As a rule of thumb, open technologies tend to be more pervasive and longer lasting (especially for the Internet) than proprietary technologies, which tend to bring more advanced capabilities early on. Consequently, Web application developers need to be pragmatically-open, by choosing open technologies whenever possible, but also by not hesitating to use proprietary ones when required. It is not about being religious about openness or anything else, but rather about being diligent so that one is able to choose the right technology to maximize the chances of success of the target application. In other words, it should not be a personal and emotional decision, but rather a business and rational one.

Today, for mainstream rich Web applications, there are two main technologies: Flash and Open Web (i.e., HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, etc…). While SilverLight and JavaFX are definitely interesting upcoming technologies, they are still unproven Web entities, and, for the sake of simplicity, this article will focus on Flash and Open Web.

Having worked for many years on the subject, and having spent time in both camps, I can honestly state that they both have their pros and cons and, depending on your rich Web application requirements, you might even need to use both. The trick to making a good business decisions is to have an objective look at each technology and to strip out all preconceived emotional opinions.

To help answer the question of what to use when, here is a technology-capability matrix, followed by short explanations.

SEO (Open Web)

While Google is making some good progress at indexing Flash content, SEO for Flash is still in its infancy, and, if your application depends on SEO to succeed, you better stick with well known URLs and HTML best practices. SEO is hard enough with regular page-based HTML content without adding unproven SEO-technologies to the mix. Even adding Ajax the wrong way could be extremely damaging to SEO. For example, the “#” URL trick that is used by many single-page Web applications might not be as SEO-friendly as it seems (Ajax and SEO will probably be the subject of a future post).

Mobile Web (Open Web)

Mobile Web is another place where Flash is still behind. Although Adobe is making promising progress in this area, if your are not building a 2D game or  video/media centric application, there are very few reasons to encumber the overhead and uncertainty of another virtual machine on top of the already very capable modern mobile Web browsers. Nowadays, most of the new high-end devices have desktop-like browser capabilities (often based on WebKit) which allow developers to take full advantage of Open Web technologies such as Ajax and CSS 2.1+. Consequently, the best way to maximize your mobile application reach is to stick with Open Web technologies and architect your Web user interface in such a way that it progressively degrades for simpler mobile browsers. Alternatively, developers can to take advantage of the current mobile app stores trend that promotes device specific applications, but this is outside the Web scope of this article.

Rich HTML Display & Editing (Open Web)

While Flash 10 has some technologies which ease the development of HTML layout and editing components, it is still nowhere near the browser’s native capabilities. It is probably a fair guess that Flash 11 will have even better HTML capabilities, perhaps even embedding WebKit, but, for today, if you want to display and edit rich HTML, not surprisingly, the Web browser is your best friend.

On-Demand Performance (Open Web)

On-demand performance is the experience a user gets when accessing a Web application for the first time (i.e., when none of the application assets are in the browser’s cache). The common expectation for consumer Web applications is usually sub-second responsiveness. As outlined in a previous post about Compiled vs. Interpreted Web, the interpreted nature of the Web makes it very efficient for executing on-demand content & interaction, whereas the compiled nature of the Flash application model is more optimized for post-load execution. So, for applications requiring Web-fast first-time interaction experiences, the Open Web model is the best one.

Post-Load Performance (Flash)

Conversely, the compiled approach of Flash and frameworks such as Flex makes it much more optimized for post-load interactions. So, if you do not mind having a “loading-bar” on your application and have a very high logic execution performance requirement, then Flash might be a good solution. Note that new JavaScript VM such as Google Chrome V8 and Mozilla Firefox SpiderMonkey with TraceMonkey are really breaking the barrier of interpreted language performance. Unfortunately, Microsoft Internet Explorer is still behind (even IE 8) in terms of JavaScript execution speed. While we may suspect that Microsoft is going to work on optimizing their JavaScript engine soon, for now, the best way to have high execution logic performance across browsers is with Flash ActionScript 3.

Animation (Flash)

If you want to make pixel flies, then Flash is your best friend. While this statement is still true today, it is also important to note that, with modern browsers (including IE-8-) and Ajax toolkits such as jQuery, applications have access to some decent sets of animation capabilities using 100% Open Web technologies. So, unless animation is a cornerstone of your application, animation alone should not be a critical or decisive factor one way or  the other.

