It seemed to have a big impact on me as it showed how scary the future may be. By displaying facts on how things have changed over the past years, its amazing how  artifical and technically driven the world has become.

To Be continued

RSS is a web 2.0 technology, and could be very important in the world of business. Businesses have only just recently started to benefit from using this technology using it as a communication medium, allowing them to advertise their latest offers and products to the public. This will be one major point that I will raise in my essay as I consider it to be a vital key in the success of RSS.

The position I am taking will be the fact that I believe strongly that this will one day become an essential piece of technology that most users and businesses will find it hard to live without.

I have found a number of resources that will help me with this assignment firstly the O’reilly report touches on RSS and its importance that it may one day have. Along with this I have found a website named http://www.rss-specifications.com that goes into the depth of what RSS is along with its many uses and  what the future might hold for RSS. I have also downloaded a RSS reader known as “Feed Demon” and am using it to receive the latest feeds from Soll Coventry a website that is based upon this course. So that I can give my opinions on the practicality of RSS and the benefits that it brings for myself.

1. Social Ads- These are adverts that will be targeted to users dependant on their profile and what it is the advert consumes of.
2. Beacon – What is unique about this concept is that users will be able to declare themselves a fan of a certain brand, for an example coke. They can then visit their site declare themselves as a fan in this case the company would then send feeds to the fan’s Facebook profile. Which will then effectively mean that the fan’s friend’s will see the brand and may think of purchasing the product.
3. Insight – This is marketing data that gathers information on a user base. Which Facebook will then supply to advertisers.

In my opinion the advertising scheme is very clever on Facebooks behalf. I don’t use Facebook myself but if I was a user I would be very worried by there new platform. From what I can gather from friends that use Facebook, is that by default you are already signed up to all of the above. So the new platform works on a opt-out bases. Which in my opinion is very cheeky by the company, as I guess that many users have no idea about the new changes, and whilst they don’t know about it there data is being kept. Another thing is if you do / when you find out, to opt-out of the advertising scheme will the data they have on you already be deleted. Plus will the sites that have your data from the scheme stop sending their adverts to you once you have opted out. Another blogger shares very similar concerns as myself (see delicious), he has written letter to ask the similar questions that I have just brought up to Facebook. The reply he got from a PR Spokesman was as follows “Users can opt-out of Beacon on a per-site basis. They can opt-out for each action, or they can opt-out to never have an affiliated site send stories to Facebook. For instance, a user that buys The Notebook from Blockbuster can stop a story from being published about it, or she can opt-out of having Blockbuster publish any actions she takes on the Blockbuster site.” Which as Om Malik (the blogger) suggests it doesn’t really answer any of the questions, it seems as if he was avoiding it. So to summarise the question “Beacon and Social Advertising. Smart Move, or Not?” I believe it cannot be answered at this minute as yes it is a very clever way of advertising by Facebook, and I believe it can be successful for them. But on the other hand once more people start asking the questions like myself it may cause a debate in how the data is handled along with how Facebook should be using a opt-in approach rather than opt-out, and this kind of debate could put a bad reputation on Facebook.

Web 2.0 is thought to be the intelligent web, and as O’Reilly suggests in his report we make it intelligent. You my be asking yourself how do we, well it is done by one of the seven principles which is “by harnessing collective intelligence. O’Reilly came up with seven principles on what exactly web 2.0 is and effectively does, I am now going to write a little on each principle, to understand them more.

1. The Web As A Platform – the web is what links us together, wherever we may be. So for the web to be able to as I just mentioned harness collective intelligence it needs as many users as possible. Which is why it needs to be treated as a platform and use open standards. Google is a fine example that O’Reilly uses “Google’s service is not a server–though it is delivered by a massive collection of internet servers–nor a browser–though it is experienced by the user within the browser.”
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence – As O’Reilly mentions in his report “The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence” A good example of this use is google, as it made its breakthrough regarding searching by carrying this principle out. The company used a method known as page rank, where google works out a documents importance by how many times the link to the document has been used in relation to the user search criteria. Rather than giving the user documents with similar characteristics. This is one main reason why google became the leading search engine, and I must admit it was one very clever technique in my opinion.
3. Data Is The Next Intel – Most successful web 2.0 companies have specialised databases. If I was to take Amazon as an example they would have data on every product they have sold, and whom sold them, the price it was sold at. An extract from O’Reilly’s report suggests how important these databases are to the companies. “Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as “infoware” rather than merely software.” So I believe the point data is the next Intel inside suggests to be able to harness collective intelligence companies such as Amazon need to keep mass storage of data, meaning the data is the intelligence in it all.
4. End Of The Software Release Cycle – With this principle O’Reilly is trying to get across that with Internet era software, needs to be delivered as a service rather than a product. Before web 2.0 we regarded internet era software as a product, but the problem with this was that a product goes out of date in a sense as it can never be kept up to date with the changing information, so with the idea of a service is that the data is kept up to date and relevant.
5. Lightweight Programming Models – With this principle O’Reilly is suggesting that using light weight programming we can reach many more people, which is an advantage as it would mean more sources of information, which enables data collection and a more intelligent web. The best way to show you and give you a better understanding of this principle is to extract an example from O’Reilly’s report “Similarly, Amazon.com’s web services are provided in two forms: one adhering to the formalisms of the SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol) web services stack, the other simply providing XML data over HTTP, in a lightweight approach sometimes referred to as REST (Representational State Transfer). While high value B2B connections (like those between Amazon and retail partners like Toys R Us) use the SOAP stack, Amazon reports that 95% of the usage is of the lightweight REST service.”
6. Software Above The Level Of A Single Device – One big feature of Web 2.0 is that, it’s not just dependant on the one platform that platform being the PC. The benefit of more devices capturing information and sharing it between devices is that it leads again to a high degree of intelligence. iTunes is an example as O’Reilly suggests “This application seamlessly reaches from the hand-held device to a massive web back-end, with the PC acting as a local cache and control station.” but what hit me when I was reading his report is that he basically says where will this end, as more and more devices are connecting to the new platform that is Web 2.0. This is one of the suggestions he makes “What applications become possible when our phones and our cars are not consuming data but reporting it?”
7. Rich User Experiences – As I have mentioned many times in this post the main principle seems to be for the web to become more and more intelligent. Like most of the principles this is important for it to succeed, as a rich user experience is required for better web applications (e.g google earth, G mail etc) that will lead to more users using the service, resulting in more information hence a more intelligent web.

