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Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
lamaditx writes "There is a good chance that you have heard about "Web 2.0" — the buzz-word coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2005. You will find several reviews of books about this topic on Slashdot. These cover mainly technical aspects of implementation whereas this book introduces the strategical thinking behind the whole Web 2.0 movement... Web 2.0 is so much more than the technology.' The table of contents is available from O'Reilly, together with a chapter preview. The book does not come with any extras but includes the usual free 45 days access to the book on Safari. When reading a book I usually flip through it quickly to get an impression for it, in this case there are three things which I noted right away." Keep reading for the rest of Adrian's review.
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
author
Amy Shuen and Simon St. Laurent (editor)
pages
266
publisher
O'Reilly Media , Inc.
rating
10
reviewer
Adrian Lambeck
ISBN
978-0-596-52996-3
summary
Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations
First, I was drawn by the the foreword by Tim O'Reilly. Since I have read his article about Web 2.0 back then I came to the conclusion that the strategy guide is a kind of successor. The next think I was looking at is information about the author. Amy Shuen concentrates on business models and teaches entrepreneurship, strategy, and venture finance on major business schools around the world. Amy is currently a Professor of Management Practice at the "China Europe International Business School" (CEIBS).
Secondly I noticed that there are a lot of footnotes on every page which reference other publications that fit the current topic. This is perfect if you want to drill into the details about a specific issue or lack some background knowledge.
The last thing I notice are the really big "End Notes" which spread across 40 pages and the bibliography which consists of 22 pages. This means that around a quarter of the book is additional information. I am pretty sure this fact is due to the academic roots of Amy Shuen and I think it is appropriate for this kind of guide. Actually this is what I expect from a guide — it should guide me through the topic and summarize the overall picture.
After flipping through the book I started reading it — and couldn't stop. I had to travel to Munich the other day — I boarded the plane with nothing else but the book and my boarding pass. I received the book on Thursday and finished reading it on Saturday.
Reading this book is fun for several reasons. I hate authors that put graphics into their books and don't provide you with additional information. That is not the case in this book, all the graphics are easily read (the only exception is a picture on page 5). Most graphics, functions, and screenshots are self explanatory. From my own experience I know it is not easy to find the right mixture between too much detail and too little.
Another important point are the numerous case studies in every chapter. Of course they do not include all information and details but they emphasize the theoretical point and provide you with a good feeling about the business case. Reading these kind of "historical" stories also adds some life to the book. Even though I have written a paper about Google's Page Rank algorithm and therefore a rough understanding of it, I learned many details about the competition between Google and GoTo (later known as Overture) that I did not know. It also teaches you that the effortless looking success of a company like Google involved tough times in the past. Running the Web 2.0 track is not always that easy as it looks like.
Talking about the big names: This book is interesting for anybody involved in a Web 2.0 (or escaping Web 1.0 ;-) ) environment no matter if you are working in a big, small, or start-up company. Amy stresses this point several times as she points out "Your business probably isn't Facebook, LinkedIn, or even something that looks much like them".
So how are you be able to transfer the knowledge you gained from the book to your own Web 2.0 concept? Amy to the rescue. Each chapter ends with a "Lessons Learned" section to summarize the most important points. After that she provides you with a section "Questions to Ask" which cover strategic and tactical issues with these tools at hand. The last chapter will also support you to "apply Web 2.0 strategic thinking to your business". Maybe you are writing a business plan or a project proposal to get your idea started. The last chapter will help.
In the end I would like to talk about the rating I am assigning to this book. I rated it as 10 which means it is "excellent" or one might call it a "classic work". I have not talked much about the content of the book because I did not want to provide you with a plain summary. I expect this book to become one of the "must-read" in business as well as technical classes since more and more business models will evolve in a Web 2.0 environment. Another reason is the well explained and easy to read writing style. Technical terminology is kept to a minimum thus not requiring a lot of prior knowledge.
Adrian Lambeck is a master student in "Information and Media Technologies" in Germany and thinks about starting his own (Web 2.0 ?) business.
You can purchase Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Secondly I noticed that there are a lot of footnotes on every page which reference other publications that fit the current topic. This is perfect if you want to drill into the details about a specific issue or lack some background knowledge.
