Transcript From Software to Infoware Tim O’Reilly O’Reilly Media, Inc. www.oreilly.com W3C Tenth Anniversary December 1, 2004

From Software to
Infoware
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media, Inc.
www.oreilly.com
W3C Tenth Anniversary
December 1, 2004
"The future is here. It's just not
evenly distributed yet."
--William Gibson
Desktop Application
Stack
Proprietary Software
(Control by API)
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System Assembled from
Commodity Hardware Components
Hardware Lock In
Free and Open Source Software
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Cheap Commodity PCs
Intel Inside
Internet Application
Stack
Infoware: Data-Rich,
Proprietary Software as Service
Lock In by Network Effects
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Integration of Commodity
Software Components
Data Lock In
The New "Killer Apps"
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What Makes Them Interesting To Me
• The Internet, not the PC, is their platform
• Built on top of open source, but not
themselves open source
• Services, not packaged applications
• Exploring how to become platform players
via web services APIs
• Data aggregators, not just software
• Network effects from user contributions key
to market dominance
• The most successful are “semantic learning
systems”, leveraging implicit metadata
Yahoo! Directory
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Google Search
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Listening to Napster (and Open
Source)
• Three ways to build a collective database:
– Pay people to organize (Yahoo!)
– Ask volunteers to do it (Open Directory)
– Architect for participation (Napster, Linux, the
WWW)
• Setting defaults for what is shared the most
important architectural decision in software
development today!
Listening to Google
• Storage is cheap - save everything
• Algorithms are powerful - leverage implicit
relationships between data items
• In a world of information richness, close is
good enough, serendipity is added value
• Leverage the “architecture of participation”
implicit in the web
Amazon - JavaScript
BN - JavaScript
Listening to Amazon
• There’s more than one way to do it!
– Leverage both implicit and explicit metadata
• Build an “architecture of participation” by
constant small invitations
MapQuest
Navteq
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Listening to MapQuest
• Didn’t build an architecture in which user
participation enriched source data
• Ended up without dominant position - three
vendors (AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft) tracking
portal share
• Control went to data supplier (NavTeq) - the
“Intel Inside”
• NavTeq in turn vulnerable to new data
supplier using an implicit metadata strategy,
with enrichment by telematics, cell phones,
GPS-enabled cameras
Microsoft research photomap
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Social Networking - Orkut
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Microsoft Wallop
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Microsoft Wallop 2
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Dashboard (Nat’s)
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Listening to Social Networks
• Rethink the address book for the age of the
internet
• Loads of implicit metadata in email, IM,
phone usage
• Standards needed for FOAF permissioning,
not FOAF network building - that should be
implicit in architecture of communications
applications!
Flickr Tagging
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CiteULike
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Key Lessons
• Setting defaults for aggregated data is the
most important architectural decision in
software development today! Enrichment by
user activity should be implicit - applications
as learning systems
• Standards should be minimal, encouraging
modularity, interoperability, and innovation
from the edge
“I’m an inventor.
I became interested in
long term trends because
an invention has to make
sense in the world in
which it is finished, not
the world in which it is
started.”
-Ray Kurzweil
For more information
http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource
http://conferences.oreilly.com/etech
http://www.oreillynet.com