Google Base. Microsoft Fremont. Most of us see these as GOOG's and MSFT's Ebay-killers, Craigslist-killers, and newspaper-killers. Maybe. But I think three years from now we will look back at these product introductions as a major inflection point in the development of the Web as a platform.
Web 2.0, such as it is, is a combination of XML and SOA technologies, combined with a community-centric focus to aggregate or facilitate the exchange of wisdom of the users. I think we are going to see that this emphasis on social computing, while important, was the more transitional emphasis. Don't get me wrong. I think social computing is important, but it is only one class of applications for these software technologies.
From what I have read, Fremont appears to be squarely a Craigslist-meets-Web 2.0 project. From Red Herring's account:
"We decided that trust is very important when you are looking for things like babysitting services," said Garry Wiseman, Microsoft's product unit manager. "People should determine who can see their classified ads. You might decide you only want to share them with your email contacts or other students if you are at a university."
That's nice. Trust is important in classifieds.
"Google Base is quite confusing," said Mr. Wiseman. "We are just about classified ads and community. Google Base is more of an open data store."
Bingo! That's the Big Idea. An open data structured content store.
Structure improves retrieval accuracy. Open means generic means breadth. Much more than "classifieds." Any Thing. Any Knowledge.
Fremont/Ebay/classifieds is simply an instance of a structured content store like Google Base, plus a whole lot of important application logic and user interface work.
My guess is that Google will shortly be crawling the web to find RSS feeds that are Google-base compliant, extending past the "submit your data" paradigm. (Of course, it is a small step after that to release an ontology of XML tags to embed some meaning in your web data that Google and others can extract as well.)
Now let's put the pieces together. What emerges is vision of a generic Web platform that could be the aspiration of either Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft, or all three. (This is a marketing guy's rendition; so, the technologists among you may will find I've taken a lot of liberties.)
No one has deployed the full stack, yet. Google has no Widgets or Gadgets, yet, unless you count their Picasa and Desktop search products. None have a payments product, yet. The ontology or schema for Fremont is application-specific with classifieds, for now. Yahoo doesn't have a generic structured content store, but they have had specific structured content stores for a long time (personals, classifieds, etc.) Mashups (a.k.a. Web Applications) are in their infancy.
Why do I find this perspective important? Early stage VCs traffic in ideas and are paid to find businesses that intersect with the Future. We need to have a Theory of the Future to create a context about every seed stage company we see. If you don't have a point of view about the future, you can't have a point of view about future value.
Like all good theories, a good Theory of the Future is constantly tested and updated with observations in the market. My Theory of the Future helps me decide if a new company I am seeing is just a feature in the stack, a strategic component, or a major new business enabled by the stack.
The best way to predict the future is to help shape it.
See you tomorrow.
I would probably have placed the "gidgets/yadgets/midgets" portion of the stack at the same level as 3rd party mashups. Both sets of application leverage the underlying service layer that you exposed. Cheers!
Posted by: Hooman Radfar | December 05, 2005 at 07:48 AM