After reading What is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly  and Brian Alexander’s Web 2.0 Storytelling for class, it left me wondering where the web is going and I just wrote down some notes and and my reactions to what they were:

In fact, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage.

Websites like Google (always the example) and Ebay rely on the data and bids that are submitted by customers and consumers. Without the large amount of people who are interested in this, it would just be like every other website.

the real success stories show their strength

Websites like textfromlastnight or fml just might be a fad, but they don’t have the power to really survive. You have to be an ever changing website to survive.

. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web

The meteor of internet. Except instead of cockroaches only surviving, only the strong websites have.

the service automatically gets better the more people use it. What’s more, eBay’s competitive advantage comes almost entirely from the critical mass of buyers and sellers, which makes any new entrant offering similar services significantly less attractive.

Like I said above, the more people that join eBay, the better the website is going to get. the cheaper the goods are going to be. cheaper the goods= more consumers= better website. If only everyone could agree to go on one website.

Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page–and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results.

Cloudmark aggregate the individual decisions of email users

Paul Rademacher’s housingmaps.com, which combines Google Maps with Craigslist apartment rental and home purchase data to create an interactive housing search tool, is the pre-eminent example of such a mashup.

I think this is our future. Taking two websites that offer great products, and morphing them. Its almost the same as a music mashup when you take two great songs and put them together. I’m not sure how the business works with housingmaps, but if it works, it can make a damn useful website.

Tunes and TiVo also demonstrate many of the other core principles of Web 2.0. They are not web applications per se, but they leverage the power of the web platform, making it a seamless, almost invisible part of their infrastructure. There’s only a limited architecture of participation in iTunes, though the recent addition of podcasts changes that equation substantially.

iTunes has every song because they allow artists to put in a song if they want, they allow the consumers to have power. It is an ever changing platform.

Real time traffic monitoring, flash mobs, and citizen journalism are only a few of the early warning signs of the capabilities of the new platform.

The good, the bad, and the ugly.