Web 2.0 Summit

The Web 2.0 Conference initiated by O´Reilly in 2004 has been re-named Web 2.0 Summit. According the Summit homepage "The Web 2.0 Summit focuses on emerging business and technology developments that utilize the Web as a platform and defines how the Web will drive business in the future. Now that the Web has become a robust platform with countless innovations driving its ongoing development, widespread disruptions in traditional business models are well underway. But within the chaos of disruption lies the seeds of opportunity. We'll focus on the startups and financiers tending those seeds, of course - including the second annual Launch Pad. But we'll also highlight how the incumbents are also taking advantage of disruption, or, at the very least, how they are responding to it so as to protect their market positions". The 2006 Web 2.0 Summit has been held last week in San Francisco.

In a recent post, Dion Hinchcliffe has written about this event "It's been a bustling and busy three days in San Francisco with sessions and discussions on a wide variety of Web 2.0 topics, from Advertising 2.0 and Net Neutrality, to the World of Warcraft and Enterprise 2.0. Given that the Web 2.0 Summit is an executive level conference, the discussion of business models and company strategies around Web 2.0 has dominated the conversation and not the specific techniques and approaches for actually designing and implementing Web 2.0 services and products. Those subjects have been moved to the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo next April, which will be a much larger event expo-style conference at Moscone Center".

Dion mentioned that the leadup to the conference was John Musser's 100-page update of the famous five page Web 2.0 description from Tim O'Reilly, that I wrote about in yesterday´s post.
In the same post, based on Web 2.0 Summit discussions, Dion presented 5 strategies for creating open Web sites and platforms:

1. Liberate content and services via a public, open API. Content will continue to be separated from the experiences that mediate access to it, this makes adaptable experiences possible. Example: RSS readers let users consume content in the ways they choose and have control over. Doing this turns your Web application into a platform and is one of the most important habits of highly effective Web sites .
2. Syndicate as well as use Web services to open up data. Each method has clear strengths such as discoverability, ease of consumption, or on-demand control. Example: This means RSS or Atom as well as REST or SOAP.
3. Make it legal to reuse content. Don't charge if you can help it, consider monetizing it via advertising, transaction fees, or subscriptions. Don't cripple unintended uses, such as Yahoo!'s limits on their APIs, vs. Amazon's profitable emphasis on unlimited use.
4. Diligently build trust and credibility. No one will use your open data or services unless there is trust and credibility in the site. This is very hard to establish and is easily lost. This is one of the hardest intangibles of openness to manage.
5. Expect the unexpected. Opening up a site means that others will dream of ways of using your data and services in ways you couldn't imagine. Often this means they'll use it as a free resource to achieve something that wasn't possible before in terms of scale or volume. Be prepared for extreme situations and be sure to monitor your feeds and open services and be prepared to throttle them for mailicous or inadvertant waste.