2D & 3D (Flash)

This is definitely a stronger one in favor of Flash. While Open Web is promoting some 2D standards and implementations (e.g., Canvas and SVG), nothing beats Flash performance and capabilities in reference to pixel and vector graphic creation and manipulation. While Canvas and some SVG are pretty well supported by Firefox and WebKit based browsers (i.e., Safari and Google Chrome), Microsoft IE is still not implementing those. Developers can circumvent this Microsoft limitation by using compatibilities such as JavaScript or even Flash libraries, but this usually comes at the cost of features and performance. In other words, while it is possible to do an online Photoshop or Visio-like applications in SVG/Canvas/VML, the investment required to do it with flash technology is definitely worthwhile. Unfortunately, Flash does not support the interpreted model, so Web developers will have to fully jump into the Flash development model and tools, which can be relatively high barriers of entry, especially for small visual components (e.g., Charting). There are some interesting Flash SVG libraries (e.g., sgweb) which allow Web developers to use Flash to rendSVG renderer and the browser JavaScript VM to run the scripts, however this comes at a performance cost.

File handling (Flash)

File handling has always been completely left-out by the different Open Web standardization and implementer groups. Building an effective experience for accessing local files through a Web browser has always been challenging, to say the least. Even the most modern browsers still have the 1995 simple file-input component which allows for the selection of only one file at a time. Flash, while far from being perfect, does add some nice features in terms of this realm, such as multiple file selections and, more importantly, a way to read selected files of clients before sending them to the server. Unfortunately, enterprise Web applications would really benefit from file drag & drop support from and to the desktop (and File Explorer), but, somehow, this feature is always given a very low priority by the various decision makers (or is somehow labeled as a security hazard). Alternatively, you can use Java technology, as does Facebook for their photo uploader, which gives almost complete file-system control for signed applets (note: somehow, it feels kind of strange to write the word “applet” in 2009). Advanced clipboard support is also another neglected requirement.

Video & Audio Playback (Flash)

Two of HTML 5’s big new features, besides off-line support, are the video and audio tags. However, there still lot of discussion about the support format of video tags. One of the biggest issues is that the best video formats are not royalty free, and, while commercial vendors such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Google are willing to pay the video tax for their users, the open source community finds itself in a catch-22 situation. So, from an application developer standpoint, Flash is by far the best option to bring high quality video and audio to your application. With the latest support of H.264/mp4 video support of Flash, there is no good reason to really look elsewhere for now.

Video & Audio Recording (Flash)

I am splitting out media playback from recordings because, if they are not split, the later tends to be forgotten. It’s difficult to believe, but, in the 2-way Web era, the big promoters of Open Web technologies have no implementations or plans to support Web Video and Audio recording and uploading. Luckily, Adobe Flash has a pretty mature solution to this need, and while they have not opened the code, they have opened the APIs and protocols to allow developers to freely use the Flash player as a video recording device (see Red5 for an open source alternative to Adobe Flash Media server).

So, as can be seen, there is no one size fits all technology. It depends on the application requirements you might need to use multiple technology sets. Obviously, as a technology vendor or advocate your goal is to build and promote your technology for as many scenarios as possible, however, as an application developer, your only goal should be to ensure the success of your application, no matter the technology you end up using or switching to. Developers should rationally and objectively evaluate each of the technologies before investing too much time and money in any one of them. Also, avoiding over-hyped terms such as RIA and Social Network when defining application requirements will go a long way to help in terms of focusing on what really matters to users.

If you liked this article, a re-tweet is greatly appreciated.

If you are in the midst of choosing your technologies for your next rich Web application, do not hesitate to contact me at jeremy.chone@gmail.com. (I provide everything from free advice to complete rich Web architecture and strategy consulting and services.)

However, by design, tagging requires users to have some sort of writing privilege, which greatly limits its reach potential. Practically speaking, it means that if a user wants to tag an item on a system (e.g, Youtube, Flickr, or delicious) he or she must have an account on that system and be logged in at the time of the operation.

