Here in the US it’s the busiest travel day of the year and while media events and new product launches lay low, entrepreneurs and geeks are hard at work building the software that will launch in coming weeks. There’s no better time to kick back and let yourself get philosophical.

Social software is a whole new world in many ways and people everywhere are trying to figure out how to design effective and compelling applications. I offer for your consideration today three recent attempts to articulate social software design best practices. Let’s discuss.

Social Software Elements by Thomas Vander Wal

Thomas Vander Wal is the man who coined the term folksonomy, meaning classification through collaborative, social tagging. (His tagging tool of choice, you might note, appears to be Ma.gnolia.)

Yesterday Vander Wal posted the following slide from a presentation he gave this month in Stuttgart, Germany. Like any good venn diagram, there’s just a little to look at here but lots to think about.

I’d gather, for example, that Vander Wal suggests here that conversation is one place where identity and objects come into contact, involving both relationships between individuals and group membership. If you and I are discussing a photo online, let’s say, then I’d like to know who you are, what groups you belong to and what our relationship is; if not explicitly then implicitly when that knowledge offers clear value to me. I think of it as a thought exercise, an opportunity to consider which factors in design to highlight for the sake of user experience. I’m sure there are other ways to read any single point of such a diagram, though. There’s some smart discussion underway already on Vanderwal’s Flickr page. Thanks to nonprofit tech consultant and North Carolina smart-guy Ian Wilker for posting Vander Wal’s slide.

OpenSocial’s Recommended Practices

Though I like to make fun of OpenSocial by calling it OpenWidget and saying it’s overhyped, there’s probably more meat there than I’ve given participants credit for.

One of the most interesting things to come out of it so far has been the OpenSocial “Social Design Best Practices.”

The recommendations include things like “focus on the 30-second experience; before distracting the user with expert features or sending invites, slow down and give the user a simpler taste of what your application is about.” That’s good advice that a lot of startups could benefit from considering.

Massachusetts design expert Josh Porter wrote about the Google recommendations on his excellent blog, pointing out that only a few are specific to social networking sites. It’s a good, simple articulation of social design principals. It may not be literally visual like the title of this post implies, but you can certainly use it for some visualization exercises.

Factory Joe’s Flickr Stash of Cool Design Examples

Factory Joe, also know as Chris Messina of San Francisco consultancy CitizenAgency when he takes his cape off, maintains an excellent collection of screenshots on Flickr. He saves all kinds of good examples of contemporary interface design in the social software world. I point people to it all the time, now you can too.

See also this collection of shots of websites implementing the Carousel design (like iTunes coverflow) from the Yahoo! Pattern Library.

I’m sure readers here can suggest other good screenshot collections for design consideration. These collections are a lot of fun to look at.

There’s So Much More to Explore!

It’s an exciting time in social media and design is a big part of that. There’s an infinite horizon in design alone but also factors like Adobe’s AIR and Thermo, not to mention the thrillingly tiny mobile world. The new web is supposed to be all about democratized participation (you can not only Read, you can Write to it too!) and usability will be an important part of making it not just sustainable but helping the web really live up to its potential.

For decades financiers of one type or another have been the “Masters of the Universe”. People who, as Bob Dylan once sang, “make the rules, for the wise men and the fools”.

In the 1970’s, with stagflation and oil crises, it was the commodities traders who ruled the roost. As the 1980s kicked in, the forex traders had their day; when Tom Wolfe published Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987, the leading character was a bond trader. From 1995 to 2000, the VCs in Silicon Valley had inherited the formula for turning base metal into gold.

Today the crown is shared by Private Equity (PE) and Hedge Funds. When you see the PE big shots selling shares to the public, you know the PE party is nearing its riotous end. And the Hedge Fund party is getting crowded, with too many lesser talented investors dragging average returns down – to levels similar to buying an index fund (but with massively bigger fees).

So who will be the next 'Masters of the Universe'? For the first time ever, maybe it won’t be another financial asset class. All those assets classes remain and their practitioners will always be wealthy and influential; it's a great time to be in commodities again for example. However, we are at a unique moment in history when power is shifting to creative entrepreneurs.

What are Creative Entrepreneurs?

