Web 2.0?
August 23rd, 2006 by Hugh
O’Reilly are running a competition called Lauchpad at the Web 2.0 Conference. It’s a talent hunt for a great new company.
When I read about this, I wondered, is Exbiblio Web 2.0? or Web 3.0? – or perhaps Book 2.0?
Last year people were still debating the meaning of Web 2.0. I’m not sure that it’s any clearer yet, but I would plump for saying that the classic Web 2.0 company has a social media aspect to it – sharing, sifting, commenting, tagging, collaborating, and communicating at grass roots level.
Would anyone like to say if Exbiblio is a Web 2.0 company?
Posted in All | 1 Comment » | Other posts by Hugh
August 24th, 2006 at 9:19 am
For the sake of discussion, here is my quick and dirty requirements for being “Web 2.0”:
1. Content from outside sources is the main draw. For example, you would hear “There are tagged photos on every subject available at Flickr” more often than “Flickr has a great slideshow feature”.
2. Web 2.0 applications play well with others. For example, my Flickr account and Blogger account were easy to link up using publicly available web services.
3. Web 2.0 applications should be platform independent and accessed primarily through a web browser. This requirement has birthed new ways of looking at user interface in the browser, often including AJAX or Flash.
As we define our go-to-market product, we may or may not be a “Web 2.0” company. If we lean towards a highly collaborative, book discussion and annotation system that is viewable through web browsers and integrates data from users as well as from other services than we would be… If we build a office productivity tool, where most data is local to the client machine than we probably would not be a “Web 2.0” company.
Because our current designs require a portable scanner, it would be hard to build a purely web based application. So personally, I don’t really see Exbiblio as a web company. More like a technology company that is drawing inspiration from Web 2.0 companies as well as other fields.