Dion Hinchcliffe

The idea of social computing is getting a lot of play these days, most notably this week as folks discuss the fall-out, good and bad, of Chevy’s own large-scale experiement in this space, Chevy Apprentice.  Forrester’s Charlene Li wrote some good coverage about this yesterday, as did ZDNet’s Dan Farber.  For those of you not following the premise yet, social […]

Now that Web 2.0 has had its mainstream media coming-out party in both Newsweek and Slate recently (here and here), I thought I’d take some time this afternoon and try to get a real sense of the prevailing winds.   Before I go further, I would ask all of you with innate dislike of the term to please

Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking with key people from two Ajax providers, TIBCO General Interface’s Kevin Hakman and Zapatec Ajax Suite’s Dror Matalan.  Each company has two quite different approaches to designing Ajax-enabled software and it highlighted an increasingly clear divide in the way that people are thinking about online software.  In these early days of Web

2.63 new mashups a day.  That’s what John Musser’s terrific new Mashup Feed site says is current the creation rate.  If that rate flattens out today, which isn’t likely, that’s over 960 new mashups every year.  Mashups, composite web applications partially constructed from the services and content from other web sites, are taking off with an amazing speed. 

Over the recent weekend I read Ellyssa Kroski’s superbly researched and written new article, The Hype and Hullabaloo of Web 2.0.  It’s a must-read piece whether you’re a die-hard aficionado or a battle-hardened detractor.  The article is essentially an in-depth snapshot of the current state of affairs of our favorite topic. And it’s particularly well-cited with

It’s getting towards the end of the year and I’m feeling the need to take stock of where we’ve actually come with Web 2.0 in the last 12 months.  So much has happened in this space recently and a tidal wave of innovative, high-quality software has been released this year.  So much in fact, that

As I prepare to give a keynote address about Web 2.0 to a DC area technology industry day, I have been looking hard for classic examples of Web 2.0 phenomenon happening at a grassroots level. It’s one thing for Web 2.0 applications to be hyperscrutinized and lauded by the technorati, but it’s quite another for

Are we heading towards an architectural singularity in the software industry? Sometimes it looks that way. If you do a superficial comparison at least, Web 2.0 is all about autonomous, distributed services, remixability, and is fraught with ownership and boundary/control issues. And yet, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is all about, you guessed it, autonomous, distributed services, composite functionality, and is fraught with ownership and boundary/control issues. Sound similar, no? It does

Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era. So said Tim O’Reilly recently in his epochal What is Web 2.0? I would also add that effects from exploits and hacks of open communication networks is a constant threat to their continued usefulness. In other words, network effects can be