Description: Fanpop is a brand-new social networking site that looks to have an impressive growth rate.  Fanpop’s Alexa chart is almost vertical despite having just been launched at the beginning of August, a chart that looks an awful lot like Facebook’s did early on. It’ll be interesting to see if they can keep it up.   The site is squarely aimed at a younger audience interested in fandom subjects of all kinds including celebrities, news, trivia, and much more.  The thing that struck me most positively about Fanpop is that it’s startlingly well designed and easy-to-use.  This is one of the essential ingredients for making a site maximally usable to users from all walks of life.  Ease of use also sustains viral propagation.  The sign up process smoothly walks you through an impressively simple, yet multistep process that makes the effort of signing up and creating your own Fanpop "spot" one of the best examples of the Lazy Registration pattern that I’ve yet seen.  Lots of Web 2.0 best practices abound on Fanpop and its traffic stats show it, including the top 100 posts of the day right on the main page.

Site:

Description: I’ve been tracking last.fm for a while and many of you will be quite familiar with it.  Recently entering the top 500 sites on the entire Internet, last.fm’s product has become progressively slicker and smoother in recent months.  At its core, Last.fm is an online radio station with a compulsive social dimension. Really, to even call it an online radio station is to do it a major disservice. Their music streaming application will "scrobble" up information about the tracks you play in the music player on your PC and then use this information to carefully tailor music selections for you. It’s very Web 2.0-like in that the more you use the service the better it gets.  Like the other sites profiled here, last.fm seems to be growing steadily, its recent growth very likely having to do with some of the social sharing tools they make available to make your personal musical data available on MySpace, LiveJournal, and others.  This of course spreads awareness of last.fm virally on the major social networks.

One things I was surprised to see was the number of fairly well trafficked social networking sites, but a great many of them have fairly static or dropping traffic patterns.  So, in the spirit of Web 2.0, please submit your favorite ones below if you genuinely think they have breakout promise in the next year….

Despite being considered so ten minutes ago in some corners of the the Internet, Time Magazine has selected Web 2.0 — in particular those people that are directly shaping it — as its esteemed Person of the Year.  Specifically, Time Magazine has singled out you for recognition in this achievement and as the actual source of the exciting things happening on the Internet and in society today.  Yes, that's you, reading this right now.  At least if you've been contributing to the Web in some way using the increasingly ubiquitious tools and technologies ranging from the basic blog or wiki all the way up to video sharing platforms and social bookmarking sites. 

But the truth of the matter is that just about any interaction with the Web at all generates new content of use to someone else (the so-called Database of Intentions ) and so that means frankly, if you're currently using the Web today even just to surf, you've become an integral part of this.  "This" being a new generation of openness, sharing, and community powered by the Web that some think may be recognized in hindsight as breaking down important cultural barriers and institutions in a very similar fashion as what happened in the 1960's.  True, it often doesn't seem like a revolution to us that see it growing bit and bit every day, but taken as a whole, there's now little doubt that the Web has become the most powerful, egalatarian, and knowledge rich platform in human history.  Rapid evolution appears to have accelerated into a sort of revolution.

The Person of the Year cover story appears with the tagline that "in 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. The cover story's lead author Lev Grossman then starts off with some fairly inspired prose after noting that there are still serious problems in the word which aregrowing in conjunction with this apparent technological Utopia, writing:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The cynical among us will find some of Lev's analysis to be starry-eyed and excessively optimistic, but calling out Web 2.0 by name, the Person of the Year cover story makes careful note that the mass participation we're witnessing on a grand scale on the Internet cuts both ways:

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But the lead story is just the beginning and Time has prepared an extravaganza of supporting material and documention in the form of fourteen separate stories that range across the Web 2.0 terrain covering subjects from online virtual worlds such as Second Life to an article titled in near purple prose fashion: "The Beast With a Billion Eyes -  On the Web, anyone with a digital camera has the power to change history."

