Ideas

Eric Schmidt's rule about Web 2.0: "Don't fight the internet."

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

Definition of Web 2.0

The Web As Platform

Harnessing Collective Intelligence

Data is the Next Intel Inside: Who Owns Data, Who Enhances Data, Who Controls?

End of the Software Release Cycle: Perpectural Beta, Users Co-Developers

Lightweight Programming Models: Simplicity Reigns (GoogleMaps is a good example)

Software Above the Level of a Single Device: Not Just PC to PC but Handhelds

Rich User Experiences: Bottom Line

from Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0?

3 Problems Handled by Crowds: Web 2.0 Essentially Seeks to Create a Crowd Around a Service or Site

1. Cognition problems: Will have difinitive solutions: how copies of this will sell?  Who will be president?  Who will win the Super Bowl?

2. Coordination problems: Require members of a group to figure out how to coordinate behavior with each other while knowing that others are doing the same.  How do we drive down the road?  How do sellers and buyers find each other? How do companies organize operations?

3. Cooperation problems: Challenge of getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together.  Paying taxes, dealing with pollution are all coordination problems. 

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

three types of innovations: mountain bikes, that math problem from gladwell, that language insight (from gladwell, or maybe use John Nash example, or radio), 

Conundrum of Control

"But just about every industry that creates of distributes content--ideas, information, or creativity in any form--exerts control over how that content is organized. The front page of the newspaper, the selection of movies playing at your local theater, the order of publicaly available facts in an almanac, the layout of a music store, and the order of marching bands in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade all bring significant value to the companies that control them.

        This creates a conundrum for business as they enter the digital order. If they don't allow their users to structure information for themselves, they'll lost their patrons. If they do allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organizations will lose much of their authority, power, and control.

        The paradox is already resolving itself. Customers, patrons, users, and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information. And we're doing it not just as individuals. Knowledge--its content and its organization--is becoming a social act." David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous, p. 133

 

Critical Mass: Striking a Balance

Need to get enough people to keep a service working, but not too many to control.

"That goes back to a major theme of web 2.0 that people haven't yet tweaked to. It's really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data." Tim O'Reillyinterview on Wired.  

"Note that unless there is a large, existing group of participants, it will oftentimes take a few months, perhaps even a year, to achieve "critical mass." Christopher Carfi Prerequisites For Setting Up A Business-Driven Web 2.0 Effort

"I think social network fatigue becomes the major hurdle standing in the way of reaching critical mass." Jon Udell, Critical Mass and Socail Network Fatigue

Brook's Law

Innovation, solutions, great ideas & synergies come from large groups, but larger groups become difficult to control and manage.

"Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later." More generally, Brooks's Law predicts that the complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly. Eric Steven Raymond "How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity" from The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Quoted from Fred Brooks of IBM and author of the book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering first published in 1975 and reissued in 1995.

Trade off Between Efficiency and Service

In services, ideal would be same service for all, but customers have differnt needs, expectations, and abilities, so they introduce variability into services.  There are 4 strategies for managing customer-introduced variability

1) Classic Accomodation--> lots of employees, adapt to customer needs

2) Low-Cost Accomodation--> self-service, low-cost labor, automate tasks

3) Classic reduction --> convince customers to to adjust their expectations, customers compromise

4) Uncompromised reduction --> target customers on preferences,

from Frances X. Frei "Breaking the Trade-Off Between Effeiciency of Services" Harvard Business Review. 93-101 Nov. 2006