I was going to just say “entrepreneurs”, but it is broader than that. Creative people – whether they are developers, musicians, actors, scientists, writers or (insert creative type that I have annoyed by omitting) – are the next Masters of the Universe. Entrepreneurs who tap the rise of the creative class will do well, but the trend is a deeper one that makes creative people into entrepreneurs.

This has huge disruptive and destructive implications for big companies which today act as the toll booths, through which creativity has to pass. Hedge Funds that like selling short can take note.

It is of course the Internet that changes everything. Here are the “straws in the wind” that indicate a pretty profound change:

* Radiohead opt to sell all their music online, by-passing the 4 major firms that dominate music sales and even by-passing the “new” toll booths called iTunes and Amazon. They are not the first and won’t be the last music artist to do this.

* Software developers who build an intuitive user interface on a SaaS model don’t need to sell to CIOs to get traction within companies.

* People seeking attention (for themselves, their products and services) no longer need to hire PR firms to get journalists to look at them; as long as they have something worth saying of course.

* In Hollywood, clout has shifted from the studios to actors and directors. Outside Hollywood, the path from YouTube to Sundance (and alternatives) to a growing network of independent cinemas is increasingly well trodden.

* For authors, yet another publisher rejection letter is less depressing when you can self-publish using Lulu.

* For entrepreneurs the VC round is no longer mandatory; with much lower start-up costs, lots of ‘pay as you go’ infrastructure, increasingly active angels and, yes, Hedgies willing to jump in with creative financing when you need to scale. See Fred Wilson’s recent post and Alex Iskold’s follow-up for more on this trend.

Conclusion: Power Shifting to Creative People

I don’t mean to underplay the very real barriers that still remain and the power still wielded by incumbents. This is a big transformation and one that won’t happen quickly.

A big reason that power is shifting to creative people is the reduction in inter-company friction. You can outsource pretty much everything, other than creativity. More importantly, you can use multiple smaller, specialist vendors on something close to a level playing field relationship – rather than being dependent on one big company that does everything to get you to market. When you add in millions of new knowledge workers from what we used to call the emerging markets, you have a formula that keeps the prices down and terms for these services quite reasonable.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

Just a few years ago, large venture firms were incubating companies for months. During the incubation period,
the founders wrote 70+ page business plans, which described the market opportunity, the execution plan, along with
the five year financial projections. The plan was a proof, a risk management tool, used to justify that the idea
has legs and will work.

But this isn’t true anymore. You can’t afford to be in stealth mode for months. Your can no longer build
realistic projections for five years. The only way to create a technology company in this market is to evolve it.

If the way in which a company is built has to change, the way in which it is funded needs to change as well.
What are the new rules for tech venture capital? Where and how should the money be allocated? In this post we take a deeper look.

How Old VC Worked

In the good old days, startup funding was a well a understood process. The founders would write the business plan.
Typically it would be a lengthy document including opportunity, market analysis, competitors, description of the business,
execution strategy staffing and five year financials. With this plan, they would then knock on the doors of different venture
firms – usually through connections, as sending the plan by mail or email was not likely to turn people on.

If all went well, they would score a pitch and get to present to a few partners. Large firms would take their time
to make sure the plan was solid. They would bring in consultants, typically founders of already funded startups, to
look at the idea – to poke at it from different angles. Then, if all added up, they would invest – typically 5M+ in Series A
- and get the ball rolling.

After the technology was built and looked promising, they’d line up for series B with 10M+ and bring in more VCs.
The typical series B was aimed at shifting focus from engineering to business, so a new CEO would often come on board at that point – as well as
an army of sales staff. All of this would take years and cost massive amounts of money.

Why New Is Different

Among the factors that caused a major paradigm shift in technology investment, two stand out: 1) a drastic drop
in initial startup costs, and 2) the increasing willingness of the public to pull technology into the market (i.e. try it, adopt it, champion it).

In the old days, $1M was needed to
even get a technology off the ground – but these days, it can be done with $100K. Because the hardware is cheap, the
web infrastructure (like Amazon Web Services) is in place and software libraries are abundant, creating new software is dramatically simpler.
It is all about the idea, whereas before it was all about the infrastructure.

