Rudelle Blogging

What is a mashup? To fully understand mashups, it is necessary to go back to another concept: public API. An API is an interface which makes it possible for two software programs to communicate together. Public API simply means an API published on the web and available for public usage.
To offer a public API became a must for any Internet site which claims to be Web 2.0. But why did this become so fashionable?
Well, it is related to the structure of the Internet. In a broad picture, one can consider Internet as a kind of giant publication tool.
You have this great content you want to share with other people. For that, you create an application to publish this content on a Web site. It looks simple, but in real life it can get very complex. Indeed, the issue is to present this content in the most appealing, intuitive and efficient way. The trouble of course is that these three characteristics are most often contradictory. Searching for the perfect balance, web publication results into eternal creative compromises. From a given piece of content, there are plenty of different marketing choices, resulting into a very large variety of concepts.
This issue has brought the following idea: I have some great content which I wanna share with the public. Potentially, there are thousands of different ways to publish this content. Sure, I can try to test myself all kinds of marketing ideas. But why not delegate this huge task to others?
For that, I just need to publish on line a public interface which gives free access to my content. In this way, a great number of independent developers will be able to publish my content each one with its own creative approach. Clearly, I no more control the whole value chain. But who cares? Collective intelligence has such a power that among all these pilots, there is a strong probability that some very good idea for my content will prevail.
For this reason, public API became very popular, especially among web 2.0 sites. Leveraging on the net community, it is likely to create more value than by controlling verything. Today, content accessible through a public API is huge. It ranges from Amazon cultural product catalogue to Google Maps geographical layouts, including also Flickr personal pictures and sophisticate predictive calculations for Criteo (yes, yes, you can check our public and free API!).
public API to produce a completely original service. A smart example of a mashup is the combination of Flickr + Navx + Google Maps which makes it possible to position pictures from a ski trip on a map using a GPS tracker.
Mashup potential seems endless. This is why in the coming years, you will see more and more of those smart hybrid applications launched every day on the web.

Despite the fact that traditional e-commerce assets are becoming a commodity, it does not mean necessarily that all large e-retailers will be excluded from the game. As a matter of fact, it might be quite the opposite. In this new web 2.0 ecosystem, mainstream large e-retailers will have a key role: to become the trusted third party for a given category.
In any case, this is the fascinating bet of Amazon which is reinventing its business with at an impressive pace (still badly understood by the vast majority of financial analysts).
The underlying idea is the following: in two or three clicks, I almost always manage to find a certain Joe who will offer me a book $3 lower than my usual e-bookseller. The only thing which retains me to deal with this Joe (unknown to me), it’s the fear (perfectly justified) that Joe will badly perform (or worse will cheat on me) this very transaction.
Now if Joe is registered on Amazon market place, the picture is very different. Amazon’s brand should guarantee transparency, effectiveness and reliability of the transaction. As a result, I can now buy Joe’s book with very little to worry about. And of course, Amazon prefers to gain a 5% commission on the transaction between me and Joe that nothing at all.
The idea of Amazon is simple: better to integrate all the Joes in Amazon’s ecosystem rather than let them develop out of control in the cyberspace. With this trusted third party role, Amazon hopes to stay in the financial transaction loop. Eventually, it is the only important thing for Amazon.
In this frame, Amazon took two years ago an amazing decision: to offer free of charge of its entire product catalogue (through Web services) to the developers’ community. When one knows that for a retailer, its product catalogue is supposed to be one of its main assets, one measures how radical this decision was.
But the logic is always the same: better to have all the Joes developing their revolutionary merchandising concepts using Amazon catalogue, rather than with others. This open API concept opened to all kinds of mashups is clearly one of the main features of these new Web 2.0 sites. Still, it remains extremely rare for e-commerce sites.
This shows that e-commerce 2.0 is still lagging well behind Web 2.0 in general. For this reason, 2007 is likely to be a crucial year where the most dynamic e-retailers will widen the gap with their followers.

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.