None of this however is likely to please most of us who have lived through the year of Web 2.0, as 2006 undoubtedly was its big break with the term making the covers of major media properties like Newsweek and The Economist .  In terms of the blogosphere, the self-appointed contributors that are making some of this this happen, the commentary on Time's choice covered the spectrum: Jeff Jarvis agreed with most of what they wrote, just requested that they turn down the volume a bit.  Nick Carr took it surprisingly easy on the article, though he's long since posted his opinions of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.  Paul Kedrosky came in as one of harshest critics of the story series and accused it of being a blatent cop-out, what with more important issues existing elsewhere in the world needing to be highlighted. With this altter bit I would suggest that the printing press didn't get much credit at the time but it's impact was practically profound and beneficial when looking back several hundred years.

In reality, the Web as it exists today with sites like MySpace and YouTube which eagerly offer anyone who wants it an essentially permanent, scalable "channel" of their very own on the Internet, makes it possible for anyone with great — or at least interesting — ideas to reach the over 1 billion users that presently comprise the Web.  Never before in history has access to the largest audience of users in the world been essentially free other than the personal time it takes to contribute.  The long-term of effects of this will no doubt be as unpredictable as they will be significant as the control over information and content becomes relentlessly decentralized.  The Web is essentially a system without an owner, a platform that is under no one's control, though anyone is free to built a new platform on top of that.  Companies have had varying success in doing just that but the design patterns and business models for making the Web work best are at least beginning to be understood (aka Web 2.0).  But in the end, control is shifting to the edge of the Internet instead of the center and it's not likely to shift direction without extremely potent motivation.

The aftershocks of all this (the shift of control, pervasive ability of anyone to trigger inflection points, etc) have sometimes been called Social Computing, and it will be long in unfolding.  Companies and organizations that continually hand over more non-essential control to their employees, customers, and suppliers will almost certain be the big winners here.  We have plenty of examples to cite already.  The sudden pervasiveness of the two-way, participatory sites and tools powered by network effects and feedback loops have quickly remade the online landscape and Time has decided it is as big an event at least as it famously did in the 1980s by making the personal computer Person of the Year.  I would wager however, the Web 2.0 is probably a more significant event by a good margin that even the PC was.  Although the precise definition of Web 2.0continues to evolve, the fundamental effect, the harnessing of collective intelligence is the one that has the genuine potential to fundamentally remake our cultures, societies, businesses and even, as Lev Grossman states, "change the way we change the world.

What do you think?  Is Web 2.0 evolution or revolution?  Why?

Of course, creating participatory, two-way political communities on the Web is nothing new to politcs. In fact, as the 2008 presidential campaign ramps up, expect to see more of this as partisan and non-partisan political groups attempt to get people to participate and self-organize in local and national election processes.  Yet influential folks in the world of social software, like Clay Shirky, seem to think that things like Deanspace, one of the success stories of the last election cycle, ultimately didn’t have any real effect.  With online communities and the tools to support them getting better, this time might be different however.  It will be interesting to see how well Wales does with Campaigns Wikia, particularly since he does have the track record for creating successful audiences around his wiki creations.

In fact, in my recent explorations of why certain Web 2.0 sites grow so quickly, I talk about how they exploit the incredible power of network effects by harnessing ther users’ collective intelligence.  My concern primarily with Campaigns Wikia is that wikis generally do not have a sufficient positive feedback loop to create the kind of viral growth that will make much difference on the national stage.  It’ll be intriguing to see what Campaigns Wikia does to trigger the necessary audience ramp up and sustained participation.

What will also be fascinating to track is whether Web 2.0’s infamous inversion of control, known increasingly for its ability to upend traditional hierarchical power structures by handing control to users, will have much actual effect in the gritty, hard nosed world of vote getting and election politics.  Online discussion, community, and self-organizing political groups are wonderful things, but may not matter much to the traditional, enclosed command-and-control campaign processes, particularly at the presidential election level.  This is what Deanspace apparently ran into ("support isn’t votes") and this isn’t likely a solved problem yet.

