Systems openness: a characteristic of the Web 2.0

Frederick Giasson

Recently, many people said that companies will need to open and share their APIs to enter into the Web 2.0. Many people also said that the future of the Internet, the Web 2.0, is to share APIs [see paragraph 3], to give possibilities provided by an API to anybody who needs it to develop their own system with these capabilities. Yahoo! Already do it with technologies like his Content analysis web service use by TagCloud, Google too with his map API, and Microsoft will start soon too. The question is: is there only APIs to share?

No. People seem to forget that we need information to use with these capabilities. What I say is: companies will need to start to share the information they gather and analyze in the same way they share their APIs. It is a premise of the Web 2.0: the information will be decentralized in such a way that people will have information to share with everybody, and that information will be formatted in such a way that computers will be able to process, analyze and understand it. To reach such a state, developers, companies and hobbyist will need to start to share their information that way. The relation between all this information and their structure will form what we could call the Web 2.0. It is not just a question of functionalities given by APIs, but one of knowledge: of information. We need information to use these APIs, and right now, the information is partial and hard to extract.

The most beautiful example we have of this type of information are the web feeds (RSS or Atom). If you check at a web feed, you will not understand anything (at a first glance at least). It is an example of an information document formed for computers and not humans (like HTML documents). These protocols (RSS and Atom) are really primitives; however, many, many way to use them has been found. Hundred of application uses them to gather or publish information in different ways. The information is presented in such a way that any software, platform independent, can understand and display the information available in these documents, notwithstanding of what the information is.

If you go to the Web 2.0 Conference 2005 web page, you will be able to read at the top of the web page:

“Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for computers.”

— Jeff Bezos

All the Web 2.0 idea in one quote. It is really beautiful to have all these online APIs available; now we need the information.

Tim Berners-Lee already said:

“Envisioning life in the Semantic Web is a similar proposition. Some people have said, “Why do I need the Semantic Web? I have Google!” Google is great for helping people find things, yes! But finding things more easily is not the same thing as using the Semantic Web. It’s about creating things from data you’ve complied yourself, or combining it with volumes (think databases, not so much individual documents) of data from other sources to make new discoveries. It’s about the ability to use and reuse vast volumes of data”

Now we need this data: this information. But we also need it in a format that software agents will be able to understand and efficiently process.

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Steve Jobs

Frederick Giasson

 
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Steve Jobs

Frederick Giasson

 
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Steve Jobs

Frederick Giasson

 
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Steve Jobs

Frederick Giasson

 
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