Image via Cogdog blog

The social web made people more receptive to new technologies; it taught us how to love new tools and services,
and made a major step towards curing the public’s technophobia. People realized that software does not need to suck, that it can be
fun and more importantly useful. ‘Build it and they will come’ turned from a joke into a reality.

If the bottom-line costs of getting a tech startup off the ground are a fraction of what they used to be,
then the old approach to funding no longer makes sense. In the old days, top-tier VC firms would do 5M+ series A in exchange
for 40%+ of the equity. Today, a typical series A is just 1-2M for 15-25% of equity. As it is cheaper to build the company,
large VC firms find it harder to get into series A. The market has created an opportunity for smaller size funds.

Big Firms vs. Small Firms

Large VC funds have hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars under management. Because they engage individually with each
investment (like any VC firm), their most valuable asset is time.

For these funds, having a lot of small investments is
just not possible, they are not setup that way. Instead, they are designed to methodically research and identify the
best opportunities and then deploy large amounts of money in each of them.

Because of the way this equation plays out,
they also need to make sure that they own a substantial stake in each company, typically at least 20%.

Smaller funds do not have this problem. They are agile and flexible and look to invest much smaller amounts.
And they do not necessarily need to own 20% of the company. Fred Wilson, the managing partner of Union Square Ventures, explains in his blog that the “need”
to own 20% of a company is no longer true.

What is going to happen next?

Lots of people have already acknowledged and recognized the coming change. Here are some examples:

• Y Combinator is creating tech companies with a tiny (10-20K) seed investment;
• Charles River Ventures started a Quick start program;
• Jeff Clavier launched a 12M fund for tech startups.

Maybe not all that we are seeing is real and going to stick, but certainly reactions are rolling in. To be able
to get into the game early, large firms need to re-think their play. Doing smaller rounds for less equity is certainly
an option, but the question is – can this scale? Since a VC partner’s time is finite, the answer seems to be ‘no’.

There is an interesting dynamic brewing in the technology VC space. Since the last bust, IPOs have been scarce.
Only recently have some companies gone public, but at large this is still far from a good opportunity. The big exits have
been far and a few between. YouTube and MySpace are the exceptions, not the rule.

Now, putting it all together, leads us to conclude
that large venture money is going to migrate away from technology. Specifically, this is what is likely to happen:

• We will see more smaller size funds and they will be successful
• Large firms are going to focus on series B deals and will have to pay premium for the same equity
• Big firms will focus less on tech, shifting to alternative energy, healthcare, etc.

Conclusion

The markets are endlessly fascinating. If a few years back someone would’ve claimed that
big VC firms would face a tough tech market, people would’ve simply laughed. Yet, here we are and it is true.
This change has led to a new category of smaller tech funds, as well as some shifts of big money from
tech into other sectors.

But just because big money cannot be deployed, does not mean that big money can’t be made.
A company can become big and successful with much smaller investments. del.icio.us, Flickr and StumbleUpon are
a few such examples. But even though the return multiple is the same, the scale is going to be different.
10x return on 1M cannot be compared with 10x return on 10M; and this does fundamentally change the business.

At the end of the day, the winner of all this turmoil is going to be the consumer. Because there will be more
smaller funds making many small bets, the result is going to be fierce competition and superb products.
So here is to change, endless innovation and technology improvements!

Disclosure: Union Square Ventures is an investor in Alex Iskold’s company AdaptiveBlue.

We have written here extensively
about the rise of web services and the transformation of the web into a platform. In our post
When Web Sites Become Web Services
we argued that more and more web sites will open their information via an interface. In our post about Yahoo! Pipes
we wrote about viewing the web as a massive, and in essence relational, database. And finally in the post about
the Future of RSS we looked at the past, present and future uses of the really simple syndication protocol.

Today we will look at an example of putting all of these elements together. Wine.com has
launched an innovative way to expose their catalog – via RSS with the API on top.

Evolving the Typical Online Catalog

Until recently, Wine.com was just a basic wine catalog. It was well designed and easy to navigate,
but it was definitely a web 1.0 kind of site. As the winds of the new web started to blow, the company
realized that it needed to stay on top of the wave. With competitors like Corkd,
Snooth and the wildly entertaining WineLibrary.tv innovating
in the wine space, the Wine.com team knew that they would have to compete for wine lover’s attention and dollars.

