Rudelle Blogging

Web 2.0 big idea is that content production no more comes from centralized sources, but is taken care by collaborative contribution from users. Traditional Web sites face indeed difficult challenges to ensure an attractive content publication services. That comes from several issues:
- content production is very expensive, without speaking about its maintenance
- the Net users are increasingly demanding regarding content reliability and integrity
- real time aspect of the Internet makes the management of content production very complex
- personalization of content for each user is a true headache for all content providers
Web 2.0 collaboratives approach are supposed to solve these issues in an elegant way. By entrusting content production to end users, portals free themselves from all these constraints. Suddenly, they can combine real time, content diversity and low production costs. Combined with advanced research tools (search engines, tags), those web 2.0 platforms demonstrate unbeatable productivity compared to traditional media approaches.
However, it remains the sharp issue of content integrity. While allowing everyone to produce content, how can one make sure that this collaborative content is not biased or misleading?
There are several ways to tackle the problem. First is to screen all produced content before (or afterwards) its publication. If the volume of content remains reasonable, this can be given to a bunch of professional experts.
For big volumes, a very interesting alternative is to have this screening carried out directly by end users. The idea is that if a majority of users consider a content as poor, there is a reasonable chance that it is actually the case. Statistically, for the mast majority of cases, this democratic control appears surprisingly effective. This idea is behind services like Digg.
Still, this process tends to eliminate exotic gems. And what if you don’t think like the majority of users? Well, this is another story that requires a new generation of tools capable to perform one-to-one personalized collaborative filtering. But be patient, as those complex tools are more web 2.5 than web 2.0. ;-)

Welcome in the marvellous world of “Long Tail”. Long Tail is supposed to make gold with loosy back catalogue. I mean a magic way to make business without relying on blockbusters (for details on this buzz word, check the excellent article of Wikipedia on the subject).
For instance, it is common knowledge that Amazon.com generates more sales on unknown books than on best sellers. The classical brick and mortar rule which states that 10% of all existing products account for 90% of sales is no more valid on the Web. In a digital store, to a physical store, zero storage cost offers the option to present an almost infinite number of products. In theory, e-commercial sites have no more limits on their inventory size. In particular, no more need to focus on a specific niche like in the old physical world. You just need to plug a fast and efficient key word search tool on your huge digital catalogue and you can serve the entire universe.
This looks too good to be true. Indeed, offering millions of products implies that customers know… what they are looking for! Indeed, it is impossible to browse around all the catalogue. Moreover, very often, the customer has a very vague idea of what he is looking for. He wants “a new cool shirt”, not “a yellow pink shirt with a rasta logo on its back”. Traditional search tools are unable to look for a “cool shirt”. Cool is not only a vague notion, it is specific to each of us!
All of us have been stuck one day in the 10th sub menu of a site “where there is all”. That is to say, in order to maximize potential of this famous Long Tail, it is necessary to invent new tools to browse within those giant catalogues.
For instance, take blogs. I love to learn that there are more than 30 millions blogs in the cyberspace. What an incredible Long Tail! But these blogs are confronted with the same problem of relevance. In all this enormous sea of posts, how can I spot those which are of real interest for me? I mean, without wasting hours browsing randomly?
Intelligent personalized filtering is definitely the next frontier of Long Tail.

Recommendation engines which generate real-time personalized recommendations are based on very complex mathematical algorithms. To source such a system, several options are possible ranging from complete in-house development to fully packaged commercial solutions like Criteo.

What are the different types of approaches?
In general, we distinguish two major types of approaches:
- « Content » approaches, based on the analysis of intrinsic product characteristics,
- « Collaborative » approaches, based on the relative user profiles.

To be efficient, content approaches need a complete preliminary configuration of products. Unfortunately, this is barely possible in an open environment. Moreover, results are in general very disappointing in terms of predictive accuracy. For these reasons, content approaches are losing ground on the internet.

On the other hand, collaborative approaches involve two major constraints:
- algorithms which are much more complex than content approaches,
- very high computing resources.
Consequently, very few collaborative methods are capable of managing big volumes of data with acceptable response times.
Conclusion : before rushing on a cheap solution, make sure you won't get stuck in the middle of your ramp up. Otherwise, you are better off doing nothing!

According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is a referring to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in new ways, such as social networking sites, wiki, communication tools, and folksonomies.
Sounds familiar to you? Finding the ultimate Web 2.0 definition has been an exciting challenge for a number of so called web experts for the last 18 months. So far, most definitions say more or less that Web 2.0 is user centric or is giving power back to users, and so on.
But now, one question: Which is the only application which already answered this criteria back in 1999 and which represented at that time a community of several tens of millions users? Answer: Peer-to-Peer networks!
Not only these P2P applications are nothing but social networks, but they meet perfectly a number of economic features of Web 2.0, in particular low production cost of the service. Moreover, it is the very reason why P2P services managed, while being developed in garages without any VC money, have achieved such massive success.
But as these services P2P suffer from legal weaknesses, it is difficult to use them as examples of the great web 2.0 revolution. For the time being, nobody has found the miracle (and consensual!) solution to make P2P as legal as any other mainstream application. It is a pity, because by its community approach, P2P could have been at the edge of the Web 2.0 new wave. With by the way, the same Long Tail challenges than for e-commerce sites: these P2P tools are really effective only if the user knows what he is looking for. But this is another story.