While this is probably not an issue for major Internet services, it can be a chicken-and-egg issue for new, upcoming services that do not yet have a large enough community to build a meaningful tag cloud. How can a new service maximize its community tag cloud if it doesn’t yet have a community?

Here is where the concept of Search Oriented Tagging comes in. The concept is that users do not tag anymore but just search. The service will extract keywords from the search query and track the user’s interaction with the results. The system will then apply statistical logic to automatically tag the interacted entities.

Although this approach is not intended to be a substitute for traditional tagging, it can also complement tagging mechanisms for large community sites.

Search-oriented tagging offers these benefits:

• Maximizes tagging participation: By transforming tagging into a registration-free functionality, search-oriented tagging maximizes its reach to the service’s full audience (i.e., registered users and visitors)
• Scales with the community: Search-oriented tagging’s statistical nature scales well with site content and community growth.
• Search synergy: Since the function is search-centric, this form of tagging can refine the search relevance logic.
• Time-sensitive: Since search-oriented tagging is more transparent and pervasive, it can better capture time-sensitive tags such as "harmony," "Google Chrome," or "lipstick on a Pig."

I am sure that this concept is not entirely new, and that search engines have similar logic to improve their results relevance. However, by applying this concept to tagging, new services can more effectively build a relevant tag cloud while developing their communities. The concept can also be applied to large community services to make their tagging systems more agile and time-sensitive.

If you aware of any services that are using this mechanism, feel free to submit a comment.

Here is some background to better understand this point of view. There has been a somewhat valid belief stating that the un-typed and interpreted nature of the JavaScript language was a major limitation for building demanding client applications. Consequently, to overcome this challenge, the browser technology providers had the following two options:

1. Re-invent the language by “upgrading” the JavaScript language to a more a traditional typed and object-oriented language, such as Java or C#, allowing the runtime to just focus on running the code.
2. Re-invent the runtime by creating novels ways for the JavaScript virtual machine to parse and interpret the JavaScript code, making the language as robust and reliable as more traditional languages.

Conforming to the EcmaScript’s Harmony decision, which focuses on not reinventing [or forking] the language (i.e., not doing #1), Google and Mozilla are actually genuinely working on the same goal, which is to make the current JavaScript faster and more reliable in a completely transparent way to the web developer. So, from a language point of view, Mozilla and Google are actually in complete harmony in pursuit of the Open Web vision.

Here are a few Q&As to summarize my take on Google Chrome from a developer’s perspective.

Which one is faster?

It does not matter as long as they keep fighting it up. Google Chrome got a good PR head-start, but, Mozilla Firefox 3.1 is back in the race with TraceMonkey.

What’s the good news?

JavaScript has become a safer bet for developers. With Google, Mozilla, and Apple seriously investing in JavaScript, from applications to runtimes, developers can rest assured that the language has a bright future. I also think this will be a factor in forcing Microsoft to react aggressively, assuming it does not want to see the Internet slipping way (again).

What’s the bad news?

The caveats (and there are always some) are that developers will have yet another browser to test against and the market will have yet another browser to adopt.

So, at the end, I think that Google Chrome is a good thing for the Open Web in general, and my hope is that it will be a forcing hand to get Microsoft to update its Web strategy.

For example, given that Microsoft Internet strategy seems to be mostly focused on the plug-in front (i.e., SilverLight vs. Flash), it might be interesting for Microsoft to just re-use the Mozilla or Google JavaScript virtual machine. Why not?  Developers will be happy, and Microsoft would be able to fully focus on SilverLight and .Net.

While slick animations and transitions are certainly useful for emotionally driven applications, such as car configurators, and some applications or components such as Google Map and charting, they should not be used as a substitute for a good interactive design. Application developers need to realize that these animations and transitions come at an extra design and development cost (no matter what tool they are using). 

In fact, the most successful and influential Internet consumer applications (e.g. Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, Facebook, FriendFeed, and YokWay) use animations and transitions relatively lightly.

In the desktop and mobile arena, Apple has become (and probably always has been) the most famous and admired pixel maestro. However, it is important to note that screen orchestration is a new art and comes at a cost. Even in Apple’s case, flying pixels come with a feature cost, whereas iPhone users can very elegantly scroll their contacts but cannot search them, and can slide from application to application but cannot cut and past between them.