As it turns out, the wine insdustry is highly regulated,
and users may not be able purchase a particular vintage depending on where they live.
Wine.com’s catalog maps the vast number of wineries to geographies and ensures that the law is followed.
When the company looked to leverage their assets against the competition, they realized that exposing
the catalog by state to users, partners and third-party developers can help drive more traffic to the site.

Wine.com’s RSS API

Not only did Wine.com open up its catalog, the company did it with elegance worthy of modern APIs like del.icio.us and Flickr.
The API is implemented via RSS, where each query returns a feed. Here’s a sample query (this is not exact query, it’s just meant
to just give you the feel for the API):

http://www.wine.com/v6/rss/rss.aspx?Ntt=+Kendall%2DJackson&State=CA

When you view the results in the browser you get this:

So to the end user the results look like a regular RSS feed. This means that the user can
add the feed to his or her favorite reader and get updates when the new Kendal Jackson wine comes out in California.
But if you look inside the source code of the feed, you will find that each item is augmented with
complete metadata about each wine.

The included metadata contains a description of the wine, price, winery, year as well as tags done as categories.
Note that it would probably be better to use a custom tag instead of overloading the meaning of the category tag.
For example, <year> would be better than having year listed as a category. Nevertheless, this feed
is essentially equivalent to a results of a query against the Wine.com catalog. Each item represents the matching
wine and contains all of the attributes of this wine.

The interface is stateless or REST, since the entire resulting feed is returned at once. There is
flexibility in the query, since the query text can be any attribute of the wine, such as name, winery or grape.
That means that the query is performed against the entire catalog and is based on text matching. This makes
it really easy for the end users, but may present scalability challenges for larger databases. Putting it
all together, we get this diagram:

When an RSS API Makes Sense

What Wine.com has done is simple and powerful. They leveraged existing technology — RSS — to deliver value
to both end users and developers. The reason this strategy worked for the wine retailer is because they needed to provide
a read-only interface to their catalog. Essentially, all the interface does is expose a way to search Wine.com’s database.
Because this is the only requirement and there is no need to expose a way to manipulate the catalog by adding
or updating information, the RSS API works great.

The only downside of using RSS is that all results must be returned at once. If the query is
broad, for example, get me all merlot wines, returning all results is too expensive.
In the case of Wine.com, the solution is to just return the most recent wines that match the results.
A more generic approach found in relational databases and in services like Amazon S3 is to page through
the results using a result set iterator.

It is clear that the RSS API approach would work for any catalog. It would not work for del.icio.us or Flickr
because these services offer a way to modify the information, not just query it. But coming back to the concept
of the Web as a database, if every retailer would offer this kind of RSS API, the web would be much more semantic,
interconnected and query-friendly.

Conclusion

What Wine.com has done is both simple and interesting and it certainly deserves consideration.
One might argue that there is nothing special about augmenting RSS with metadata, but there is nothing
special about any format. What is special is leveraging existing technologies and making things
compatible and interoperable.

The fact that RSS feed can channel metadata can lead to a lot of interesting applications
including, for example, richer widgets. We hope that these early iterations of web services and APIs will
give rise to a new, more connected and richer web where web sites are also web services.

Everyone knows that widgets are the new black. They are cool, they are slick, they are playful.
Cool and fun is one thing, but business is another. We are seeing an increasing number of media companies
and publishers turning to widgets. But why? What is it that media giants expect from these microchunks
of their content?

Apparently a lot. Media companies see widgets as an important new method of reaching audiences both inside
and outside their domains. It seems that widgets cover array of tasks ranging from brand propagation to
instant transactions and customer tracking. In this post we will take a look at how web widgets have evolved
from cool, viral toys of self-expression to important big media tools.

The Origin of Widgets

The rise of widgets was caused by several factors including the adoption of RSS, the expansion of the blogosphere,
growth of social networks, fashion of self-expression and the democratization of the web at large.
Originally, the goal of widgets was to simply deliver a miniaturized version of a specific piece of content
outside of the primary web site. A classic early widget is the Flickr badge, which allowed users
to show a preview of their photos. Clicking on the badge would lead to the Flickr user’s profile page with
all the user’s photos.