That’s not to say I’m not a big believer in the effectiveness of grassroots use of Web 2.0 techniques to ultimately change reality for the better.  My favorite anecdote about self-organizing efforts to achieve real world change using Web 2.0 is still the incredible story of Katrinalist and the PeopleFinder project.  I also covered another Web 2.0-in-politics story, Democracy 2.0, in my popular Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005, and there are many more similar examples.  There truly is vast upside potential here and, like Enterprise Web 2.0, those that figure out how to exploit it have the potential to reap huge rewards. But I certainly think the ball is up in the air for exactly who will make it happen next in the political arena.

I wish Wales the best of luck with Campaign Wikia and I do suspect he’ll have a good measure of success.  But my bet is that we’ve not yet seen the online source of political disruption and success in the next election cycle.  Web 2.0 can be a very disruptive force and will potentially be a significant one in the 2008 political story.

Watch a TV panel that I was on with Google’s Adam Bosworth on how the improvements to the physics of the Internet have enabled Google’s newer products, particularly around SaaS and Ajax.

I wrote recently about the trend of Web 2.0 reductionism that is helping us get to Web 2.0 fundamentals and assisting us in understanding why it’s such a game changer.  The upshot is that the Web is rapidly evolving and is increasingly being shaped by its users.  If you’re not entirely sure that this is really a big deal though, you have only to look at the example of MySpace.  MySpace is as pure a Web 2.0 play as you’re likely to find and they’ve exploited user generated content and network effects to become the #1 visited site on the Web (as of last week), from out of practically nowhere two years ago.  This is an extremely impressive achievement and shows the power of Web 2.0 techniques to quickly best even the very largest and most established industry leaders, including Google and Yahoo!  This demonstrates that the successful exploitation of what has been labelled "Web 2.0" can be an extremely disruptive force.  People are sitting up and taking notice.

Of course, in a few years the exact design patterns for triggering a new MySpace, Facebook, or similar social juggernaut will become common.  Then most likely balance will be reachieved in the industry and there will be less disruption.  But for now the secret balance of Web 2.0 techniques that powers growth through efficient access to network effects is still an art (read my Notes on Making Good Social Software for an idea of how these design patterns might look however).  The bottom line: the upside and downside potential of Web 2.0 is truly significant.  And it means that in most industries doing nothing is really no longer an option.

But let’s talk about network effects for a minute.  What are they?  I’ve written before that the core description of a network effect  is when a good or service has more value the more that other people have it too.  Easy so far right?  Examples include e-mail, IMing, the blogosphere, and even the Web itself.  But what’s not clear from this description is the raw power that is caught up in and represented by network effects.  Most rigorous studies and mathematical formulations reveal that there is tremendous geometric power in network effects.  Though Robert Metcalfe originally coined Metcalfe’s Law to describe the raw potential of network effects in computer networks, most recent formulations have attempted to capture the exact value of them more precisely.  Most notable has been David Reed with his relatively well-thought out and profound  Reed’s Law, as well as Odlyzko and Tilly with their work.  However, whichever formulation you believe is right (and Reed’s Law, if true, has staggering implications in this regard), the result is clear: At even an early point, the cumulative value of a large number of connected users goes exponentially off the charts.

So what do you do?  Most of us will soon face situations where the person or organization we’re competing against will be trying to use these same techniques to gain advantage, marketshare, or whatever.  Agile development processes have taught us in recent years that that the tightest closed feedback loops resulted in better products, faster.  The Web is now allowing feedback loops of this kind between staggering numbers of non-centrally coordinated people from a ready -to-tap worldwide audience.  Emergent content, communities, and unintended results are all side effects of systems (and yes, your enterprise) with rampant network effects.  Learning how to channel these feedback loops and the resulting network effects constructively will become a significant competitive advantage and a required core competency across the majority of professional disciplines in the very near future.