The last thing I notice are the really big "End Notes" which spread across 40 pages and the bibliography which consists of 22 pages. This means that around a quarter of the book is additional information. I am pretty sure this fact is due to the academic roots of Amy Shuen and I think it is appropriate for this kind of guide. Actually this is what I expect from a guide — it should guide me through the topic and summarize the overall picture.
After flipping through the book I started reading it — and couldn't stop. I had to travel to Munich the other day — I boarded the plane with nothing else but the book and my boarding pass. I received the book on Thursday and finished reading it on Saturday.
Reading this book is fun for several reasons. I hate authors that put graphics into their books and don't provide you with additional information. That is not the case in this book, all the graphics are easily read (the only exception is a picture on page 5). Most graphics, functions, and screenshots are self explanatory. From my own experience I know it is not easy to find the right mixture between too much detail and too little.
Another important point are the numerous case studies in every chapter. Of course they do not include all information and details but they emphasize the theoretical point and provide you with a good feeling about the business case. Reading these kind of "historical" stories also adds some life to the book. Even though I have written a paper about Google's Page Rank algorithm and therefore a rough understanding of it, I learned many details about the competition between Google and GoTo (later known as Overture) that I did not know. It also teaches you that the effortless looking success of a company like Google involved tough times in the past. Running the Web 2.0 track is not always that easy as it looks like.
Talking about the big names: This book is interesting for anybody involved in a Web 2.0 (or escaping Web 1.0 ;-) ) environment no matter if you are working in a big, small, or start-up company. Amy stresses this point several times as she points out "Your business probably isn't Facebook, LinkedIn, or even something that looks much like them".
So how are you be able to transfer the knowledge you gained from the book to your own Web 2.0 concept? Amy to the rescue. Each chapter ends with a "Lessons Learned" section to summarize the most important points. After that she provides you with a section "Questions to Ask" which cover strategic and tactical issues with these tools at hand. The last chapter will also support you to "apply Web 2.0 strategic thinking to your business". Maybe you are writing a business plan or a project proposal to get your idea started. The last chapter will help.
In the end I would like to talk about the rating I am assigning to this book. I rated it as 10 which means it is "excellent" or one might call it a "classic work". I have not talked much about the content of the book because I did not want to provide you with a plain summary. I expect this book to become one of the "must-read" in business as well as technical classes since more and more business models will evolve in a Web 2.0 environment. Another reason is the well explained and easy to read writing style. Technical terminology is kept to a minimum thus not requiring a lot of prior knowledge.
Adrian Lambeck is a master student in "Information and Media Technologies" in Germany and thinks about starting his own (Web 2.0 ?) business.
You can purchase Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
please stop with the version numbers, it's insulting and it's dumb
...sailing the sausage seas!
"Web 2.0 is so much more than a technology." Priceless. I can sum up the entirety of this book quite simply: If you want to be "Web 2.0", develop a web application that is social-based, use plenty of Flash or Ajax (Ajax preferable), and create an API that allows script kiddies everywhere to fashion useless add-ons (preferably that involve cute icons of small furry animals or various celebratory trinkets). That's the Foreword, Prologue, and Chapters 1-5. Chapters 6-10, Epilogue, and Appendices are as follows: The magic behind the Web 2.0 movement is this: the generation of kids nowadays have grown up using computers, are computer savvy, and are used to being online. So websites have become portals for social interactivity. The more interactive you can make the sites, the more "social" they become. So ends the mystery of Web 2.0.
Technical terminology is kept to a minimum thus not requiring a lot of prior knowledge.
Is that really supposed to be a selling-point for this crowd?
Anyone else noticed that almost all Web 2.0 applications are strongly centralised and cannot survive a central server outage?
A "Web 2.0" application being based on a strongly centralized server is a problem of defective implementation, rather than defective concept.
Google is an example of good implementation, i.e. distributed server with no central chokepoint.
Anyone else noticed that almost all Web 2.0 applications are strongly centralised and cannot survive a central server outage?
Partly true, and in that, partly necessary.
A lot of what's going on in what I will reluctantly call the "Web 2.0" world is built around database-centric frameworks. The SQL RDBMS is a strongly centralized approach, and since it was invented in the days of the mainframe, that's not a big surprise. So if you start out with a normal PHP or Rails setup, you've implicitly bought into centralized thinking whether you need it or not.