In a way, this type of widget is similar to affiliate links, except instead of the payoff being a lead/sale,
the badge owner received an ego boost whenever people looked at and commented on his or her profile.
The combination of the social dimension, the cool factor and self-expression made such widgets work
and they spread quickly on blogs and social network profiles.

Widget Platforms

Once the web widgets became popular, two major widget management platforms launched: Widgetbox and Clearspring.
Both platforms share a goal of helping spread and install widgets all over the web, but thier approach is
fundamentally different. Widgetbox is essentially a marketplace for widget consumers and widget developers.
Developers register with the site, then configure and submit their widgets to the gallery. Users can browse the widgets by
popularity or topic and then use an automated installer to get the widget set up on their blog or social network profile.
You can find more Read/WriteWeb coverage Widgetbox in this post.

Clearspring’s approach is different, focusing on widget developers and widget syndication, rather than being a portal for widgets.
Unlike Widgetbox, Clearspring does not have a browsable gallery, instead they offer API for developers to
use, which wraps the widget into a container that allows Clearspring to track the usage of the widget, handles installation
and offers a viral “Grab this” button (Widgetbox also offers tracking and a similar “Grab this” function).
Clearspring lets the developer of the widget decide how and where to offer the widget to the users.
Recently, Clearspring announced a few major deals with media companies, including the deal with NBC, which
we covered in this post.

Media Companies Get Widgets

So what is so compelling about widgets for companies like NBC? There is an opportunity to leverage widgets
both inside and outside the network. Inside the network, companies strive for audience retention and page views. Audience retention is complicated because readers have a myriad of choices these days and ever shorter attention spans.
Widgets, being typically interesting and playful, offer a way for companies to engage users with their content.
The same information presented inside the widget instead of on a plain web page is likely to be more interesting to the user
and prompt further exploration, thus leading to more page views.

Outside of the network, the latest widgets promise to combine the power of brand propagation (advertising) with
interactive content and even transactions. Widgets are perceived different from advertising, because
they deliver utility, particularly if they have interactive content. For example, the Random House Books
widget that we recently covered on this site lets users search through the entire contents of the book and read
preview pages. The users get a lot for free with this widget, so they are less likely to mind the Random House
branding and more likely to see the widget as a useful tool.

Seeing the benefits of widgets, large media companies turn to platforms like Clearspring to handle the infrastructure.
The media companies focus on what to widgetize and why, while the platforms are focused on how to make the widget
viral, installable in as many destinations as possible, and how to track the widget usage. The comprehensive tracking
is absolutely essential, because it measures effectiveness and lets the publishers understand their audience.

Widget Standards

A major development in the history of widgets occured just this week; the W3C published a draft of the
first widget specification. The goal of this effort is to standardize how widgets are scripted, digitally signed,
secured, packaged and deployed in a way that is device independent, follows W3C principles, and is as
interoperable as possible with existing market-leading user agents on which widgets are run. The spec is very raw,
and mostly based on desktop widgets rather than their web cousins, but it is already showing the direction where the W3C thinks widgets should evolve.

The major theme in the spec is interoperability. This is a big pain right now for widget developers and platforms
because widgets are platform specific. The spec aims to solve this problem by introducing common container API.
This, in a lot of ways, is similar to Applet or Servlet Specifications widely used in Java Community. The spec
proposes that the API focuses on declaring the packaging and the authorship metadata of the widget, as well as letting the widget
know about its environment and user preferences.

Overall it is an ambitious effort and will require a lot of community involvement and vendor cooperation.
The good news is that if this spec gets widely adopted the widget development will be much more fluid.
And this, will no doubt, lead to major growth in the widgetsphere.

Conclusion

Over the past few years widgets have gained wide acceptance as permanent citizens of the web.
Social widgets are continuing to grow and have become basically a standard feature,
since most social sites have them. We are also witnessing growth in widgets coming from large media companies,
as they recognize that widgets offer a unique marketing and revenue opportunity.
Because big media companies are jumping into the widget space, we expect to see the development of
richer, more interactive widgets. It is not clear at this point how long it will take to flash out the W3C widget specification completely,
and it is even less clear if/when it will get adopted. However, we expect that before that happens
platforms like Widgetbox and Clearsping will be adopted major widget destinations and platforms, including Wordpress.