A couple of months ago, only experts were debating over the web 2.0 phenomena. But recently, we see more and more mainstream national Medias covering Web 2.0.This new buzz gives a fresh smell of bubble.
But what is behind all the excitement?
In fact, what fascines before all the mass media, is clearly not new technologies related to Web 2.0 (Ajax or RSS for instance), nor even the community aspect (which has existed for a long time). What fascines them is two things:
1) the irresistible growth of giant Google which is eating more and more in the mouth of old superstars Yahoo! and MSN
2) the irruption of an unexpected new generation of Net players. Unknown sites like YouTube, Flickr or MySpace made spectacular rises in traffic rankings in matters of months. And even more dary, they have achieved this spectacular rocket growth almost without any dollar spent in advertising!
In 2001, after the burst of the Internet bubble, one believed that the game was over. The survivors seemed to be able to lock the market, in particular large e-commerce sites. A that time, everyone considered for instance eBay untouchable. Moreover, traditional brands finally thought they had their revenge over those arrogant pre bubble start-ups.
Suddenly, this reassuring feeling disappeared. People were surprised to rediscover a basic rule of business: positions are never secured for ever. On the Internet even more than in the old economy, new entrants can always change the rules.
Fast successes tend to fascinate people. One thinks that there must be some hidden dark secret behind such miracles. Well, in some ways, this secret could be called Web 2.0 ;-)

Following the announcement of the partnership between eBay and Google at the end of last August, eBay stock has gained a steady 1.86%. However, on second thoughts, this giant deal seems rather surprising.
What is really behind this deal? As with Yahoo! for the United States, the king of auctions chose Google to fill its international sites with ads. This astonishing decision will create a new form of competition for all the small sellers on eBay. While seeking for a new revenue stream, eBay takes the risk to angry its most valuable asset: those thousands of small eBay sellers. It is likely that the recent pressure on eBay bottom line has push toward this delicate choice.
The other part of the agreement is also symptomatic. The deal consists in developing with Google a common click-to-call offer on its site, by leveraging on Skype. The trouble is that most click-to-call experts say that the vast majority of customers (almost 85%) prefer to use landlines rather than computers to call. Thus Skype ends up to be rather a barrier than anything else for the deal.
This seems to illustrate the difficult integration of Skype into eBay. Skype is a formidable telephone operator. Its economic model of voice over IP is very strong. On the other hand, synergies with eBay are far from obvious. That is for two reasons.
First able, a large part of Skype customer base is located in Brazil and India, that is to say very far from eBay customer base. The second reason is that allowing buyers to call sellers (which was the main rational of Skype takeover in the first place) was not welcome by those very precious sellers. Indeed, sellers are already having a hard time to cope with all the emails from buyers. The idea of having to answer buyer queries by phone gives them nightmares.
The future of eBay seems rather in pushing quickly towards Web 2.0 and smart collaborative filtering, as is doing Amazon. By offering a much more systematic usage of its fabulous “Long Tail”, eBay will greatly boost its powerful community of sellers. And as a result, securing its long term bottom line.

With the opening a couple of weeks ago of Writely and the launch of Google Apps, Google takes a new step to offer a complete Office solution. There was already Google Spreadsheet versus Excel, Google Calendar and Gmail versus Outlook. With Writely versus Word, it still needs to offer (soon) a clone of Powerpoint and the panoply will be complete.
The idea is of course to offer a credible alternative to the 800 pound gorilla Office. And in the backstage, with the will to challenge, via Office, with the very principle of traditional PC (which made and to still make the fortune of Microsoft).
Is this strategy poised for success? I move on quickly on the fact that this supposes to have a permanent high speed connection each time one wants to work. With the generalization of Wifi (and soon of Wimax), it is reasonable to think that within a few years, high speed Internet connections will be as usual as electric plugs.
The problem of Google is above all to fight against the inherent inertia of any user. To make a user change his habits (what an absolute horror), one should offer enormous incremental value. However on the functional side, even overpowered with Ajax, Writely remains definitely below Word. But, given that 90% of users master 10% of Word functionalities, it is not really important.
Paradoxically, the interest of Writely lies in fact within two characteristics not connected with the text processing itself: centralized data storage (which protects from the system crash) and the option to share a document among several users (a little like a wiki).
Will that be sufficient to lure tons of Office users? In the short term, that appears not very likely. Indeed, the concept of centralized data storage is challenged by spectacular progress of external flash memories, say nothing of the delicate issue of data privacy. To accept that all ones private and professional life be to stored by the king of keyword search, implies very strong trust. Regarding sharing documents, even if this functionality is rather extraordinary, its usage is justified only in very specific (mainly professional) situations.
In short, Microsoft should concentrate at last on the eradication of its eternal crash issues (which still occurs too often on Word) rather than on endless increase in new functionalities. And if in addition, Microsoft keeps its soft policy on licences, Office should be able to resist fairly well against Google new assault.