• The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Massachusetts lawmakers are considering a bill to punish retailers for leaks in personal data. I wonder how long it will take for a law like that to go nationwide? Looks like there may be some good jobs in retail IT data security opening up shortly.
• There is an interesting debate on the SAAS architecture in Dr. Dobb’s Portal. The money quote for me was as follows:

“Ajax and Web 2.0 are great technologies for casual use, but for mission critical you need the capabilities of a desktop app,” RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte says.

I have to admit I don’t agree with that quote at all. It seems pretty shortsighted in minimizing the capabilities of web based applications.

• As a follow-up to yesterdays entry about the 12 steps to overcome email addictionhere is a 12 step program to help you overcome being a SOAholic. There are also some symptoms you can look for to see if you are a SOAholic.
• Ram Ravishankarposts on if SOA requires web services. He makes pretty good arguments for an against a SOA requiring web services and ultimately doesn’t answer the question. I would say that a SOA doesn’t require web services, but it is very likely in the range of 90% plus that a SOA within a company is going to have at least some web services in it.
• Harry returns from his secret mission and will be back blogging on Monday. I have really enjoyed stepping in being a replacement blogger this week. While my take on technology is a bit different that Harry’s I hope that my entries were interesting and offered a bit of a different perspective on IT.

(Harry is on a secret mission in uncharted space this week, so instead of the daily Morning Coffee post, you get a series of autoposted essays. As this post is about Web 2.0, it’s obviously from fairly old from his previous role @ Microsoft.)

In my previous post, I wrote that I thought of Web 2.0 as the latest evolution of our post-industrial society. This latest evolutionary step was enabled by ubiquitous access to the Internet. We’ve come a long way on that front in just the past five years. Take for example, home networking. In 2000, less than 10% of active Internet users in the US had a broadband connection. Today, that number is just under 70%. At the same time, the consumer wireless router market has exploded. In 2000, there was no such thing as a wireless router for the consumer market. Today, you can buy a wireless router for under $100. In just under five years, consumer Internet access has evolved from being slow, intermittent and isolated to being fast, persistent and available anywhere in the home.

In addition to home networking, we’ve seen dramatic rise in mobile computer usage. Today, laptops are ahead desktops in terms of dollar sales and are expected to move ahead of desktops in terms of unit sales by 2008. Wireless access isn’t available just in the home, but in offices and at tens of thousands of wireless hotspots worldwide. Beyond WiFi and laptops, there is the availability of third generation wireless phone networks and smart phones with built in Internet and media functionality.

These technologies combine to provide a mobile and always-on connection to the rest of the world via the Internet that society is just beginning to leverage.

One of the earliest examples of the effect that the always-on Internet can have society was the original Napster. While Napster’s history and impact on the music industry is well documented, their peer-to-peer approach was only possible because of the availability of fast and persistent Internet access. Music files are fairly large, so Napster ran better with a fast connection. Furthermore, the availability of an always-on Internet connection enabled Napster’s peer-to-peer connections to be available even when the user was away from their computer or using it for other things. This allowed individuals to contribute to the overall Napster experience, even when they weren’t using their machine.

The dubious legality of Napster’s business eventually led to its shutdown. But the idea of connecting users directly to other users is alive in well in legal online services such as Skype and FolderShare.

This persistent connection was the final puzzle piece that has caused a fundamental shift in computing. There’s been more processing power and storage on the edge of the network for quite a while, but it was inaccessible. We needed fast, persistent and ubiquitous network connections to make that power available. As that network bandwidth has become available, the balance of computing power has shifted from the center to the edge. Today,

And in the Information Age, where the computing power goes, society will follow.

(Harry is on a secret mission in uncharted space this week, so instead of the daily Morning Coffee post, you get a series of autoposted essays. As this post is about Web 2.0, it’s obviously from fairly old from his previous role @ Microsoft.)

A friend of mine is doing some research into Internet topics, including Web 2.0. After reading dozens of articles each with a different definition, she asked me to sum up Web 2.0 in thirty seconds or less.

Web 2.0 is the latest evolution of our post-industrial society, driven primarily by the ubiquitous access of Internet connected computing devices.

Got it down to just one sentence and it only takes about fifteen seconds to say. The critical thing to notice about that statement is what it doesn’t include:

• No mention of specific technology outside of “Internet” and “computing devices”. That means no acronym laden techno-babble such as AJAX, REST, SOAP or XML.
• No mention of a specific platform or vendor. That means no references to Microsoft, Google, IBM, Yahoo, Sun or Apple. Likewise, there’s no mention of open source software projects like Linux, Apache or Ruby on Rails.
• No mention of Tim O’Reilly’s principles of Web 2.0. That means no web as platform, harnessing collective intelligence or the end of the software release cycle

This isn’t to say these technologies, platform vendors and principles aren’t important. They are. However, they aren’t what are happening; they are only pieces of the bigger picture. Exploring these individually without understanding the larger context is like the Blindmen and the Elephant.

I’ve recently been reading Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. It’s fascinating to read a book about the future that was written twenty five years ago. His opinion is that the industrial age peaked in the mid 1950’s and that the post-industrial age has been building steam ever since. Not coincidently in my opinion, the late fifties saw the first transistor based computers as well as the earliest work on computer networking. It is because of this intertwined history that this post-industrial age is often called the Information Age.

While it’s been building for half a century, the Information Age is only just getting started when it comes to remaking society. Over the course of three centuries, the Industrial Age saw rise to societal concepts such as the nuclear family, the school system and the corporation. It created the role of the bureaucrat. It separated the producers and consumers, giving rise to the idea of the market. It changed our view of the universe by precisely defining units of time and space. It got its energy from non-renewable sources, such as fossil fuels. In short, the Industrial Age completely remade the world. The Information Age will have equally far reaching effects before it’s done. I believe Web 2.0 is the next step in this evolution.

Toffler identified six principles of the Industrial Age: Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, Centralization, Maximization and Concentration. The relevance of each of these principles is dropping rapidly as we shift out the Industrial Age. For example, weblogs represent a massive de-centralization of the news media. Online retailers like Amazon.com replaced the standardized shopping experience with a personalized one. Digital video recorders and online video sharing sites eliminate the synchronization of broadcast TV.

For each principle of the Industrial Age, there are examples of Web 2.0 companies working against it.