Sometimes, that centralization is a pretty poor approach, and compute offerings from Amazon and EC2 push people away from that. It's a struggle for some; people who have only built SQL-backed web apps have a strong bias to centralization. It always worries me when I talk with a team that can only talk about "the database" (or "the server" or "the application"); if you grow sufficiently, one of anything isn't enough.
Sometimes, though, centralization is legitimately hard to avoid. A lot of Web 2.0 apps are inherently social, and social graphs are hard to partition. If you are moving to London and want to find people in your social network who live there, that's not an easy problem to distribute, especially if you need things to stay up to the minute and work reliably.
Why are the uber-corporations against P2P? It's the perfect paradigm of dynamic community-based sharing of innovation and ideas, and is the pinnacle of Web 2.0. With all those buzzwords, it must be good for business!
Something for the rich and tasteless to sink their cash into, with any expectations of long-term success being relegated to wishful bar talk.
Also, it's a good browse spoiled.
That's already a problem. Most desktop apps for taxes do regular updates from the server to ensure they have the latest information. They also allow for e-filing, which is another area of connectivity that could fail.
The solution is not to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that it's too hard. The solution is to size capacity for the expected load. Companies like Google and Amazon are leading the way in planning for sudden spikes in capacity requirements.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
These cover mainly technical aspects of implementation whereas this book introduces the strategical thinking behind the whole Web 2.0 movement
Ummmm...strategical?
You DON'T (in theory) have to worry too much about scalability. At least not the infrastructure side of it. So if you're caught being slashdotted, you're OK.
Not saying these services are all the way there yet, but it appears to me that there is a whole class of sites that more and more are likely to have high traffic variability. It can be pretty hard to predict too. Cloud style utility computing is definitely one answer to that.
So it would seem to me that 'learning how to size their solution' may be exactly what web devs WON'T need to worry about for much longer. This seems to me almost inevitable, they are orthogonal concerns. In general such things eventually get segregated into different parts of the IT skill stack, and the less one factor influences another, the more effective the overall technology.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Book aside (I didn't RTFA) and glossing over the Web 2.0 jargon the important change I see isn't the social features you seem to be mocking. That's just an easy facet to focus on.
What's news is websites have become services.
Mull that over for a second if you want.
Now days there are 2 kinds of websites: destinations and services.
A destinations major draw is it's content and it relies on this content to draw visitors and to thereby grow its site. A service will also have content, but like the name suggests a service also provides it's visitors with services and it relies on its content *and* the usefulness of its services to grow the site.
Now if we extrapolate that for a second we can create two imaginary retailers: musicshop01.com and musicshop02.com
Musicshop01.com is a good old music retailer. They sell cds, lps and t-shirts and have a great selection. People love to go to musicshop01.com and find the latest music.
Musicshop02.com just opened and they have a similar selection, but the owners a bit younger with some computer experience and a few programming buddies. People can browse catalogs and lists just like they could at musicshop01.com but they start to notice a few other features: they can create tags, add comments, create and manage lists, add ratings or reviews, view personal history, suggestions, search these items, add friends and send and receive recommendations. The website owner is happy because the cost of this user-generated content is very low (increased overhead) and the users are happy because the peer-generated content provides additional information which can prove useful.
Over time users realize that the services provided by musicshop02.com are convenient and can save them time and can help them find products that they might not find otherwise.
At the same time growth at musicshop01.com has been flat and is now beginning to drop as users become increasingly familiar with the services available at musicshop02.com.
Welcome to the social revolution.
Quack, quack.
Not that I don't get where you're coming from. But the thing that we seem to be discussing when we pull out this useless and unintelligible term Web 2.0 is the real and fundamental shift in the (for lack of a better word) marketplace.
Pundits want to explain it (hi Tim!) businesses want to understand it. But we continuously end up talking about the technologies used (yay AJAX! yay Javascript!) or the days most popular implementations (OMG Social Social Revolution!) while we miss or ignore the simple fact that sites that are becoming relevant today are offering to be more then just a destination by provide users with useful services.
In fact you might argue that there seems to be an increasingly direct correlation between usefulness and relevance.
So sure, AJAX is topical and it helps you achieve some enhanced usability. But the fundamental shift in focus towards services seems to be the more salient point, remarkably, missing from the conversation.
Quack, quack.