Today is one of those days where one topic appears to be on the mind of many across cyberspace. You guessed right! Its that Web 2.0 thing again.  

Paul Bausch brings Yahoo!'s most recent Web 2.0 contribution to our broader attention in this excerpt from his O'Reilly Network article:

I browse news, check stock prices, and get movie times with Yahoo! Even though I interact with Yahoo! technology on a regular basis, I've never thought of Yahoo! as a technology company. Now that Yahoo! has released a Web Services interface, my perception of them is changing. Suddenly having programmatic access to a good portion of their data has me seeing Yahoo! through the eyes of a developer rather than a user.

The great thing about this move by Yahoo! is two fold (IMHO):

  1. It certainly makes Yahoo! a little more interesting of late. And it will certainly helps to distinguish Yahoo! from Google. Of course these companies overlap somewhat, but they are also pretty different in focus. I see Yahoo! increasingly as a portal platform play providing content access via syndication, publishing, and web services.

  2. It will impact their bottom line pretty rapidly, and I hope they realize the impact of Web 2.0 when trying to explain the growth increments whenever they next report to their investors :-) In a previous post I expressed my sense of some confusion on the part of Jeff Bezos regarding the total contribution of AWS to Amazon's growth (BTW - my articles to date re. Amazon and Web 2.0 are available from here in a variety of XML syndication formats: Atom, RSS 2.0, RDF).

The great thing about the Platform oriented Web 2.0 is the ability to syndicate your value proposition (aka products and services) instead of pursuing fallable email campaigns. It enables the auto-discovery of products and services by user agents (the content aspect). Web 2.0 also provides an infrastructure for user agents to enter into a consumptive interactions with discrete or composite Web Services via published endpoints exposed by a platform (the execution aspect).

A scenario example:

You can obtain RSS feeds (electronic product catalogs) from Amazon today, although you have to explicitly locate these catalog-feeds since Amazon doesn't exploit feed auto-discovery within their domain.

If you use Firefox or another auto-discovery supporting RSS/Atom/RDF user agent; visit this URL; Firefox users should simply click on the little orange icon bottom right of the browser's window to its RSS feed auto-discovery in action.

Anyway, once you have the feeds the next step is execution endpoints discovery within the Amazon domain (the conduits to Amazon's order processing system in this example). At the current time there isn't broad standardization of Web Services auto-discovery but it's certainly coming; WSIL is a potential front runner for small scale discovery while UDDI provides a heavier duty equivalent for larger scale tasks that includes discovery and other related functionality realms.

Back to the example trail, by having the RSS/Atom/RDF feed data within the confines of a user agent (an Internet Application to be precise) nothing stops the extraction of key purchasing data from these feeds, plus your consumer data en route to assembling an execution message (as prescribed by the schema of the service in question)for Amazon's order processing/ shopping cart service.  All of this happens without ever seeing/eye-balling the Amazon site (a prerequisite of Web 1.0 hence the dated term: Web Site).

To summarize: Web 2.0 enables you to syndicate your value proposition and then have it consumed via Web Services, leveraging computer, as opposed to human interaction cycles. This is how I believe Web 2.0 will ultimately impact the growth rates (in most cases exponentially) of those companies that comprehend its potential.