For more Read/WriteWeb Widget coverage check out these excellent posts by David Lenehan
and Graeme Thickins.
What is your take on widget growth? Please share links to your favorite widgets in the comments below.

That’s a dramatic and possibly even sarcastic headline, but it was derived from a real question asked in our current post comparing indie blog platforms Six Apart and Automattic. Commenter jm wrote:

“the other vision is that blogging is dead vs myspace/facebook stuff. Where is the need for a individual expression tool when the whole business is moving to social? they were just pre-2.0…”

Another commenter, Jason, quickly retorted:

“I’m not so sure blogging is dead, jm. New blogs pop up on every few seconds and the emerging markets in Asia and Africa are just starting to be tapped. Blogging has certainly evolved over the past five years, but its final shape has yet to form.”

Obviously blogging is nowhere near dead, but jm does raise some interesting issues. With the rise of MySpace in the last couple of years and now Facebook in 2007, many people aren’t writing personal blogs anymore. Having said that, both Six Apart (with Typepad and Vox) and Automattic (with wordpress.com) are clearly targeting personal – and social – bloggers with their products. So it stands to reason that both of those companies are threatened somewhat by social networks. Although the counter to that is that the overall market pie is growing.

Why People Blog

There are many other reasons, apart from being social, that people may want to blog. One is to focus on a niche and essentially treat it as a media website, which is what we do here on Read/WriteWeb.

Another reason is to join a distributed conversation about shared interests – usually a half social, half work activity. Newbie blogger Marc Andreessen’s blog is probably of that type, as he wrote about today in his Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far post. Marc goes as far to say that “…in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact.”

The Best Blogs Are Social

Marc’s post focuses on how blogging has in some ways usurped traditional forms of publishing (books etc). But I think R/WW commenter jm actually hit on a more interesting tension – between blogging as a social communications tool and social networks like MySpace/Facebook. Matthew Ingram has (as always) a great perspective on this, in a post entitled Do blog comments still matter?. Like Matthew, I think comments are vitally important to a blog. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret – right now increasing the comments and discussions on R/WW is my number 1 priority. The reason why is because blogs are at heart a social medium. Blogs are a publishing platform, sure, but they are a social publishing platform.

Now, we’ve seen some very cynical and exploitative uses of blogs over the past year, along with a lot of stats manipulation. It makes me despair at times, but then I think about how the best blogs have resisted the sleeze and have become platforms where discussions bloom. These are blogs where the writers actually write for their readers, and not just to get page views. A good example is my friend Joshua Porter, whose blog Bokardo is a great resource about social web design – and there are always excellent discussions happening on his blog.

Admittedly it’s hard to get discussions going on a blog, but the blogs that at least attempt it and actually write for their readers — these blogs are the most compelling in my view.

So back to the original question – is blogging dead? Not on your life! Blogs, social networks, newspapers, any other form of publication – all have social aspects to them. It is a spectrum really, with social networks at one extreme and a 19th century novel at the other. But there’s room for all types of social publishing platforms.

Cat photo by junku

This post is a result of an email exchange between Greg Pass from Summize and myself (Alex Iskold). Big thanks to Greg
for his original ideas and the technical collaboration.

We spend most of our time online searching for information. This is not
surprising, since the Web is a vast sea of information, where finding exactly what you
are looking for is not easy. But why is it that when we find something on one site it is
still not easy to find it on another? Say you found a Harry Potter book on Barnes and
Noble, why is it still hard to find the same item on other sites like Amazon and Powells?
Why is search a one time deal?

We are used to a Web where each site has its own copy of the information. Each web
site is a silo. But that does not need to be the case. If web sites agree on how to
represent things like books, music, movies, travel destinations and gadgets, then we
would spend a lot less time searching. Imagine that the URL for the Harry Potter Goblet
of Fire book is this:

http://www.amazon.com/books/j-k-rowling/harry-potter-and-the-goblet-of-fire

In other words, if there was a standard way to turn things into URLs, then finding
information would be a lot easier.