Obviously, the point here is not that including animations and transitions is a bad practice, but that the animations and transitions need to be carefully and thoughtfully considered and planned. So, here are the good, the bad, and the five rules about flying [your pixels]:

The good

• Natural Feel: In the real world, things do not disappear and reappear as they used to do on computer and mobile screens. As shade and gradient are making shapes easier on the eye, animations and transitions are useful techniques to bring a more natural feel to the application.
• Visual Continuity: Good animations and transitions for some types of information can dramatically improve their access (e.g., maps and multi-level charting).
• Perception: Perception is everything, and nowadays a couple of flying pixels can go a long way toward obtaining some good marketing/user buzz and management visibility. iPhone without the flying pixels would not be iPhone.

The bad

• Distraction: Users can be overwhelmed by too many flying and flashing pixels, and developers can spend too much time animating them. The order of priorities should be: first, interaction design; second, visual design; and finally, “orchestration design.”
• Perception: Cool flying pixels might give a false sense of design quality when, in fact, they can hide some serious design flaws or even deteriorate the real use of the application.
• Costs: Flying is not free. First you need your team to learn new APIs, tools, and, sometimes, languages, and secondly, you need to acquire good screen orchestration design skills. Making moving parts feel natural is not as easy at it might seem (even with the right tools and APIs)

5 rules about flying [your pixels]:

• Hire a pilot
• Fly when you need to, not when you can.
• Fly from A to B, not A to A.
• Don’t fly too high — it might suck out all your oxygen.
• Don’t forget to land.

My belief is that animations and transitions are like lipstick; the good ones are the ones you do not notice… except if you are selling lipstick, I guess.

Having worked for many technology provider companies (e.g., Netscape, Oracle, and Adobe) and being a developer myself (mostly on weekends), I have always been fascinated by the dynamics and trends in the developer industry. I think that, coupled with the open source and software as a service dynamics, this industry is experiencing an auspicious time for interesting technological and business opportunities.

If you happen to build a [Web] developer strategy for a company or a project, you will often need to have some sort of representation of this market. To this end, I have been developing a simple—but useful—representation of the Web developer community in the form of a spectrum which I have called the “Web Developer Spectrum.”

The Web Developer Spectrum consists of four main contiguous sections, from Enterprise Technology Developers up to Hackers/Hobbyists. It is important to note that an individual developer may belong to multiple sections, depending on the nature of his or her projects at a given time.

Here is the representation and description of this spectrum.

Enterprise Technology Developers

The Enterprise Technology Developers category consists of developers who work for big technology companies, such as Oracle, IBM, and Sun, and create technologies and standards that will be packaged in complete product offers targeting large enterprise IT departments.

These developers tend to be focused on architecture, completeness, and standardization, sometimes at the cost of simplicity and accessibility. Compared to other developer segments, these developers usually have an adequate amount of time and resources to get their job done.

Some good examples of technologies coming out of this segment are: J2EE, JSF, EJB2.x, and SOAP. As previously mentioned, some of these technologies, especially EJB 2.x, could be considered by some enterprise developers a little bit over-designed. EJB 3.x has addressed some of these issues by adopting the persistence model from alternative open source frameworks, such as Hibernate.

Business Application Developers

This segment includes developers from system integrators, such as Cab Gemini, Infosys, IBM-Services, and developers from various enterprise IT departments. The main priority of this segment of developers is to build and deploy enterprise applications in order to maximize the overall business productivity.

These developers are usually application-centric, meaning that they focus mostly on bringing the right functionalities to the right users in a timely manner. They tend to favor technologies with high returns on investment (i.e. with the highest “application-out/time-in” ratio), and they usually like to mitigate risk by contractual relationships with technology “vendors” (i.e. product licensing and support agreements).

JSP, ColdFusion, asp.net, Spring, Hibernate, and XML-RPC are the types of Web technologies used by the business application developers. Many of these developers are coming from the 3GL/4GL client/server development world, and often require quite extensive training to learn these new Web development paradigms and tools.

