Rudelle Blogging

All along 2006, we have seen Web 2.0 hungry VCs racing to invest in web community startups. They were all trying to replicate YouTube supposed easy cash out. Anything with some Ajax, mashups, open API or User Generated Content would be called Web 2.0 and was supposed to be very hot.
In beginning of 2007, it looks like Web 2.0 is no more a phrase to put forward to attract VCs attention. They have eaten too much of this buzz word and get afraid to get stuck with some lagers who have missed the wave.
However, it’s not because a catchy phrase is no more fashionable that the underlying concepts are dead. Open APIs, mahsups and UGC remain a major key of Internet’s future. Many innovative and powerful business models are still to emerge in this field. Some of them have the potential to overtake the traditional way to do e-commerce and media.
But as for the first Internet bubble, only savvy investors who are smart enough to invest against the crowd will make tremendous leverage in a couple of years on these emerging players.

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.