Read David Berlind’s excellent overview of Eventful and how they are using Web 2.0 techniques to be successful

But is this really happening?  Is the competitive landscape about to be torn up?  Are companies starting to respond?  It does appear so.  For one thing, I’m increasingly seeing traditional organizations trying to do things like "MySpacing" their current product offerings.  Everything from Starwood Resorts to major national interest groups are looking at creating business communities that are really viral social networks powered by their users.  It is a fascinating time to be building or reinventing a business. And if you haven’t started, now is probably the time to begin the effort.  And worry not if you can’t figure it all out right now, the entire world is still trying to figure out how it applies to them too.

I was traveling most of last week and so was unable to weigh in on the Web 3.0 mini-tempest that occurred when John Markoff published his exploratory piece in the NY Times last Sunday.  The premise of the article is that we are finding new ways to mine human intelligence which can be exploited by building a new layer of "meaning" on top of the accumulating mass of global collective intelligence that is growing by leaps and bounds every day on the Internet.  Collective intelligence of course is one key aspects of Web 2.0, namely an Internet that is continually improved by constant and sustained contact with hundreds of millions of users contributing content.  These users can either contribute explicitly via a conscious act or implicitly by their very interaction with the Web which then leaves behind useful behavioral "tracks" that can be fed back into the system.  In this ways, hundreds of millions of people are adding to what we know every day, even if individuals contributions are often minor.

Markoff's description of Web 3.0 was ostensibly prompted by something I'm seeing as well, well beyond pure play Web mashups we're beginning to witness a number of companies building end-user solutions that can automatically navigate the Internet, weave together tapestries of online information to generate new, useful results. They can even take it a step beyond: dynamically generated situational Web applications that fully interact with the Web ecosystem.  Such applications — self-assembled by these tools — can perform useful tasks such as planning vacations, managing personal schedules, or even orchestrating complex, collaborative business processes for example including entire real-world projects.  The vision is stunning and futuristic yet and the rich fabric of the Web today, with hundreds of open APIs and even vaster reservoirs of content and raw data, now opens the door to the possibility.

Background Reading: Take a look at eight end-user mashup platforms available today 

I've written a lot recently about the trend of user generated software, applications developed by end-users that use the openness of the Web 2.0 era to interact with high value Web services.  But already we're beginning to see the emergence of the next step beyond that: applications developed and tasks completed intelligently by software itself.  Tim-Berners Lee himself envisioned this as the coming Semantic Web which he brilliantly espoused in Scientific American a few years back and has been the goal of great many companies ever since, but which has been relatively unsuccessful on a large scale even up until now.  The reasons for this are complex but seem to lie in what we learned from Web 1.0; a priori solutions often aren't the right ones, emergent ones are .

So while many might say that the 1,200+ mashups currently listed in the trend graphs on Programmable Web are mostly NOT user generated, one only has to look at the widespread use of badges and widgets on MySpace and other major social networking sites to see that everyday people are getting more and more comfortable with "turfing" their blogs and spaces with content, code, and feeds from elsewhere on the Web.  So while much of the end-user mashup activity we see today is probably shallow and don't represent sophisticated functionality, the new tools we're seeing every day are getting better and better and allowing users to take it deeper, creating a true mashup ecosystem.

The shortage of developers and application backlogs: Not finding the app you need

Here's an significant fact, if you look at the number of professional software developers out there today, they are dwarfed by the number of end-users with the time and motivation to describe the solutions that they need.  And interestingly, the same population is dwarfed by the potential output of computer systems that can be directed to create the applications or carry out the tasks we need, with minimal continuous attention on our part.

If you only look at the enterprise IT space you will see that users usually have a long list of things for which they'd like software solutions, but can't get satisfied by the traditional purchase or build processes in place in most organizations.  Every CIO out there is painfully aware of this application backlog but hasn't had the tools to address it.  And out on the Web, there's a different problem: Lots of Web sites, but little software that will do the specific things that a users needs to get accomplished.  As Steve Borch says , "sit back, relax, and let your customers create your products."