Web 2.0 Developers

By Web 2.0 developers I mean developers who build Web application for consumers, such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Craigslist, and many other Web companies. The successful one tends to start small and scale fast, while the others tend to move from project to project until they find the one that can attract a good user community.

Web 2.0 developers tend to be user-centric, prioritizing application simplicity and design over completeness. Web 2.0 developers tend to like dynamic, simple, and scalable technologies, such as Ruby/Rails, REST, and MemCache, Java (minus J2EE), to name a few. This is a relatively difficult business for technology and tool vendors since this community is very self-serving and usually pushes technologies in the opposite direction from what a typical enterprise would require (scalability vs. transactional).

Hacker & Hobbyist Developers

Last, but not least, there are the hacker (in the open source sense) and hobbyist developers. While many of these developers are actually paid to work on their projects, some of them (the hobbyists) code mostly for fun and self-satisfaction. This segment could be another spectrum in itself, but I combined it for simplicity.

Great quality products, such as PHP Gallery 2.x, Wordpress, and PHP BB are coming from this community, as well as some smaller projects, such as greasemonkey, and other application plugins. This community tends to be self-serving as well and extremely proficient at fulfilling its own needs.

Hobbyists tend to use more scripting language, such as Python, PHP, Javascript, and other accessible technologies, while hackers tend to go relatively deep in the software development stack to accomplish the required tasks.

A few weeks back, I showed this spectrum to Rich Levandov from Master Head Venture Partners, and he raised a very interesting point. Prior to the open source development, technology vendors, such as Oracle, Sun, and IBM, represented the largest developer community on the market, and, consequently, were the main technology sources for the industry. With the popularization and maturation of the open source development and distribution model, community-created technologies have become more and more relevant, to the point where they even eclipse vendors’ technologies. AJAX and Hibernate are probably the most recent examples of such a trend. I still see major technology vendors making most of the technology distributions (given the enterprises’ need to mitigate risk); however, I think they will have to adopt more and more community technologies and standards if they want to stay relevant in the marketplace.

Obviously, this representation in not perfect, but, many times, it has helped me to visualize “developer” business opportunities. I hope this will be useful to others, and I definitely welcome any and all feedback.

From an internet technology point of view, 2006 and 2007 could be characterized by the rejuvenation of client technologies for web-based applications.

The main theme of this trend is to enable web applications to borrow as many characteristics from desktop application as possible without losing their inherent web attributes such as seamless deployment and cross platform/devices support.

We can identify two phases for this quest.

The first, which is well underway, consists of using more capabilities from “modern” internet browsers, often referred as AJAX, to enhance or build better web applications. GMail and Google Map are probably the most notable examples of this trend, although most of the traditional web applications nowadays are using such techniques to incrementally but dramatically improve their web user experience (e.g., Yahoo, Netflix, and Facebook). While these new techniques are huge steps towards improving the web application user experience, the fundamental capabilities of the web browser have not really changed that much. Every web application is still confined within the browser container which limits (purposely) advanced operating system access such as local storage access and desktop integration.

The second phase, which is gaining serious momentum due to the involvement of major technology providers (e.g., Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Sun), aims to provide an environment for developers and end-users to go beyond the current browser constraints while preserving most of the benefits of the web. The challenge is as technical as social, given that “normal-users” (i.e. non-geeks users) have learned to trust the current web browser with its constraints.

There are basically two ways to accomplish this goal. The first (Option A) is to extend the existing browsers with new capabilities while keeping the user within a browser experience. The second (Option B) is to create a new application container for a new generation “Internet Desktop Application”.  They both have their pros and cons and probably are both needed. Interestingly, most of the players have a strategy for both.

Below is an overview of the different technology-provider solutions.

Adobe

Adobe is probably the technology provider which has the made the most headway on both options. On the browser side, Adobe Flash can almost be considered as a de facto standard for browsers; with Flex, it has become a robust platform for building rich web components or applications.

From a desktop perspective, Adobe is also pushing Adobe AIR, which brings HTML/AJAX and Flash/Flex to the desktop with deep desktop integration. It is a little bit too early to say that this will have the same success that Adobe Flash, but it does look promising from a technology point of view.

