TECH: New Design Patterns = New Opportunities

I just finished reading the new book “the Google Story” and have been thinking about "Web 2.0", "The Long Tail" and the rise of "Remix Culture". There is definitely something significantly different about today’s internet and now begins the hard work of separating the Hype for the Reality. Is the new web landscape going to be profitible for the smaller and nichier businesses? Is the playing field begining to level as services are freely exchanged in a more organic fashion. Is this the end of the microsoft era and the beginning of the.. google era??? I would venture to say that every marketing machine is reving up it's respective “Web 2.0” story, which is interesting as there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means.

From a technical standpoint there is clearly a new set of "Web 2.0 design patterns" and technologies (Web Services, RSS, AJAX, OpenSource). New user paradigms such as Collective Intellegence, Social Media and all things living ditigally online. The business models can monetize the long tail market through ad revenue or upsell services from their free base offering. Google has shown that using algorithms to automate all aspects of the business model is essential to scale and survival in the long term. Something is clearly happening here.....

Shedding More Light with the following 3 concept illustrations:

1. Web 2.0 Examples (Source: O’Reilly)

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	Blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	Participation
content management systems	-->	Wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	Syndication