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Web 2.0 Expo – Personal Analytics

Using personal analytics to create a better user experience will help you gain insight into your business and your customers (thus increasing revenue). Ankur Shah (from Techlightenment) used the example of the village bakery in the 1970s – the baker knew what you liked and could make recommendations on what to try based on knowing what you chose for years in the past.

On the web we’ve traditionally asked users for information via long registration forms (which are boring for the user), but there is a lot of information available without having to ask. Amazon.com recommends books and products based upon on what you’ve chosen in the past and what others have chosen is similar to the village bakery. These types of recommendations are part of the implicit web and are valuable for both the user (who sees more things that may be of interest) and to the website (who can sell more books).

Think about every interaction on your website as data about your users which should be treated as content. When your users click on a link, when they signup for an enewsletter, and when they come in from a a search engine, they are giving you valuable information that you can use to enhance their experience. One of the most basic enhancements would be to acknowledge users who come in from search engines with the keywords they came in with and give them relevant links from all over your site.

Obviously there are some fairly large privacy issues with using personal data, but if you are upfront with what you are doing and are providing a valuable service, people will be willing to share their information in exchange (just make sure you are providing valuable, relevant services in return).

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Web 2.0 Expo – The Next Generation of Tagging

Kakul Srivatava from Flickr spoke about how tagging is evolving. Tagging started as a way to find things or to play with friends and family. Then additional meaningfulness was found from community tagging – things the author would not have thought to mention. Inferred tags used in clustering, hot tags, places, etc. can show you what is important at a point in time.

What’s next?

  • More Metadata – using subtags (people, regions, etc), machine tags, “suggest” tags, “correct” tags, “play” tags to merge data sets and get new connections and meanging.
  • More Network Magic – is this interesting? is this related? is this a story? is this news? To find more information and new relevancy.
  • Greatest Challenge – all this data requires more and more screen space so how do you make it available and useful?

Using tagging on your business website can help your readers find more relevant content on your site, which increases their length of stay (and the opportunity to brand and/or sell to them).

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Web 2.0 Expo – Yahoo, Google change Web, kinda

The wave of tech information is starting to drag me under. So many great web solutions to problems that businesses have. As the last day of the conference, I’m starting to reach critical mass.

Yesterday I watched two internet titans decide to embrace open, user friendly web platforms for us mortals. This could be exciting for our business web developer community.

In their keynote, Yahoo! announced a Herculean task to re-wire every part of their platform to open up access to outside applications. Starting with the recent announcement of Search Monkey, Yahoo! is making bold moves to bring web developers into their house and offer them warm cookies and fresh milk. Their idea is to make their web properties sticky, keeping people on Yahoo’s network though stealth because the interconnections made though 3rd party web apps will drive them back in. Thats not as sneaky as it sounds, many many web application platforms work in the same way (Facebook is natorious for its locked-in platform for web applications). The appeal to web app developers like me is the potential for huge, fire hose style traffic curves coupled with some of Yahoo’s cooler properties like Flickr, Mail, Search and Finance. This won’t happen overnight, but if Yahoo can keep its focus though all the distractions, then they have a real chance at stealing the hearts and minds of some influential developers. Those developers may just change the web.

Later that same day, Google took the mic in the big hall to discuss Google Apps Engine. The company line here is that Google wants to “help the internet scale” by opening up access to its massively scaled data hosting platform. That’s a cute little sound bite, but I personally suspect it has more to do with the decision to monetize spare computing power, a decision Amazon had years ago Google’s offering goes a bit further than Amazon, building out every aspect of the stack to allow web sites and web apps to use Google to host up their online ideas. Once you get past the initial ‘I can have my little web site running on Google’ daydream fantasy, you see that there are some severe limitations as of today. Apps need to be written in Python, which may be a hurdle for some. They need to interact with Big Table, Google’s unique persistence layer. Big Table is not a relational database, so you really need to rethink how you interact with your data. Outbound web interactions are limited to 1MB transfers per connection and http calls only for outside web services. The service is free today for beta but expect that to change in the future. These limitations aside, you cannot deny that when Google sets a path for the future, it draws a considerable crowd of followers (some may say sheep) If Google can make this app engine viable, they may have once again changed the web as well.

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