Google

A few months ago, Google introduced Google-Gears which allows developers to extend web applications with offline capabilities.

On the desktop side, Google has been aggressively pushing their Google Desktop product to end-users, and has opened it up somewhat to developers. While Google-Desktop is not a “full desktop application container,” it definitely has some of its characteristics, and potentially can become one if Google wants it to (which does not seem to be the case today).

Microsoft

From a cross-platform point of view, Microsoft has decided to focus only on extending the browser with a Flash direct competitor called SilverLight, with an emphasis on Video and on XML/HTML interoperability.

Mozilla

Mozilla Firefox extension model has proven to be one of the best ways for developers to extend Firefox browsers. However, this is obviously limited to Firefox only.

In October 2007, Mozilla launched Prism, an experiment allowing developers to build and deploy desktop applications using the Mozilla Firefox technologies (i.e., HTML/Javascript/XUL). It is kind of a re-launch of XUL Runner, and in many ways, it is an alternative to Adobe AIR.

Sun/IBM

On the Java side, Java applet was probably one of the oldest ways to extend the Internet browser. However, despite some early success, it did not really scale with the market demand. Adobe Flash and AJAX seem to have taken this part of the cake.

On the desktop side, in a traditional Sun-Java vs IBM-Java, we have JRE/WebStart (Sun) and Eclipse RCP (IBM) as robust cross-platform desktop frameworks. IBM is pushing RCP heavily in the enterprise, and SUN is working on making Java cooler with its latest JavaFX addition.

As we can see, internet client technologies have become a hot topic again, with many big players competing aggressively (i.e. for free). In short, I think that Adobe has a head-start, Mozilla has the glory, Google the fame, Sun the legacy, and Microsoft the money. However, I would not place my bet just yet… Only time will tell.  

Disclosure: I was the Director of Product Management & Strategy for Flex in 2006/2007.

Update 2008-03-23: Great post from Techcrunch about Prism and the market

Current Web application model limitations:

For technology providers, although the cost of development of a internet service might be relatively low, operational costs, mostly related to bandwidth and storage, severely limit what can be offered to users. For example, providing an entirely free mainstream photo, audio, and video sharing Internet application would require continuous investment that would be hard to justify outside of an monopolistic business strategy.

From the user’s point of view, while the "zero install" feature of the Web application model is advantageous, it also has the drawback of a "zero memory" limitation (at least as it relates to Internet requests). This means that an interrupted transaction (i.e., Internet request) is a lost transaction. While this is not really an issue for small requests (e.g., eBay bid, craigslist post), it could be quite frustrating for users performing more involved tasks, such as sharing videos.

Also, although today’s new Web trend (Web 2.0) encourages the social aspect of these services, I think that most of the current Web 2.0 applications are still primarily focused on the "tech-savvy" population and have not yet reached the "mainstream." One of my current explanations for this assumption is that "mainstream" users tend to prefer participating with their adjacent network first (friends and family) first, which has been cumbersome given the current proliferation of user identity silos.

Web 2.0 Limitations

P2P Opportunities:

While P2P is definitely not the magic pixie dust to solve all of these problems, combining the P2P paradigm with the traditional Web application model could open the door to many interesting innovations and offer the following advantages:

• Reduced operational cost: By the very nature of P2P architecture, P2P technology providers can offload most of the service processing to their end-users, allowing providers to just centralize what matters to them most (usually the directory service), while offering more attractive services to their users. For example, Skype’s P2P approach was probably a big factor in their exponential growth despite their relatively modest financial investment.
• Illusion of continuity : While this is not really a P2P attribute, most of the P2P clients, such as Skype, instant messengers, and file sharing applications, usually support some sort of "transaction recoverability." This means that the client application is usually able to remember an interrupted request and restart it where it left it.
• Network of proximity: One great feature of all IM clients is the "buddy list", which allows users to easily communicate and share with their close network, such as friends and family. I personally think it would be a great step forward if this paradigm could be carried into the user’s Web experience.

