Multithreaded

One of the great things about Web 2.0, compared to the dot-com boom, is how much of it is happening in Europe. Living in England in the late nineties it often felt as if dot-com was something that was happening elsewhere. This time around, much more innovation and development seems to be going on in Europe, for example sites like NetVibes, Plazes and others. In addition, Europe is hosting quite a number of Web2.0-related conferences such as dConstruct, Flash on the Beach and, Le Web 3. We also have the Future of Web Apps coming up in London in February and Ajax World Europe in Amsterdam in May.

It seems to me that at least part of the reason for the level of activity in Europe is the difference in financial model for Web 2.0. The dot-com boom was all about investing a lot of money, developing fast and then going for IPO. Burn rates for dot-coms were legendary and the capital was available on the basis that the investors would reap huge rewards on flotation. This, of course, meant that access to the much more flexible and willing US stock markets was very important.

Web 2.0 seems to be going about things differently. Companies are starting up on shoestring budgets and the exit strategy seems to be to be bought by Google, or some other cash-rich survivor of the last boom. The hardware and software necessary to get an idea off the ground is now trivially cheap in comparison to six years ago so the major cost is people. That means that two or three people who are willing to invest their own time in developing an idea can come up with something innovative and viable in a few months so access to a lot of liquid capital is not as necessary.

This is reflected in the changes in capital funding. I am reading that traditional VCs are having a hard time finding places for their moneys. Business angels are much more dominant. These are people who will put up much smaller amounts of money than VCs but not demand nearly so much equity in return. It seems a startup is more likely to go for a couple of hundred thousand pounds rather than a couple of hundred million.

What it boils down to is that it is good news for those of us in Europe (or at least on the edge of it in England) who want to participate in this wave of innovation.

Technorati Tags: dconstruct06, Web2.0

Or at least it is what programming is becoming. If anything defines Web2.0 for me then it is the idea of moving the software into the web itself (hey, the network is the computer!) Web 1.0 was about getting users to interact with websites. The websites, by and large, were (and mostly still are, for that matter) islands. The user needed to hop from island to island to do several things, sometimes copying the data by hand to get something done, e.g. taking a post-code from an address on ons site and copying it into the search box on streetmap or similar. If you were lucky, the website designer had done this simple sort of stuff for you.

Now, however, it is becoming possible to use the APIs which a lot of sites, such as Flickr, Technorati, Amazon, Yahoo!, Google and so on, are providing to produce actual applications. Those sites are building core services that others can create richer applications on. The basic stuff is being pushed down the stack just as with any programming language libraries and frameworks. The system is evolving.

This is heralding a fundamental shift in the nature of programming. These APIs will become standardized over time so I won’t be tied to Flickr to hold my photos, or Google for my maps. Standards groups will form to create abstract APIs and these web service provider will either conform to them or wither. This is the network effect in action.

These APIs are programming language independent. They are mostly specified in XML or JSON and libraries exist for every mainstream language to make calls in those formats. The new applications will be on the web themselves, or be rich, desktop, connected applications. The ‘connected’ app is a powerful idea. Let me use the power of my computer running a proper desktop application talking to a variety of data sources on the web. The iTunes Store is like this. The blog software (ecto) that I’m using to write this does this. It’s nice.

The biggest immediate problem such an application face is what to do when a service that it relies on is unavailable. In theory, any application is like this, but we have become used to the reliability and availability of desktop machines, local databases, etc, that such a failure can be taken as fatal and a small amount of downtime tolerated until the problem is rectified. Web services are not so highly available at the moment. It could be that the service itself is down, or that the network has failed somewhere between us and them. The standardization of APIs might mean that I can fall back to a different mapping service if my main service is down, but what about if I want to get to my photos?

Another reason I like the idea of connected desktop apps is that there is the opportunity to cache data locally so that if I am totally disconnected from the net then I can still work and things will synchronize when I re-connect. (This sounds great, but something I’ve learned over the years is that synchronization is hard to do and few implementations do it well. Maybe there is the opportunity for a web service to do it right and make it easy?) Alternatively, because my ’stuff’ is all on the web as well, if I don’t have access to my desktop or laptop then I can still get to the data and functionality I need via a web browser.

We’re still in the early stages of all of this. The Web2.0 crowd are as small (but growing) band of pioneers and it will be down to us to experiment, innovate and resolve these issues before the whole idea can become as mainstream and embedded as, say, object orientation is now that even languages like Basic support it. It is, as always, an exciting time to be a programmer.

Technorati Tags: programming, Web2.0