Today is one of those days where one topic appears to be on the mind of many across cyberspace.You guessed right!Its thatWeb2.0 thing again.

Paul Bauschbrings Yahoo!'s mostrecent 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 certainlyhelps 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 postI expressed my sense of some confusion on the part ofJeff Bezos regarding thetotal contribution of AWS to Amazon's growth (BTW - my articles to date re. Amazon and Web 2.0 are available from herein 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 pursuingfallable email campaigns. It enables the auto-discovery of products and servicesby user agents (the contentaspect). Web 2.0 also provides an infrastructure for user agents to enter into aconsumptiveinteractions withdiscrete or composite Web Services via publishedendpoints exposed bya 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-discoverywithin theirdomain.

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

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

Back to the example trail, byhaving 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)forAmazon's orderprocessing/ shopping cartservice.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 propositionand then have it consumed via Web Services, leveraging computer, as opposed to human interaction cycles.Thisis how I believe Web 2.0will ultimatelyimpact the growth rates (in most cases exponentially)of those companies that comprehend its potential.