As with all technologies, there are many different ways these types of functionalities can be delivered to users. It could come from a better and deeper integration between existing P2P clients, such as Skype or BitTorrent, with existing Internet browsers. Third party browser extensions, such as the promising AllPeers Firefox extension (profiled by Techcrunch), seem also to be headed towards this goal. Or, lastly, it could come from a revolutionary all-in-one client, similar to Groove, but geared for the consumer market.

Related links:

• Great Allpeers article (from Allpeers’ blog) about extension vs standalone.
• Some Skype P2P pitfalls on Om Malik’s blog.
• An interesting take from Muli Koppel about Skype and Web 2.0.

Most of these criticisms seem to be based on the fact that Flock tries to provide an alternative "Web browser" application rather than providing extensions to existing browsers (e.g., a Firefox extension). Lately, the launch of a great Firefox extension Performancing (see Steve Rubel and O.M. Malik quick profile), which offers one of the core Flock’s functionalities by allowing users to blog "in the context" of their browsing experience, has revived the discussion. In a response to these last complaints, Chris from Flock, supported by Bart (Flock’s CEO), issued a good post giving a little more context behind Flock’s vision and direction.

As mentioned by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Flock’s Buzz might have come a little bit too early for the Bits, which is always a very dangerous position to be in. Also, Flock’s first audience, the Mozilla tech savvy crowd, was probably not especially receptive to the idea of another browser. I personally am a big fan of Mozilla Firefox, and while I have tested Flock developer preview release, I went back to Firefox since I have all my extensions set up.

However, I deeply believe in Flock’s idea. As Chris mentioned, Flock might or might not be the answer, but the point is that users need much more than a traditional Web browser to make the "Everybody-to-Everybody" Internet vision a reality. This new "Internet Companion" could come from the evolution of an existing Web browser, from a set of extensions, or from another application altogether: the way it gets here is less important than the things it will allow people to do. Obviously, this assumes the goal is to allow the "rest of us" to participate on the Internet.

So, the question is not "to Flock or not to Flock", but rather to believe that the way we will interact with the Internet in couple years will be substantially different from what we do today.

Also, I have had the privilege of meeting the Flock team on many occasions, and it is always refreshing to see a passionate and dedicated team so focused on accomplishing its vision. I would not be surprised if future versions of Flock will surprise us. And I definitely need this new "Internet Companion" for my grandmother and sisters.

This new excitement is probably generated by the presumption of achieving the ultimate Internet goal of enabling true “Everybody to Everybody” participation. However, while this “new wave” brings tremendous user and social values, it still does not seem to address some of the critical Internet roadblocks to pervasive Internet collaboration.

To better understand these limitations, we need to take a quick look at the evolution of the Internet. I see three main phases in the Internet evolution. (Note: The “Web x.x” numbering scheme is completely artificial, and is just used to support a “relative numbering” scheme leading to today’s “Web 2.0″ term).

• The Creation (”Web 0.x”): In the late mid `90s, the Mosaic project, created by Marc Andreessen, had the ambitious goal of making network collaboration accessible to the broadest audience possible. With the creation of Netscape Corporation, the idea attained tremendous visibility and support from the market, leading to the proliferation of a new client application allowing unfettered access to network information: The Internet browser.
• The Development (”Web 1.x”): The exponential growth in popularity of this new medium led established and new software companies to realize the great potential of this new market. On May 26, 1995, Microsoft, in a famous Bill Gates memo (”The Internet Tidal Wave“), reoriented itself towards this new model. Although the over-excitement created an inflated market that eventually burst, many content and service companies such as Yahoo!, Amazon, and eBay have remained strong and growing. The popularity of this new paradigm, coupled with the commoditization of the Browser on many devices, have put Internet in almost everybody’s hands. This phase could be seen as the popularization of Internet access.
• The Reinvigoration (”Web 2.0″): Lately, infrastructure commoditization and the flamboyant success of new Internet companies, such as Google, have reinvigorated the drive for Internet innovation. I see two new fundamentals from the previous eras:
  • First, the industry is now focusing on popularizing content publishing. New services like Blog (e.g. Six Apart), Wiki (e.g. Wikipedia), Photo Album (e.g. Flickr), Social Network (e.g. Linked In), and many others are based on the principle of enabling every users to become content producers as well as content consumers.
    This “2 Way” web is already having important social ramifications, where knowledge and information are becoming more and more open and accessible.
  • Second, most of the Internet organizations are placing more emphasis on usage (direct or indirect via APIs) than subscribers (eyeballs). This is a great step towards building a stronger Internet in which closed Internet services, such as today’s Instant Messaging networks, will hopefully be pushed out of this ecosystem. It is always a great milestone when an industry understands that backing a larger cake might be more beneficial than trying to take a bigger piece of a smaller cake (see the Inherent Truths and Value of Community).