Like IBM is realizing with their exploration of end-user driven development products like QEDWiki, most of us today are already conducting much, if not most, of our software integration manually, by re-entering or cutting and pasting data endlessly between our applications.  This implies that 1) there's demand but not enough access to software that does exactly what people want and 2) there is a very low level of integration between the dozens of pieces of software that we currently use on a daily basis.

And in fact, there really is at least two ways for Semantic Web technologies (and its myriad offshoots, many of them proprietary) to improve the way that we use the Internet.  The first is in fact to provide that "layer" of meaning; making the underlying intent services and content to be made clear to programs and not just developers.  And the second is to actively exploit that layer; building software or carrying out processes intelligently on the behalf of users. 

Traditional software isn't adaptable enough: Mashups and Semantic Web Apps are a better way to do things on the fly 

Need a piece of software to manage the process of planning a wedding and its long list of attendees, suppliers, and dependencies?  How about something to coordinate the delivery of construction materials to a job site for the least total cost including materials and shipping, just in time and in the correct order as the items on the construction schedule are completed?  The possibilities in the consumer and business worlds both are truly endless and reflect that such software can at long lat perhaps fill The Long Tail of IT software demand , which could never cost effectively serve the thousands of mass customized applications that would potentially make using software a dream instead of the chore that it often becomes due to the fact that processes and not just data is what needs to be managed.

And while this — and by "this" I mean recombinant, self-assembling software that exploits collective intelligence — is certainly the cutting edge of software development, many companies are beginning to map out this terrain closely and I encourage you to begin tracking them along with me.  Startups and initiatives such as JackBe, Teqlo, OpenKapow, Itensil and a great many others are either wholly or partially enabling the automation of software creation and process management. Interesting, they are usually not via true Semantic Web technology, but by virtue of open, simple, easy-to-describe-and-consume services of the Web 2.0 generation .

This brings us to my last point.  In a panel earlier this year with Adam Bosworth and other notably Web lumuniaries, I responded to an audience question about the difference between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web by saying "Web 2.0 is what happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web." And that highlights an interesting point, that this latest generation of tools appears to be built on simple yet proprietary approaches and not on the open but formal Semantic Web technologies.  Whether this points to underlying issue with the usability of Semantic Web 1.0 is hard to say but RSS 1.0 ran into the same issue.  Thus I call this next generation of approaches the "Pragmatic Semantic Web." But I am a bit concerned about the lack of standards and this will be something to watch as we see if this next generation of online software is truly ready to sprout wings and fly. 

What other Web 3.0/Pragmatic Semantic Web companies or projects do you know about?

It's been approximately 18 months since Jesse James Garrett fatefully coined the term that would go on to nearly reinvent the face of Web development.  A lot has happened in the last year and a half, including the Web 2.0 phenomenon getting into high gear, the creation or resurrection of many a company building or using rich Internet technologies, and the proliferation of really great dynamic, online software.  It's clear that Ajax as a name, a concept, and a popular browser development technique is here to stay, and our Web applications will never be the same again.

While most of us know that the Ajax approach was fairly well known before the term ever came about, the timing was apparently just right for the idea of Ajax to capture our imagination and apply such a pithy name to an important new development trend.  And just as powerful browsers, high-speed connections, online software trends, and development tools were reaching the sweet spot that needed to form for Ajax to be popular, so also came the embrace of a world extremely interested in turning their boring, static Web pages into full-blown, sophisticated applications.  Since then, I've heard of or seen literally hundreds of Ajax products, tools, utilities, debated the disruptive potential of Ajax, speculated about how Ajax will be the face of our SOAs , and even watched as RIA technologies in general have risen up that truly complement the few things that Ajax does not do well, such as multimedia.

