2007 May 16

Scaling Web 2.0: The Dirty Little Secret Exposed?

Was very pleased to see Tim O’Reilly bringing forth the issue of Web 2.0 scaling and Ray Ozzie’s perspective. This is such a vitally important issue and it needs analysis, facts and discussion and big time thought leading exposure.

I first wrote about the “dirty little secret” of Web 2.0 back in December of 2005. That secret is that infrastructure, bandwidth and minimizing latency is a huge issue for startups and is one little discussed. It’s one I know first hand from a conferencing startup I worked with last year — and informing developers is an imperative since this dirty little secret will impact rich, internet applications; mashups; widgets; and other composite applications delivered going forward.

This problem becomes more acute as we all pull data from geographically disbursed hosted online services. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve waited…and waited…and waited….for some data to appear in a widget, an ad served from DoubleClick, or a startpage pulling simple RSS text data from dozens of different sources. Imagine when several, dozens or numerous interdependent sources (ones that pull data from other services to deliver a composite web service that is, in turn, consumed by yet another new application!). It’s a recipe for disaster unless managed at a world-class level.

Now that more of us are playing with video, Flash and, especially, streaming video (e.g., uStream and like what I did at a low level yesterday with Skype video), the challenges in betting a business, a workshop series, a product category or composite applications means that we all better get more informed about this issue and damn fast.

I’ve said before that one key to the dotcom crash was HUGE amounts of content and functionality being shoved into the top of the funnel while those of us consuming it were drinking from the tiny end of the funnel through 56kbps straws.

I fear that unless this dirty little secret is handled and done so by disseminating understanding amongst ALL creators, developers, business strategists and users of Web/Enterprise 2.0 products and services, users expectations are going to be dashed and it will create material barriers to adoption and use. Maybe not another crash, but the barriers and obstacles that will come are preventable with enhanced understanding and knowledge dissemination.

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Sydney to Minneapolis on Skype Video

Last evening I helped stage (with Entrevis and Heartland Circle) an event and three profound things happened:

1) Malcolm Cohan was introduced to several dozen people in Minneapolis before coming here in person in a couple of weeks. Malcolm is being brought to the US by George Johnson of Entrevis. You’ll be hearing a lot about Malcolm and his Vision’s for Humanity. The entire premise of telling vision stories is profound in-and-of-itself, but this guy is so incredibly delightful and the vision stories so powerful and fun to watch that people are creating them like crazy and I’m surprised they are so compelling.

2) We had Malcolm speaking to an audience over Skype video and you can seem him projected in front of the group in the top photo. This isn’t a big deal to do, you might think. It turned out to be a bit of a challenge to hook up to the in-house mixing board (I even brought my own board!) while ensuring the audio from Malcolm came through the speakers so the audience could hear him *and* so that the microphone was fed back into my laptop so Malcolm could interact with the hosts and audience.

After getting everything set up, tested and underway, Murphy’s Law appeared and suddenly the DSL connection dropped completely a few minutes into it! After determining with the excellent staff at Horst Rechelbacher‘s Intelligent Nutrients that it was dead, I pulled a rabbit-out-of-a-hat and connected through my Treo 700p and my Verizon EVDO connection and it worked! It still dropped the Skype video call several times, but it got us through until the DSL came back up in the last ten minutes.

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