Web 2.0 Themes (UI 10 Conference)

October 20, 2005

Last week, I attended the User Interface Conference in Boston. It was hosted by UIE. It was a really good conference and I would like to go back next year if I can get the funding.

Joshua Porter did a seminar on Web 2.0 and here is my summary. He talked about it using different themes he has identified.

• Information Remixing – He showed us housingmaps.com which is “mash up” of Google Maps and Craig’s List. Information remixing takes previously disparate information and ties them together in new ways that are more useful.
• Architecture of Participation – We looked at del.icio.us. This theme takes one person’s activity and makes it a useful tool for others. Del.icio.us allows a user to enter bookmarks and then tag them with different categoried that are useful to that person. Then I can look to see what others have put under those tags. It is collabortive filtering that takes personal info to help others find valuable content.
• Social Networking – Flickr and Netflix would be examples of this. This theme deals with sorting information based on who I am and who my personal authorities are.
• Interfaces – This theme deals with making new interfaces for content through what are referred to as APIs or Application Programming Interfaces. One example is Andale which uses information in eBays database to help those who sell on eBay become better at it. Here is a description from their website, “Andale Research is a power tool that can boost your sales every day. By helping you uncover the secrets to successful selling on eBay and formulate winning pricing strategies, it can show you how to sell more and maximize your profits on every sale.”

I thought Joshua did a good job of trying to make the concept of Web 2.0 a little easier to understand.