught me two things:
- Money does not solve all problems.
- You cannot rely on advertising revenue alone to float your business model. You have to offer value and service.
By now you've heard of "the long tail." You may also be hearing people talk about something called "Web 2.0." And by now, your measure for irrational exuberance is dulled from five years of rational value you've put into internet presence management. (That makes two of us.) And what was then called the X Internet is today synonymous with the central tenets of Web 2.0.
Web 2.0
The X Internet stands for the executable or extendable internet. It encompasses internet-based applications (such as email and IM), web services and browser plug-ins. In short, the X Internet puts the functional parts of communicating closer to the people (or systems) that use them. The same is true for Web 2.0. Web 2.0, according to Wikipedia is defined as follows:
Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.
MS Live
This month Microsoft announced Windows Live, which is its attempt to get applications into the browser as apposed to the desktop. This was unexpected, given Microsoft's precedence for defending their OS and Office Applications so heavily. Some have speculated that they are learning from their anti-trust loses and the growing movement from government technologists worldwide to support open source alternatives. By moving email, chat, news readers, word processing, database management, contacts and calendars online, they hope to make their network do the work that your desktop used to.
Google Mail, Maps, Desktop, Talk and Google Base
Microsoft is responding also to pressure from Google which has emerged as a Web 2.0 innovator, so apt at creating and extending value to the nodes, that I must admit a certain amount of Google fatigue myself. The search giant is growing so quickly, I find it takes months to wrap my head around each new development. Keeping up with their blog is exhausting. Of their launches this year, Google Desktop, Google Talk and Google Base are the three biggest advances in putting functionality in the hands of users and systems, while Google Mail and Google Maps are making people's online lives a bit more enjoyable. Google is the master at creating free services that allow users to enhance them for free -- which is true of all five aforementioned services. That is, not only are they creating applications that are free to use, but also free to extend and make more useful.
Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey is popular among web developers and people who spend anywhere between 14 and 24 hours a day online. Greasemonkey is an extension for the Firefox browser that lets users apply Greasemonkey changes to pages they visit. For example, Greasemonkey lets me preview individual messages in my Yahoo! mail inbox without having to click on the messages themselves. I simply visit my in-box and the preview widget displays the first several lines of each message for me. That's just one example. There are thousands of Greasemonkey developers out there making our online experience better one page at a time.
Apple Widgets and Yahoo! Konfabulator
When Apple debuted its latest operation system, Tiger, it featured two key innovations. One was an advanced system search called Spotlight; the second was its Dashboard Widgets. Widgets are very small, highly specialized dashboard applications that run very quietly on your desktop. Graphically, they are pleasing. Like the Google desktop you can use widgets to keep up-to-date on news, stocks, weather, surf conditions, traffic and so on. Like Greasemonkey scripts, Widgets are designed and written by people like you and me. There are literally thousands of them to choose from, each highly pertinent to the people who designed and use them. Konfabulator is a platform-independent Widget aggregator. So if you like the idea of using widgets but are on a PC, you can download Konfabulator and share in the love. Widgets and Konfabulator scripts are each equally easy to design, deploy and use.
Open APIs
Some say the truest meaning of the X Internet is in its extensibility. Extensible as in XML, or eXtensbile Markup Language. XML is the method of choice for sharing data between two systems. For developers XML is easy to create, share and consume. As such, XML is the method of choice for websites that wish to make their data available to the Web. XML is a key value-add for dot-coms from Blogger.com to Flickr.com to Salesforce.com. These companies have realized that being an ASP (Application Service Provider) can never hope to fulfill 100 percent of their customers' needs. So why not let the customers themselves extend the data and customize it? If you have an open Application Programming Interface (API) via XML, then you can let your customers add value to the core set of data and the functions your application provides.
What does this mean for Advertisers and Media outlets?
The X Internet is a DIY thang. From API's to Widgets, users are creating value from the bottom up. What marketers need to know is that they are not only marketing to end-users but to value-added end-users (VAEU's - yes, I just made that up). As marketers, you're used to the concept of evangelism amongst your customers. Well think of these users as evangelists who want to tap into your IT power. Let them get on the grid, and who knows what value they can add to your company. These users are not driven by profit motive primarily. You'll need to offer them services at no cost (in the case of Greasemonkey, you will have no control at all). The widgets they make from your API will most likely drive more business your way.
In addition to empowering VAEU's you're going to want to start thinking about how you can get involved with some of the services like MS Live and all of the Google products. Making sure your products are listed on Froogle is no longer enough. But making sure they show up in Google Mail Adwords, having a Google Talk account for customer service, and creating your own Konfabulator widgets for people to download are just as important. Think of nerds like me as an additional channel to pursue. What we can do is help you tighten that organic bond you are attempting to create with your customers and prospects.
Kelly Abbott is Director of Information Strategy at Red Door Interactive, helping organizations in diverse industries to implement Internet technology systems tying together disparate networks. He is the co-founder of the San Diego Telecom Council's e-Business and Wi-Fi Special Interest Groups. He divides his volunteer efforts between Mama's Kitchen - which feeds people living with AIDS - and Airshare.org - an education and community building site for Wireless LANs. He can be reached at kabbott@reddoor.biz