What Is Web 2.0?
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media, Inc.
www.oreilly.com
Web 2.0 Expo Berlin
November 5, 2007

We’re best known as a book publisher
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What We Really Do At O'Reilly
Change the world by spreading the
knowledge of innovators
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How we do it
• Find interesting technologies and people
innovating from the edge
• Amplify their effectiveness by spreading
the information needed for others to
follow them.
• Books
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How we do it
• Find interesting technologies and people
innovating from the edge
• Amplify their effectiveness by spreading
the information needed for others to
follow them.
• Books, Conferences
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How we do it
• Find interesting technologies and people
innovating from the edge
• Amplify their effectiveness by spreading
the information needed for others to
follow them.
• Books, Conferences, Online
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MAKE: Magazine
“Martha Stewart
for Geeks”
-- Newsweek
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Watch the Alpha Geeks
• New technologies first exploited by hackers, then
entrepreneurs, then platform players
• Three examples
– Wireless community networks
predict universal Wi-Fi
– Screen scraping predicts
web services and the internet
as platform
– “The pedal powered internet”
predicts new focus on energy
Rob Flickenger and his potato chip can antenna
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\"The future is here. It's just not
evenly distributed yet.\"
--William Gibson

This is not new
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Nor is it limited to technology...
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New Ad-Hoc Comms Networks
• Brad Templeton’s burning man phone done
with 802.11 and IP telephony
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We look at people having fun with
technology ... and think about what it
means
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It usually ends up meaning
something big for business
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What People Still Don’t
Understand about
Web 2.0!
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media, Inc.
www.oreilly.com
Web 2.0 Expo Berlin
November 5, 2007

User Generated
Openness
Sharing
Content
Social
Blogs
Networks
Wikis
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User Generated
Openness
Sharing
Content
Social
Blogs
Networks
Wikis
Love
Peace
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Web 2.0 is turning into a
battleground of tooth and claw
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Harnessing Collective Intelligence
Every true Web 2.0 company is building a
database whose value grows in proportion to
the number of participants -- that is, a
network-effect-driven data lock-in -- with
accelerating returns to the winners.
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“Red Shift”
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Red Shift in Action
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Understanding Web 2.0
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1. Users Add Value
The key to competitive advantage in internet
applications is the extent to which users add
their own value to that which you provide.
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Every time someone makes
a web link, they contribute
A critical mass of buyers
and sellers makes it hard for
others to enter the market
Embraced and extended the
product catalog
Self-service classified ads
- the users do all the work
Viral distribution, user
creation, user curation
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The opportunity was in finding new
meaning in user-generated data,
and turning that meaning into real-
time user-facing services
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Some Lessons from Google
• Harnesses users without them even knowing it
• Search relentlessly focused on relevance - All
available data mined to give better search
results
• Advertising serves the user - unobtrusive
• Top ad position doesn’t go to highest bidder
but to bid times expected click-through-rate
• Increasing returns in both improved search
results and ad performance help Google pull
further and further ahead in search
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2. Data is the Next “Intel Inside”
Applications are increasingly data-driven.
Therefore: Owning a unique, hard-to-recreate
source of data may lead to an Intel-style
single-source competitive advantage.
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Didn’t realize that
users add value!
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Key Questions to Ask Yourself
• What useful sources of data do you own and
control?
• What user-facing services can you build
against this data?
• How can you make these data sources get
better automatically as customers use them?
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The Enterprise Opportunity
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Turning 1.0 into 2.0
Web 2.0 Your Bank
Massive Data Centers Yes Yes
Data from customers Yes Yes
Data gets better all the time Yes Yes
Data mining of customer Yes Yes
behavior
Real time user-facing Yes No
services based on that
data
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3. A Platform Beats an Application
Every Time
•Lotus 1-2-3
•WordPerfect
•Netscape Navigator
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3. A Platform Beats an Application
Every Time
•Lotus 1-2-3
Microsoft Excel
•WordPerfect
Microsoft Word
•Netscape Internet Explorer
Microsoft Navigator
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3. A Platform Beats an Application
Every Time
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Internet Explorer
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Two Types of Platform
• One Ring to Rule Them All
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined
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Some Things I Want From Social
Networking
• I want it to reflect my REAL social
relationships (mine my phone and email)
• I want it to help me manage those contacts
(how to reach them, updated status)
• I want to manage groups of people
• I want it to recognize asymmetry in
relationships
• I want fine grained control over what I see
and what I ignore
• I want to discover interesting people
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Why Should I Have To Confirm?
• geni.com already knows that Sean is my
brother
• My company directory already knows who
works at O’Reilly
• Google knows that I worked with Danese
Cooper on open source Java and that she
has spoken at many of my conferences
• Amazon knows who’s written books for me
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Turning 1.0 into 2.0
Web 2.0 Phone Co
Massive Data Centers Yes Yes
Data from customers Yes Yes
Data gets better all the time Yes Yes
Data mining of customer Yes Yes
behavior
Real time user-facing Yes No
services based on that
data
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How Ridiculous Is This?
• Dialed calls (last 10)
• Received calls (last 10)
• Missed calls (last 10)
My phone and my email already know who
my friends are?
Social Networking has a long way to go till
it’s the Web 2.0 address book
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How Ridiculous Is This?
• “Will you be my friend?”
(Anyone with a communications network -
email, phone, or IM - already knows who my
friends are!)
Where is the Web 2.0 address book?
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CRM 2.0, anyone?
• There are huge opportunities to reinvent
enterprise software along Web 2.0 lines.
– Social networking meets CRM
– The RSS-enabled supply chain
– Enterprise data as the driver of user-facing
services
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The Internet Operating System
The subsystems will be data subsystems
– Location
– Identity
– Time
– Products
– Media types
– Relationships
– Price
– Tags
– ???
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4. Software Above the Level of a
Single Device
The PC is no longer the only access device
for internet applications, and applications
that are limited to a single device are less
valuable than those that are connected.
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iTunes perhaps the most important
Web 2.0 application to study
• User participation made the iPod possible
– without free mp3s, digital music wouldn’t
have taken off
• Three-tier architecture
– Device, PC, Web Cloud
– PC as management console
• Data as the Intel inside: Apple now controls
the music industry, embracing and extending
via file format. Phone is next?
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Sensors and Collective Intelligence
We are moving out of the world in which
people typing on keyboards will drive
collective intelligence applications.
Increasingly, applications are driven by new
kinds of sensors.
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Smart Presence on the Phone
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What’s Next?
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OpenCV: Computer Vision
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“I’m an inventor.
I became interested in
long term trends because
an invention has to make
sense in the world in
which it is finished, not
the world in which it is
started.”
-Ray Kurzweil
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For More Information
• What is Web 2.0?
http://www.oreillynet.com/go/web2
• http://tim.oreilly.com
• http://radar.oreilly.com
• http://www.makezine.com
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