Notes:
Lets take a more detailed look at what makes these organizations successful. I cant think of a better example of collaboration than the Wikipedia. People around the world are doing their bit to contribute content to the worlds biggest online encyclopedia. It is powered by MediaWiki a free open source wiki engine. Anyone who does not know what a wiki is? (A wiki is radical content management system where anyone can modify content for immediate publishing).
Google's page rank is a good example of collective intelligence in this case the intelligence is drawn from the collection of hyperlinks that refer to a web page thus providing a measure of its value.
The next one is quite interesting. Amazons original book database came from the ISBN agency. But then it enhanced that basic data with data from publishers like cover image and table of contents. Then it went one step further and let its users enhance the data by submitting and rating reviews and mining the purchase data for relevant recommendations. Because of these data enhancements, Amazon is now the primary source for bibliographic data on books. It is very difficult now for someone else to enter the market and compete with Amazon. Where will it go for the user annotated data? Amazon effectively embraced, extended and took over the data.
The long tail is a fandu concept that only makes sense for web businesses. Some time back, I went to my local dvd rental shop and enquired for a film called Magnolia. He didnt have it. I told him it is supposed to be a very good film. How come he didnt have it? He said I was the first person to have asked for it. He couldnt stock films that only a few customers would be interested in watching. It wasnt economically viable. But a movie download website can stock any number of movies. It turns out that the total sales of unpopular titles is greater than the total sales of popular titles. And thats because popular titles are only a fraction of all titles. Without the web, the barriers of inventory cost and geography would prevent retailers from catering to the long tail of tastes.
Mashups. How many of you noticed the Geo Visitors icon on the FOSS.in website. When you click on it, you are taken to a website that plots for you on the world map the location of all visitors to the FOSS.in website in the past 24 hrs. How does it do it? The icon on Foss.in page is served by the site that hosts geovisitors, digitalpoint.com. So they can capture the requesting IP address each time someone views FOSS.in. It then sends the IP address to a service that uses a number of techniques to zero down the address to an approximate latitude and longitude. This information can be used to generate a plot using Google Maps. Thats not all, if you have Google Earth installed, you can even see the building that is hosting the internet gateway. This is an example of what is called a mashup - combining information from multiple sources to create a unique application. To facilitate such mashups, companies provide a programmer API to access the same information that is available to human users. This is why web 2.0 is also called programmers web.
Tagging. This is the ability to reach the same data via multiple paths. For example, when I get my bank statements from ICICI in my gmail account, I tag it with labels icici and money. And when I get mails from IRCTC. or AirDeccan, I tag it them with labels travel and money. So when I prepare my tax returns, I would use the icici tag to access all statements but when Im calculating my monthy expenditure, I'd use the money tag to access all expenditure data. Categorizing using folders would be much more tedious. This way of classifying information using simple keywords instead of using more formal taxonomies is called folksonomy or simply tagging. It is now supported and widely used on photo-sharing sites and blogs. So the photo of a hot model standing beside a Hero Honda Karizma can be tagged under hot babes as well as cool bikes and interested parties from either camp will be satisfied.
Rich user interfaces. Standards compliant browsers are now freely available. Its easier than ever to design web pages that are cross-browser compatible. And whats more, its no longer uncool to design web pages that are heavily reliant on JavaScript. Basically, Gmail came along, cast its vote in favor of JavaScript and wowed everyone with its usability. And so richness and usability of the user interface is often a key characteristic of web 2.0 sites.
Continuous releases. If you notice, Gmail is still in beta. Features are introduced continuously. Some sites actually pilot features for a brief while to see if users like it. If they dont, the feature is rolled back. Amazon recently introduced tagging for its books. The concept of continuous software release is not new. It was the open source software community that pioneered nightly builds. In fact, a number of ideas behind web 2.0 originated in the open source community.