Jeff Clavier and Paul Kedrosky note that the chmod 777 definition of 'web 2.0' is coming back into fashion. As Jeff nicely put it:
"Web 2.0 = chmod 777 web
For those (non-geeks) who don’t get the reference, chmod is the Unix command allowing you to change the access control of a file or a folder, and 777 means that everyone can read/write/execute your file or read/write/traverse a folder. I.e the Read/Write Web (no Richard, no cease and desist please)."
The chmod 777 meme got picked up recently by Tim Bray, who pointed to IBMer James Snell's definition a year ago. Incidentally, I was secretly thrilled to discover that Tim Bray likes my blog - always cool when your tech heroes acknowledge you :-) [Update: I neglected to mentioned that it was James Governor who brought up my name to Tim - thanks James!]
So getting back to chmod 777. It is an incredibly geeky definition. Also of course the whole 'defining web 2.0' thing is very much played out - I'll start issuing Cease and Desist letters soon to blogs that continue to do it :-) Even Mike Arrington has stopped using his 'Tracking Web 2.0' tagline and he thinks the 'Web as OS' theme is the next phase. I agree, because 'Web as platform' has always been my staple definition of... you know what.
But there is something nice about this chmod 777 definition of what's going on in the current era of the Web. Laurent Denoue emailed me about it, saying:
"each number maps to an entity:
- the first number maps to your permissions
- the second to the group permission
- the third to everyone's elseEach number is the decimal representation of the binary: RWX
R=Read
W=Write
X=eXecuteSo if you want to set full rights (read, write and execute) for a given entity, you use 111 <=> 7
in the end, using 777 means that you, your group and everyone else has full rights.
I think that the power of chmod 777 web is that it's not only readable (e.g. CNN), and writable (e.g. blogs), but also executable: you can actually do stuff (e.g. writerly, etc.)."
In any case, I don't really care what it's called these days. It's all about the evolution of the Web, when it comes down to it. My inspiration when I started R/WW was Dave Winer's Two-Way Web theory and of course Tim Berners-Lee, who as far as I know was the first to use the term 'read/write web' - but I haven't been able to confirm that. Anyone got a link to TBL using that term? Perhaps he just used the 'read/write' bit. Either way it'd be hard to credit anyone else but him for coining it, because right from the start TBL always wanted the Web to be read/write. FWIW this was my first post on the topic.
My buddy Ben Barren has just released his blog search engine, Gnoos. Even though recently I declared that the world doesn't need another blog search engine, this is my second post about them this week! Techcrunch and Mashable, amongst others, have already gone over the feature set of Gnoos. No need for me to repeat that, except to note that Gnoos is a local blog search engine - for Australia. Which means it does count as one of my Top Ten Underserved Web 2.0 Markets after all, because local services was one of my picks :-)
Do non-US countries need local versions of Web 2.0 staple products?
Let's explore the 'local' angle a bit. Do countries outside the US require their own media and web 2.0 products? In countries that speak different languages, there is unquestionably a need. In China, Baidu kicks Google's ass in the search engine market. The real question though: is there also a need for local services for other reasons? Ben thinks so and he told me:
"If you are outside America, it's hard to find what the local conversation going on is. You couldn't even find a place to find local blogs when we were developing gnoos. As technorati indexes 30 million+ websites and Google indexes tens of billions of documents, gnoos is indexing 30,000+ RSS Feeds (growing 10% weekly) that matter to Australians."
Interestingly Ben claims there is "far less international expansion" amongst seed-funded Web 2.0 startups these days, due to less VC and IPO funds in the post-dot com bust world. Which Ben says provides opportunities for companies like his, Feedcorp. So it seems not only is there a need, but US-based web startups may be leaving the door open by not expanding internationally.
Local matters, as I've heard Ben say a lot of times. I agree totally with him on this (it's why I put Local Services in my list of underserved markets in web 2). Also I'm seeing this trend all over - little non-US startups are creating their own local versions of the main '2.0' categories. Blog search, photos, maps, feed management, etc. All those things that Google, Yahoo, MSN, Technorati, Feedburner, Flickr et al supposedly have conquered already. Maybe there are opportunities to add community and other localized social touches to those 'template' products - and be successful in their backyard markets?
ZoomIn is an example of this in my own country, New Zealand. Even though Google Maps has just entered the market here (I suspect because of ZoomIn), the local product ZoomIn actually has a lot of nice community features as well - which Google Maps doesn't have... maybe will never have because it doesn't understand the local users and market as well as ZoomIn. Remember that one of the cardinal rules of web design is that you must understand what the user wants. I think Gnoos and ZoomIn have that understanding, in their local markets.
