OpenID, RapLeaf, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Undisposable. All of these services have one thing in common - they make web development more granular. By granular, we mean they are making web development componentized and outsourceable. So as a web developer, you can outsource things like authentication, email check or trust system. This brings 2 main advantages:
- Decreased development time and cost
- Power of Masses
Below, we take a closer look at the major granular service providers so that you'll better understand the concept and its advantages:
]]> OpenIDOpenID, as we mentioned in a previous article, is a distributed authentication mechanism. It allows you to outsource your whole authentication system to this distributed platform. This results in 2 things:
- You don't need to develop it on your own (decreased development time and cost)
- Moreover, you decrease the sign up threshold and so attract more users (Power of Masses)
Sounds like a good deal, no? But the numbers are not supporting this goal. Even though OpenID is a widely covered topic in blogosphere, and is backed by big companies like VeriSign and SixApart and has many fans and the open source community behind, the adoption and usage rates have remained low.
In the same way, RapLeaf provides a distributed trust system for your site. What made eBay so successful was the trust system it brought into the online auction arena. Similarly, many other ventures need trust systems to make transactions between their visitors more secure. And making your trust portable across all these sites is a very bright idea - which is yet another advantage of power of masses in granular web.
In the same way, outsourcing this system to a 3rd party can result in decreased development time and costs. Although the advantages are obvious, I called the founder Auren Hoffman last week and tried to learn more. He gave me 2 success examples: SwapThing.com and PetLovers.com. That same night, I had the chance to meet the SwapThing developers in the Stirr event. They said the biggest advantage of RapLeaf for them is the portability of the trust system. This is very understandable for a newly founded site - which wants to stand on the shoulders of other similar startups. Nevertheless, the usage rate of RapLeaf still seems to be low.
Amazon S3 is all about distributed storage. S3 saves you from the hassles and big costs of buying and maintaining storage hardware for your site's needs. YouOS is one example that secures its data on scalable Amazon S3 servers. You can see if a web site is using S3 or not by keeping track of your status bar while a page loads; S3 powered sites will frequently fetch data from http://aws.amazon.com address. R/WW's MyBlogLog for example uses S3.
Even though the advantages are so obvious and the company that offers it is the well trusted Amazon, my personal experience tells me that S3 usage is not very large either yet.
Similarly to S3, EC2 (Electronic Cloud 2) is Amazon's distributed computing power system. Considering the fact that it's still a beta service and its implementation is not that easy, the low usage is understandable. But when it gets ready, Amazon EC2 will become a compelling service that ends all the hassles of maintaining clusters and scalable services.
Undisposable.org allows you to outsource email validation against disposable email addressing (e.g. 10minutemail.com, mailinator.com) and fake accounts spread from the likes of bugmenot.com. Needless to say, the usage rates are very low.
Why are the implementations are low?
Now it's time to answer the big question, why are these granular services not being used as much as they could/should? In my opinion, there are several reasons:
- Transfer of Assets: Actually in all these services, you don't only transfer the hassles and extra costs, but also transfer the assets that make your site so valuable. In the case of RapLeaf for instance, trust has always been the biggest asset of eBay. That's why eBay prohibited the use of RapLeaf throughout their site. And that's why many web developers may be suspicious about transferring their core assets to RapLeaf, unless they think trust is not a primary asset of their site.
- Uncertainty of Services: Site owners are uncertain of the granular services we pointed out above. They can't trust startups and even big established companies like Amazon; because it's obvious that even Amazon may get out of this business if they see no profits and no opportunities. The availability as well is a big question mark for web developers. Because relying on granularity means your visitors will be affected by the outages of the sites you depend on. In the end, in granular dependent sites, even small outages add up successively.
- Implementation Threshold: Implementation is often not so easy. Web developers need to learn new patterns and APIs to start experimenting with these services. And considering that the points above create question marks in your mind, would you neglect this threshold or would you keep going?
Conclusion
We may have portrayed the granularity of web 2.0 "a little" dark. But in our opinion, granularity may leap (should we call it web 5.0 after this and this?) after it solves the aforementioned problems and creates some trust in developers. One possible solution would be to clearly state the conditions and availability of these services from the homepage. Maybe a Creative Commons style licensing organization may need to arise to support this. Also clearly state that data will always be open for import/export.
Amazon is working hard on the granular web with their new AWS services and the seminars they organize. They seem to be the flagship in spreading the Granularity trend. Please let us know of other web services that may be categorized as Granular.
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