Along the way, the Web development community has learned a lot about Ajax including its strengths and weaknesses, appropriate uses, and its inevitable foibles.  So to inaugurate the first print edition of a dedicated Ajax print periodical (see below for details), I thought I'd share my perspective on what I think we've learned in our 18 month journey to remake the face of the Web and the browser.  Ajax has indeed helped give us the next major new platform for software, almost certainly forever surpassing our desktop operating systems as place we develop and use most of our software applications, consumer and business both.  As always, this merely represents my opinion…

What Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax

1.  The Browser Was Never Meant For Ajax.  About a week into your first Ajax serious application you'll discover that Ajax pushes the browser nearly beyond its limits and there are definite lower engineering tolerances to get used to. The fact is, without powerful 3rd party development tools, designing clean Javascript software of any size requires some genuine discipline and effort.  So too does Ajax debugging applications in multiple browsers (a real headache), and doing any serious background processing or threading can require heroic measures, particularly if you're mixing in other components that use the rather limited number of simultaneous timers available.  The good news: Simple Ajax — sprinkling in a little DHTML — is much less daunting than Ajax In The Large.  But be warned and be prepared to scale up your level of development and testing effort significantly with each doubling or trebling of your application size.
2. You Won't Need As Many Web Services As You Think.  I used to think that going the Ajax route required the development of a bunch of new Web services in order to feed the application data and provide a backing store.  In reality, I'm finding a great many projects are quite happy to scrape HTML and/or use plain old HTTP POSTs to existing service endpoints that have no formal Web service structure.  This is further turning the tide towards Ajax by making it very, very easy to "dip your toe" into Ajax development and reuse almost any preexisting HTTP service on the back end instead of SOAP or REST/WOA.  While this can encourage poor architectural choices, it does make very incremental conversion to Ajax almost effortless and turns out to be a natural thing to do, though it can certainly lead to headaches later.
3. Ajax Is More Involved Than Traditional Web Design and Development.  The loss of HTML user interface conventions, the almost limitless potential for hidden or latent functionality, the programmatic creation of page elements instead of declarative, and other intrinsic aspects of the Ajax approach throw out much of what we know about Web design and development.  Web designers must much more deeply understand the capabilities of the DOM, Javascript, CSS, and how the browser renders graphics, layouts, and elements.  Developers find testing both difficult and tedious.  Though tooling is continuing to improve across the board, it will take years for the industry to develop best practices, lore, patterns, and shared knowledge to make Web application development straightforward.  Huge kudos to folks like Yahoo!'s Bill Scott for trying to fix many of these problems — particularly the loss of GUI standards — by actually moving the state of the art considerably forward with things like the Yahoo! UI Design Patterns library.  The bottom line: Ajax development, at least for now, usually takes quite a bit longer than traditional Web development and requires a higher level of skill.
4. Ajax Tooling and Components Are Still Emerging and There Is No Clear Leader Today.  Though Dojo is getting one heck of a running start, the race is very far from over.  For instance, the Dojo framework itself is still just at version 0.3.  And close at its heels are an amazing range of tools, frameworks, and component libraries.  Though OpenAjax will make this mosaic of products play nicer, most developers will get deep experience with two or three of them and stick with them. For now, I would say deeply committing to a particular product is usually not the best idea.  Innovation, competition, and market leadership is likely going to bounce around for a while.  In the meantime, be sure to check out script.aculo.us, Prototype, Google Web Toolkit, Yahoo! UI Library, JackBe, Zapatec, Bindows, Nexaweb, General Interface, Backbase, ActiveWidgets, and last but not least Microsoft Atlas. There are many others and I encourage you to look at Max Kiesler's roundup of 50 Ajax frameworks, with many others in the comments (and growing).  Finally, Microsoft's Harry Pierson has diligently taken me to task for my Ajax spectrum comments, noting that Microsoft actually has more serious experience fostering an interoperable component community than just about anyone else.
5. Good Ajax Programmers are Hard to Find.  Zimbra's Scott Dietzen has lamented recently about the real difficulty in finding good Ajax talent.  See point #3, but building sophisticated Ajax applications requires more computer science skills much more than it does Web design skills.  And I find that experienced programmers tend not to enjoy Javascript programming and debugging. This too shall pass, but not for a few years, and not for a good while in the Bay Area.
6. One Must Actively Address Ajax's Constraints of the Browser Model.  Though the final result can be very rewarding, Ajax is not a perfect Web development approach and it has a few genuine weaknesses.  One is that it tends to break the model of the Web including preventing users from bookmarking content, breaking the use of the Back button, and more.  Fortunately, smart folks like Brad Neuberg have addressed much of this, as long as you're willing to put out the effort and understand why it's important to recover this functionality.  Ajax also lacks much of what still makes desktop software a strong contender; the ability to run disconnected from the network and access to local disk storage, though Flash local storage and the upcoming Apollo platform can help address this.
7. Ajax Is Only One Element of a Successful RIA Strategy. As I've written before, the addition of RIA platforms such as Flex, OpenLaszlo, and WPF/E to a RIA strategy is virtually required to properly exploit the range of capabilities you'll want robust online applications to have.  This is particularly true around rich media support such as audio and video — which Ajax is virtually incapable of — but even such mundane things as good printing support.  These are all things that the more sophisticated Flash-based RIA platforms really shine at and are easier to program in to boot.  Ajax will increasingly get a serious run for its money from these platforms, particularly as they provide back-end server support for things like server-side push, formal Web services, enterprise environments, and more.

