"Once we get over the peak of the hype curve, that’s the point where we can move from excitement to effort, from being inspired to being innovative. Web 2.0 is now reaching this important and productive stage in its lifecycle."

Opening Statement

I must confess: I love it when a buzzword loses its buzz. Once we get over the peak of the hype curve, that's the point where we can move from excitement to effort, from being inspired to being innovative. From my perspective, the collection of technological, social, and business trends that was collectively labeled "Web 2.0" five years ago is now reaching this important and productive stage in its lifecycle.

The Web has always been a rather odd technology, with one foot in the land of media and the other in the land of computing. The trends falling under the Web 2.0 umbrella reflect the evolution of both faces of the Web. In other words, the Web has become a platform in both the media and the computing sense.

On the one hand, we've seen the transformation of the Web from a content consumption to a content creation/sharing medium (the "read/write" Web). The contemporary Web is an extraordinary media platform -- an environment for massive social interaction (Facebook has recently signed up its 500 millionth user),¹ content sharing (24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute),² collaborative content creation (Wikipedia holds more than 3,300,000 articles in English alone),³ and so on.

On the other hand, we've simultaneously seen the transformation of the Web from a document-oriented to a service-oriented computing environment (the "executable" Web). The Web has become a powerful computing platform -- specifically a software execution platform, a system development platform, and a hardware virtualization platform.

First, the Web has become an execution platform. For an increasing number of independent software vendors (ISVs), the operating system of choice for new software products has become either the Web as a whole, in the form of rich Internet applications (RIAs), or individual Web sites, such as Facebook and iGoogle, in the form of platform applications and widgets. This has created opportunities for ISVs to:

• Reach new markets and better serve existing ones

• Explore new application spaces and innovate existing desktop applications by exploiting the inherent connectivity of a network-native platform

• Reimagine the software development lifecycle and the management of product releases and upgrades

• Effectively realize the vision of delivering software as a service (SaaS)

Second, the Web has become a development platform. XML Web services and syndication technologies, such as RSS, have transformed the Web into a developer's toolkit of modularized content and functionality components. This has changed the ways in which firms contribute value online, by creating new opportunities for value-added integrators and by shifting the focus of Web-based firms from stickiness (increasing traffic and loyalty to a firm's Web site) to ubiquity (increasing the Web-wide presence of a firm's content and functionality across all sites). It has also provided developers with a constantly evolving platform for rapid application development and an infrastructure for the deployment of service-oriented architectures (SOAs). In addition, it has stimulated downstream innovation in the form of mashups (and, indeed, user-created aggregations) of Web content and code.

Third, the Web has evolved into an interface for virtualized hardware. The "Web as platform" has become an important component of the broader cloud computing vision, providing an interface for consumers to access and utilize remote storage, processing power, and other hardware resources. Most significant, the Web has allowed cloud computing to move from the data centers and back offices of large enterprises onto the desktops of small firms and into the living rooms of home users.

All of the concepts described above represent significant opportunities. However, these opportunities are accompanied by equally significant challenges. In terms of technology, developers must deal with the constraints inherent in a network-native environment, which have an impact on both performance and security. Likewise, the Web interface presents new challenges in terms of both usability and accessibility. Finally, the Web as platform depends on interoperable standards -- at present we face a variety of competing standards -- both open and proprietary. Beyond technology, the Web as platform creates a variety of business challenges, including:

• Legal frameworks for handling open development and innovation

• Changes in the way we deal with customer, partner, vendor, and competitor relationships

• Privacy issues

• Intellectual property

The four articles in this issue of Cutter IT Journal provide a wide variety of perspectives on the challenges and opportunities created by the Web as an execution, development, and hardware platform.

PLATFORMS OF PARTICIPATION

In our first article, Tadgh Nagle and Dave Sammon reconceptualize the Web as platform in terms of four emerging "platforms of participation," a compelling twist on our issue's theme. Leveraging their research expertise in the areas of electronic business and enterprise systems, they describe enterprise platforms, social media platforms, commerce platforms, and community commerce platforms.