Standard URLs – Web Sites as Directories

The basic idea behind standard URLs is simple – given a type of object, like a book or
a movie or a music album, create a URL schema that can be used by any site. Here are some
basic examples to get us started:

• /books/michael-pollan/the-omnivores-dilemma-a-natural-history-of-four-meals
• /music/jack-johnson/in-between-dreams
• /movies/alejandro-inarritu/babel

First, the objects are divided into categories such as books, music and movies. The
category is followed by a major attribute such as author, artist or director. Finally
there is the title of the object. So for example, if this scheme worked, we could type
in:

http://www.netflix.com/movies/alejandro-inarritu/babel

…to get to that movie on Netflix. Or:

http://www.blockbuster.com/movies/alejandro-inarritu/babel

…to get to the movie on Blockbuster.com.

There are three big benefits to standard URLs:

• Savvy web users can just type in URLs directly, using this naming convention.
• Search engines will deliver more precise results.
• Most importantly, any site can automatically link to the same object on another site,
  saving people a ton of search time.

Extending the idea of standard URLs, we can think of web sites as directories. For
example, /books should match all books, while
/books/michael-pollan should match all books by Michael Pollan. So in a
way, instead of a search, users will be doing a directory listing – which is much more
reliable. If this works, the next step would be auto-completion as the user keys in the
URL. It would work by having the browser query the list of possible matches from the web
site. However doing auto-complete on URLs would be more harder than doing auto complete
on Google search today.

Who is working on this?

Quite a few companies are doing this already. del.icio.us was one of the first
companies to start using standard URLs. However, del.icio.us does this only for tags. So a URL like
http://del.icio.us/tags/books returns all posts tagged with
books. A richer example is the review aggregator called Metacritic, which we covered here.
Metacritic developed proprietary representations for objects, similar to the one we
discussed above. For example, here is a link to a music album:

http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/arcadefire/neonbible

Amazon is also trying to do this, but it seems like there are legacy issues that
prevent the eCommerce giant from fully implementing standard URLs. The example below
shows that there is still the need to have an ASIN (universal identifier for all Amazon
products) as part of the URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Songs-About-Jane-Maroon-5/dp/B00006879E

Possible protocol

The actual nuances of the protocol are not really that important. To paraphrase Dave Winer, it does not matter what the standard is, as
long as there is a standard. This is a really important observation, as a lot of times we
argue over the details – forgetting that there is an important bigger goal that we are
trying to get to. Greg and I discussed specific, fairly simple flavors of the possible
protocol. The main idea is to represent objects like this:

/topic/major-attribute/title/[one or more minor attributes]

Each object needs to be presented so that it is as distinct as possible. The
disambiguation is done by adding one or more minor attributes after the title. For
example, for a book a minor attribute could be a type – softcover or hardcover. It is
important to agree on the sequence of the minor attributes for each topic. For example,
for music it could be year, followed by record label followed by genre.

Difficulties with standard URLs

No matter what the specifics are, it is unlikely that a protocol will be able to
eliminate ambiguity completely. That is ok, as long as it works most of the time – the
benefits will be greater than the glitches. In the worst case scenario, users will see
all matching objects instead of exactly one. That is, in the worst case scenario we are
back to search – except that it would be much more precise, since it would actually be a
directory listing.

Conclusion

Can this actually work? Yes, but it will take a big community effort. Adopting a
standard on a web-scale is no easy endeavor, but this one could be worth considering.
There is a big incentive for the companies as well – they want users to get to their
content as quickly as possible.

Let us know what do you think about this idea.

Even with consolidation going on left and right, the galaxy of sites that make up what we call “web 2.0″ is expanding at a frantic rate (or perhaps that elusive goal of being snapped up by a bigger fish is helping to drive it). So how do you keep up with this ever growing array of web 2.0 sites? That is, other than reading Read/WriteWeb. The answer: via the ever growing array of web 2.0 lists.

A little over a year ago, Richard MacManus posted his List of Web 2.0 Lists. Just 13 months later a lot of those links are dead, or no longer being updated, and there is a whole crop of new sites that we can now add to our arsenal. Below I will endeavor to update Richard’s list with new sites and those that are still in business.

