Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2006
More than just the latest technology catch phrase, "Web 2.0" describes a robust and growing set of web applications and sites that leverage the participation of many. But no matter how you label it, there is an unambiguous difference between first-generation Internet applications and those emerging today. Drilling down to the differences between Netscape and Google or DoubleClick and Yahoo! Marketing Search (formerly Overture), we see the pervasive power of collective intelligence, and the multitude of smaller sites that make up the real muscle of the Internet. On top of that, attention to what users really want versus what "we" (vendors) want to show them takes center stage in Web 2.0 applications with their minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly content and advertising.
What is most interesting, though, is not the use of Web 2.0-based applications by major brand names, but the rumble created by as-yet-unknown companies that are actively leveraging the technology. Already, a handful of companies are building solutions that can help peers deliver solutions that they could not bring to market alone.
For instance, CITTIO (www.cittio.com) has launched WatchTower, which monitors thousands of servers, operating systems, network technologies, and applications in a purely web-based environment. CITTIO has embraced "collective intelligence" principles and exponentially increased the value of its solution by contextually importing rich information from O'Reilly's Safari Books Online (safari.oreilly.com) database of IT intelligence. Together, CITTIO and Safari are putting the concept of "system help" on steroids: Instead of one vendor's information, help information from Safari's library is presented, along with the event notification, in a different vendor's solution. This is the collective intelligence model in action.
The Web 1.0 approach would have been to license Safari content and present it through hyperlinks, forcing users to leave WatchTower and toggle between two applications. CITTIO also would have needed an army of programming bodies building tables of content, and search engines to locate specific information so that customers could quickly arrive at the information they needed—adding significant time and money to the project.
But because both WatchTower and Safari were built using a Web 2.0 foundation, CITTIO leveraged the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and prebuilt web services in only one month. Engineers simply piggybacked onto Safari's "ready to run" web framework.
Web content syndication, which involves weaving content into enterprise-class applications, was one of the Web 2.0 technologies that made a huge impact on the WatchTower/Safari project. In this collaborative solution, content is pulled into WatchTower and presented alongside the "event" so that users never need to leave the WatchTower environment. Alternately, network administrators can type keywords into the WatchTower dashboard and be presented with the most updated available Safari content.
Making content from one application available in another is one thing. But actually making specific information down to the chapter, page, and paragraph contextually available is another. Offering this level of granularity was critical, because the amount of content in the Safari library could easily result in information overload.
XML provided a huge leap forward. With XML and XSLT, CITTIO is essentially offering a Safari "librarian" who watches users and intelligently sorts through millions of pieces of pretagged information to suggest the right reading material. Moreover, the instructions for how the information is presented (in the Watchtower look-and-feel) are separate from the actual context tag. This means that the information is stored only once and configured on the fly for any format and served up in a variety of formats, such as PDF or Microsoft Word—a far cry from the HTML world, where presentation instructions were hard-coded.
The days of a single vendor defining the "next big thing" are gone. The Internet has shaped information resources and how they are delivered. By freeing themselves of the need to solve multiple problems, vendors are free to further develop their own area of expertise while simultaneously addressing next-generation "bigger" solutions. Content repositories like Safari Online Books can continue to focus on refreshing, growing, and delivering information, while businesses like CITTIO are free to concentrate on excellence in network and application monitoring and management. These benefits are possible because of the standards and emerging technologies of something that for now is called Web 2.0.