While the other articles in the issue focus primarily on the technological implementation of the Web as platform, Nagle and Sammon focus on the business model implementation. Specifically, they look at how the creation and exploitation of one of these platforms of participation affect a firm's value proposition; the management of customer and partner relationships; key partners, resources, and competencies; cost and revenue; and so forth. Their analysis forms an interesting foundation for the rest of the articles in this issue.

INTEGRATED COLLABORATION

In our next article, Cutter Senior Consultant Claude Baudoin provides us with a second perspective on the Web as platform -- specifically, the Web for integrated collaboration. Baudoin begins with a brief history of the evolution of the Web and of electronic collaboration. He then presents us with a key opportunity (the ability to create a rich collaboration environment using the Web) and a key challenge (the need to effectively integrate the multiple components of that environment), examining a range of issues that contribute to the integration challenge, including identity management, user interface characteristics, rich semantic models, and scalability.

Baudoin builds his discussion of these issues around an emerging product from Cisco (the Quad platform), providing insight into the architectural and functional decision making that went into the development of the product. Among other issues, he looks at the role of open standards, extensible programming interfaces, SOAs, and other Web 2.0/Web-as-platform staples. He concludes with a short discussion about the next logical step in this evolution -- the business and technical issues associated with delivering collaboration services in the cloud.

THE PROGRAMMABLE WEB

In our next article, Lakshmanan G, Pradeep Kumar M, and Harish K tackle one aspect of the Web as platform -- the "programmable Web" -- at a high level. They begin by characterizing the programmable Web as a set of APIs providing us with access to channel, collaboration, presentation, and other services. They then identify some of the key opportunities, such as greater connectivity and semantic richness, that these APIs create for developers, users, and firms. However, these opportunities don't come free, and the authors also highlight a number of key challenges (technical, legal, and political) associated with the programmable Web.

Echoing some of the ideas in Baudoin's article, Lakshmanan, Pradeep, and Harish demonstrate the importance of open standards and appropriate architectures for meeting the challenges associated with the programmable Web. Along the way, they provide a useful roundup of the key standards and technologies that have made the programmable Web a reality -- from Atom to XHTML.

THE MOBILE WEB AS PLATFORM

Mobile technology plays an increasingly important role in our use of the Web, whether for traditional content-centric operations or emerging application-centric operations. Thus, one of the questions we posed in our call for papers was "What is the role of mobile technologies in the Web-as-platform vision?"

In our final article, Simon Woodworth and Rohan Beckles take up this theme and give us rich insights into the need for secure application delivery in mobile environments and the challenges associated with achieving this. Building on their experiences working with UniVirtua Ireland Limited's Majic platform, they discuss in practical detail a variety of technologies, development techniques, and architectural characteristics that can be employed to help us deliver a more secure and better-performing mobile Web application environment.

LET'S GET TO WORK

In a recent issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we examined the state of Web 2.0 activity.⁴ In that survey, we asked respondents to comment on their intentions for future activities. We found that around a third of respondents were committed to increasing their activities associated with "the Web as platform" as described in this issue of CITJ (such as rich Internet applications, content sharing, social networking, and so on), and about a quarter were committed to increased activity in the Web service provision and syndication space.

There is a lot of forward momentum out there and a real interest in putting the "new" Web to work. We hope the articles in this issue will provide you with some of the insights (into the technical, operational, and strategic opportunities and challenges) you will need to get this job done.

ENDNOTES

¹ "Facebook Hits 500m User Milestone." BBC News, 21 July 2010 (www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10713199).

² "YouTube Fact Sheet." YouTube, 22 July 2010 (www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet).

³ "Wikipedia Statistics." Wikipedia, 22 July 2010 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics).

⁴ Piccoli, Gabriele (ed.). "Web 2.0 Revisited: Mapping the Evolution of the Phenomenon ." Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 10, No. 3, 2010.

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