When the world wide web was introduced, it was very much considered as a read-only source as it allowed users to search for information and read upon it. As society and culture developed users wanted to be involved in what information is available, and voice their opinions and views on things. Hence Web 2.0 was born, as before Web 1.0 was considered to be as a read only source Web 2.0 is considered to be read and write. A good comparison is to compare Britannica Online to Wikipedia , Britannica is very much Web1.0 as you can search and read a specific article which has been written by paid professionals. Whilst on the other hand Wikipedia lets users add their own content to the website, the entries are firstly checked by Wikipedia to make sure they contain relevant content once passed this check its published. This saves a lot of money for the business as they are not employing professionals to write articles as the general public are full filing this necessity. It also gives the user a sense of achievment as they have had an involvment in helping others. According to O’Reilly Wikipedia is now in the top 100 websites, and in the future expects it to be in top 10, this shows this is what people want, which was the reason for the movement to Web 2.0 technology.

The development of Web 2.0 has also brought some disadvantages to the market, as P2P technology became available. P2P stands for peer to peer, which is a method used for file sharing over a network, in this case the network is the Internet. As p2p grew a new piece of technology was introduced known as torrents. A big pioneer in the P2P technology was BitTorrent, O’Reilly explains very well the concept of torrents “files are broken up into fragments that can be served from multiple locations, transparently harnessing the network of downloaders to provide both bandwidth and data to other users. The more popular the file, in fact, the faster it can be served, as there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the complete file“. Because of this service some people abuse it, and allow people to download music and other illegal content which is a crime. Because of this there is one huge problem in the music Industry today which is sales on music is down, due to this.

Firstly Nick Carr is suggesting that Web 2.0 technology and the Internet as a whole is making fewer people rich and putting people into unemployment. An example he uses is that compaines such as skype, youtube and constructed almost entirely of software. The point that hit me the most was when he speaks of skype and compares the company to BT. A fact that shocked me was that skype have signed 53 million people up to there service, this is twice as many customers as BT have on their books. But skype have one huge advantage which gets across Nick Carr’s suggestion which is that as Nick says himself in his article “Skype doesn’t have to string miles of cable between telephone poles“. Skype only employ 200 people comapred to what probably is thousands of employies that BT have to maintain their service. Another very strong example that Nick Carr uses is the dating services. Plenty Of Fish is an online dating agency that was launched in Canada in 2003, by 2006 it had 300 000 people signing on every day. The amazing fact is that there was only one employee which was the founder of the company Markus Frind. But the company does not need to open an office which a normal dating agency would have to do. All they need is a computer and connection to the Internet. I’m guessing in the future taking this profession as an example there will only be online dating agencies you will find it very hard to find an office some where that does the same as it is alot more costly as you would have a number of staff as well as paying out for the office you would use. But this would put many people out of a job.

Because of the points I made above I can see where Nick Carr is coming from, but on the other hand the comapines using the internet to supply their product that are seemingly killing the existing compaines using the traditional way of doing things with their greater number of employees, that may stand to loose their jobs will have to retrain as computer engineers, software developers or website designers for example. As most companies will need to maintain there software or wish to develop it. But I don’t think every market will be affected for example the travel market, as my father is a travel agent I know that many customers of his, knowing there are offers on the internet would rather go into his travel agency and book a holiday face to face with him as it gives them a kind of reassurance. As to when purchasing over the internet when you don’t always know who it is that is selling you that holiday. Plus if anything was to go wrong with your holiday you have somewhere to go back to and complain to whilst if you were to purchase a holiday over the internet you would have to phone a number and would probably be given poor customer service.

To be honest I have no idea what is going to happen, and will maintain on the fence on this discussion because I can see two sides of the argument and in my opinion they are just as strong as one another.