The following simple graph represents this evolution, where the “Web 1.x” phase is characterized by “content consumer” growth and the “Web 2.0″ phase by “content producer” growth.

Web 0.x to Web 2.0 Simplified

However, while content publishing has been made much simpler, it still is not as pervasive as content access. For example, while my grand mother can access online pictures of her grandchildren, she still has a hard time contributing to the content.

Here are the main hurdles to realizing the true “everybody to everybody” Internet participation paradigm.

• User identity silos: While today’s economics valorize usage values, there are still strong incentives for companies to own their user communities on a exclusive basis . These economic incentives, coupled with the technical challenges to providing secure and distributed Identity Management mechanisms, are considerably slowing down the rate of Internet participation growth. The good news is that the Internet community is tackling this issue (referred to as “Identity 2.0“) very seriously, and while there are no clear winners yet, there are good contenders (Infocard and SXIP).
• Interoperability mechanisms fragmentation: As Ray Ozzie mentioned in his memo, cross-service interoperability mechanisms fragmentation is also a key obstacle to Internet growth. However, the defacto standard, where “clone services” just copy the APIs of their established competitors, has been a pretty good short term workaround. For example, 23 photo sharing service, profiled by TechCrunch, cloned Flickr from the user interface down to the APIs. There are also very promising new simple protocols, like SSE, that will probably continue to emerge as needed.
• Limited Internet architecture utilization: Outside of a few Internet applications, such as IM, Voice Chat, and “Illegal” file sharing, most of the Internet services just use a Client/Server Internet application model. However, there are many examples where a more distributed approach would greatly enhance the user experience. Opera integration with Bit Torrent is probably a first step towards this direction. However, there does not seem to be much more than that happening in this area.

The good news is that the Internet community is actively working on resolving these issues to enable users to take better advantage of the Internet.  So, we can expect to see more innovation in the years to come around these areas.

UPDATE Dec 02, 2005: Michael Arrington reports a great post (Web 2.0 DNA), from Brandon Schauer, about Web 2.0 historical timeline. A must read!

UPDATE Dec 04, 2005: Good discussion about “Web as a platform” from A VC.

TechCrunch has good profiles on Windows Live and Office Live.

Overall, "Microsoft Live" is cool for the Web. Microsoft even claims they will support Mozilla Firefox.

If you are a Mozilla Firefox user trying to access www.live.com, you will read:
Firefox Users. Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient.


This is a good acknowledgment of the Mozilla Firefox browser ;)

Here is my quick take on Windows and Office Live:

Technical Side:

• At first glance, although Windows Live is a cool AJAX application, it has nothing really revolutionary (at the exception of VoIP). Windows Live looks like a cool AJAX web portal. I am sure my.yahoo.com is working on something similar. And, this is definitely the direction the Web is headed.
• The User Experience is pretty good for Web 2.0 geeks, but really scarce for the end-user (sisters, mothers, etc). Definitely a beta.
• It will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s "Gadgets" evolves. Today, it seems very basic to say the least. I have tried the Flickr Viewer gadgets, and it is a good start.

Business Side:

• I think their “Advertising-based business story” seems to be a lure, allowing them to fully get into the Web 2.0 game without getting busted by Wall Street. Google did a good job at reinventing the online advertising business, but I am not sure there is as much money as Microsoft claims.
• However, I do think their subscription model, principally on Office Live, will be interesting to see.
• It is also interesting to see the early stage of this service. Many things are very basic and still under construction (i.e. Gadgets). This Web 2.0 is pressuring all companies (even big ones) to quickly come out with cool Web2.0 stuff, even if they are fra from complete. The thought is that you just need to add the magic Beta stamp, and it is good to go.