• eConsultant: Web 2.0 Directory – It appears not to have been updated in nearly a year, and is (hopefully) the only inclusion on this list that’s not up-to-date. But because eConsultant’s massive list is categorized so well, it is still very helpful.
• NEOBinaries – These guys keep a large, categorized list of web 2.0 sites on hand, updated Monday – Friday.
• BuzzShout – BuzzShout is similar to NEOBinaries — a big list of web 2.0 companies that you can rate and review. Nicely categorized.
• Go2Web2.0 – A really great flash-based list organized by tags, and a displayed using a dizzying array of logos. Clicking on a logo brings up a concise overview of that company or application.
• All Things Web 2.0 – This is where Christian Mayaud’s Sacred Cow Dung list ended up. It’s mostly up-to-date and obsessively categorized.
• Web2.0List – Categorized by tags, Web2.0List is just what it sounds like.
• Web2.0Logo – A sister site to Web2.0List, but this time with an emphasis on logos.
• Dexly – Dexly tracks over 3,000 web 2.0 companies in 53 categories, including blogs that write about web 2.0 (like this one).
• SimpleSpark – SimpleSpark lists web applications and is adding apps at a frenetic pace. They launched in May and earlier this month crossed the 3,000 applications mark.
• FeedMyApp – The new kid on the block, FeedMyApp launched just this month but already lists 299 apps in 36 categories.
• HappyCodr – HappyCodr is a list of Ruby on Rails-powered web sites. It’s not strictly about web 2.0, but given web 2.0’s infatuation with Rails you’ll find a lot of neat web apps and social sites on the list (mixed in with the occasional content site backed by a Rails-based CMS).
• Startup Search – Startup Search takes a different approach than the other lists in this round up, focusing on the people and funding behind web 2.0 companies rather than on the products.
• Museum of Modern Betas – MoMB is a great daily blog by Saurier Duval about all things beta.
• eHub – Emily Chang’s eHub is another must read daily blog covering new web 2.0 sites.
• Everything 2.0 – Bob Stumpel’s link blog is yet another great daily look at new web 2.0 companies.
• TechCrunch Company Index – Speaking of great blogs, our friends over at TechCrunch review a lot of web 2.0 companies. Luckily for us, they tag each one and arrange all the tags into a helpful company index.
• Listio’s Everything Web 2.0 Directory – Listio’s directory lets anyone submit new web 2.0 sites and then vote on them digg-style. Browsable by tags.
• KillerStartups – Another digg-style community directory of web 2.0, organized by categories.
• Progammable Web’s Mashup Directory – While this isn’t a general web 2.0 directory, many things we call mashups fall under the 2.0 umbrella, so this is a great resource for web 2.0 watchers nonetheless.
• Webware’s Top 100 – The recently completed Top 100 competition from CNet’s Webware blog isn’t the most comprehensive list, nor the most scientific way to find the top web apps, but even so, it’s a list of 100 apps that any web 2.0 fan will want to be aware of.
• SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards – The 2007 edition of SEOmoz’s awards lists over 200 web 2.0 sites in 41 categories.

Conclusion

I think its safe to say that there are more sites devoted to tracking web 2.0 now than there were when Richard made his original list in May 2006. More than a few entries on Richard’s list were links to blog posts consisting of giant lists of web 2.0 sites, which have since evolved into full fledged directories or up-to-date daily link blogs. If you know of any other good web 2.0 directories or lists, please mention them in the comments.

Davide Casaleggio sent a tip to Read/WriteWeb about a video his company produced exploring the future of media. It is a very cool 6-minute video, which takes some educated (and imaginative) guesses at how the Web and media will evolve over the next 40-50 years. In the short movie, Google, Amazon.com and Second Life are the big winners – with Google buying Microsoft, Amazon buying Yahoo, and Second Life becoming the dominant virtual world.

The core future media concept is the Agav – an Agent-Avatar, which “finds information, people, places in the virtual worlds”. Here’s where it gets interesting. In 2022 Google launches Prometeus, the Agav standard interface, and Amazon creates ‘Place’ – a company that replicates reality. Then in 2027 Second Life evolves into ‘Spirit’, where people can become who they want to, via avatars. And then finally, the ‘Google overloads’ moment – when Prometeus buys Place and Spirit! By 2050 virtual life is the world’s biggest market and Google/Prometeus reigns supreme.

Of course it may turn out different, but the video does make you think about where the Web is headed. Check it out…