Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Two brief case studies in Web2.0 thinking

I realize there’s already a plethora of examples and commentary regarding “Web2.0″ technologies and mindset, but I gave a short presentation this evening on three points which I believe are key to developing a competitive web-based service. In fact the service need not be web-based, as Sony – being first and foremost a hardware company – has no real core competencies in this space to begin with. However as the pace of software innovation is magnitudes faster than for hardware, it’s much easier to use currently popular web-based services as examples while thinking about how they fulfill the three key points.

Before I briefly demonstrate flickr and 30Boxes as good implementations of “2.0 thinking” (and I’m quite aware of the many other services which demonstrate the paradigm well), think about how they:

• incentivize
• give ownership/control
• harness

For “incentivize,” I want you to think about how the service creates an incentive in the user to hand-over their data. Think about why someone would want to give a part of their personal collection (of anything – photos, music, information) to a service, and how that service creates a positive outcome from the user’s perspective for doing so.

For “give ownership/control,” think about how the service instills confidence in the user that not only is their data safe, but is actually still owned and controlled by the user. Even after a user gives their data to some service, said service makes clear that the user can still set permissions, copyright control, and privacy.

Finally for “harness,” think about how each service attempts to utilize the power of the development community to build on and expand the core of the service. The key admission each service must make is to humbly accept that there is someone smarter who, given the right tools and motivation, could adopt your service and make it even more appealing.

So, keep those three key points in mind – incentivize, ownership/control, harness – as you read through the following two brief demonstrations of quickly expanding web-based services.

Flickr

Flickr incentivizes its users to continue uploading their photos in a multitude of ways, and it’s clear they understand this by the following 4 links in the righthand column on any user’s main page: “Most views”, “Most ‘favorites’”, “Most comments”, and “Most interesting”. Users want to know what others think of their work, what people have to say, how people react to their “contributions” (well, some things may arguably be “detractions” :). Users get a one-click kick in gauging community reactions to their photos. And it doesn’t just stop at comments – people can leave notes right on the photo! That’s pure fun.

At the same time, Flickr is good at letting the user set licensing restrictions and permissions – from completely private to a combination of friends and family, and finally to the entire public. Check underneath the following two pictures – one flagged for public viewing, the flagged for friends and family only. The designation is clear. There is no forced usage of any kind, which instills a certain level of confidence in the user, realizing “hey, I can just use this for backup if I want.” That’s just considerate.

Finally, Flickr harnesses the development community through the obvious – an open API. An interesting bonus for Flickr is not just more applications built on Flickr’s API, but the great number of wrappers around the API in the many other development languages out there. If you follow the links for Perl, PHP, etc., you’ll notice Flickr doesn’t manage any of them – it’s all handled by the development community!

By realizing there are many more creative and inspired minds out there, Flickr is able to harness the community to their advantage, leading to cool gimmicks as ColrPickr and Retrievr (which is based on a fascinating SIGGRAPH 1995 paper), and viable businesses as QOOP. This is just awesome.

30Boxes

30Boxes is still very much a new-comer to the game but has already evidenced clear understanding of the three principles underlying “2.0 thinking”. 30Boxes incentivizes users by making it extremely easy to access personal and contacts’ calendering information from any browser. The service gives control by letting users determine what appointments are viewable – seems obvious, but the extent to which tags are used to customize and exemplify this fact is quite impressive. Finally, 30Boxes harnesses by opening their API as well as making the interface “skinnable” with themes.

Perhaps what is most telling of both services’ confidence is the extent to which they allow users to “take the data and run.” Both Flickr and 30Boxes provide “badges” for users to post desired data anywhere else on the web they want. Nobody has to ever see a Flickr logo or a 30Boxes logo to enjoy the data; both could be relegated to the back-end of another service. And yet, they continue to support this. Fascinating.

So why are these three points so important? As it turns out, any service supporting feedback, control, and integration has the ingredients to create a platform which leads to an expanding service, and every business is at least thinking about how to grow, if not now then somewhere down the line.

Conclusion

Tying all this back to work, if Sony can figure out how to extrapolate these three points to its current development environment (even better, completely flip the environment to best harness the community), then I believe we will once again see truly interesting and innovative products the user community will enjoy. As the internet helps Jon and Jane Doe find more and more satisfying alternatives for products and services, companies with 60 year histories of ignorance and arrogance cannot afford to be so much longer.