Learning from the Web

Adam Bosworth (Google's VP Engineering), has an interesting article on ACM Queue on unintuitive lessons that the web taught us. Here are the main points:

1. Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than complex and efficient binary ones.
2. It is worth making things simple enough that one can harness Moore’s law in parallel.
3. It is acceptable to be stale much of the time.
4. The wisdom of crowds works amazingly well.
5. People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs).
6. Pay attention to physics.
7. Be as loosely coupled as possible.
8. KISS. Keep it (the design) simple and stupid.

Compare this with Tim O'Reilly's core competencies of Web 2.0 companies, as mentioned in his article "What is Web 2.0":

1. Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
2. Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
3. Trusting users as co-developers
4. Harnessing collective intelligence
5. Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
6. Software above the level of a single device
7. Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

You can see that a lot of the "lessons" that Adam Bosworth pointed out, have been learnt and are being applied by Web 2.0 companies.

Links

• Learning from THE WEB on ACM Queue
• What is Web 2.0 - Tim O'Reilly