There are certainly other things software projects should know about Ajax but this is plenty of crucial food for thought.  Looking ahead, we see the growing trend of in-browser mashups which is making the habit of combining pulling together — entirely on the fly — sets of Ajax components, Javascript snippets, and Flash widgets from all over the Web into a new set of often user-generated ad hoc software .  Backed by the growing Global SOA , online Ajax components such as Google Maps, that can be referenced over the Web by a line of Javascript, and you have a recipe for an increasingly emphasis on assembly and glue instead of "green field" development of RIAs.  This is an important use of the Web that I've called the "mashosphere" for the lack of a better term, which ushers in a whole new era of dependency and configuration management problems.  The rich palette of software components and high value services on the Web will be a irresistable siren call for developers and expect more and more Ajax applications to be mashups in one form or another.

But all of this talk of the evolution of Ajax does bring up some exciting new industry events… 

The next Web 2.0 Conference will be upon us in early November and things are busier than ever in the Web 2.0 world.  Along the way, I've managed to miss the one year anniversary of this blog, which I began back in late September of last year.  There have been over 2.5 million direct hits on this site since inception, a large percentage of it due to my Web 2.0 lists such as last year's Best Web 2.0 Software List , but I also get e-mail frequently from die-hard readers as well.  Most importantly however, from all my conversations with people all over the world, it's clear that Web 2.0 remains more than ever a topic of major popular interest and industry fascination.

While the general understanding of Web 2.0 is improving all the time, we have a ways to go before we have a concise, generally accepted definition.  My favorite is still networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects. But while most of what we ascribe to the Web 2.0 name falls out of these definition, it's fairly hard for most of us to extrapolate meaningful ramifications from this.

People that read this blog know that I'm in the camp of folks that try to look beyond Ajax and the visual site design aspect of Web 2.0, and try to capture the deeper design patterns and business models that seem to be powering the most successful Web sites and online companies today.  Though concepts such as harnessing collective intelligence and Data as the Next Intel Inside, as described by Tim O'Reilly , most directly capture the spirit of the Web 2.0 era, it does seem to me that there are a few other elements that we haven't nailed down yet.

At the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo earlier this month, I gave my usual talk about how to formally leverage Web 2.0, with plenty of examples coming from things happening out on the Web.  If you accept that it's the power and size of the Web today , particularly the number of highly interactive network nodes (who are mostly people), give them extremely low-barrier tools, and we should be able to find plenty examples of emergent behavior; significant events happening suddenly and unexpectedly.  Tipping points are getting easier and easier to reach as site designers learn how to create better network effect triggers, draw large audiences suddenly, and as those same audiences increasingly self-organize spontaneously