The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

I have been on Facebook for 3 months and although my next comment will instantly brand me as tragically unhip, I find it a complete waste of time. I keep on expecting some sort of mystical Web 2.0 insight if I just stick with it for another week - instead, I just get more confirmation that Facebook is more of a step backwards than a step forwards.

This last week brought another blogger-driven Facebook tempest in a teapot when Robert Scoble tried to synchronize his Facebook contacts with his Plaxo contacts. Facebook shut his account down, drawing howls of protest from Kara Swisher at the WSJ and a typically thoughtful rebuttal from Nick Carr. By the way, Facebook already supports a one-way import of gmail contacts into Facebook.

There are two interesting points from an Enterprise Web 2.0 perspective here:

1. There's no lock-in like SaaS lock-in. Software as a service offers a spectacular downside in the case that the service provider doesn't like the way you are trying to extend their service. At its most extreme, closed SaaS is the Roach Motel of enterprise software - your data and logic may check in, but they're never coming back out, as I wrote here.
   


2. Scrape-ability will be an increasingly important battleground: I sit on the board of Kapow, a company that has powerful tools for gathering data from public web sites. If those web sites block access by bots (this is what happened in the Scoble kerfuffle)

In short, much of what is presented as Web 2.0 magic is really just lipstick on a tired old Web 1.0 pig. Here are three examples:

1. Microsoft Silverlight: everything bloated and retro about Windows brought to Internet Explorer. Silverlight, despite its technical innovations, is yet another attempt to assimilate the recalcitrent web beast into the Microsoft borg.
   


2. Adobe flex: everything proprietary and designer-wonkish about Flash brought to any browser. Given that enterprise developers are more interested in formatting data than getting their company logo to spin and then fade, making the design-heavy Flash language an enterprise standard is a lost cause.
   


3. Facebook: if you liked AOL, you're gonna love Facebook! Facebook represents a cautionary tale for enterprises looking at SaaS solutions like SalesForce and Netsuite - make sure you have an ironclad way to get your data and logic back out!
   

ps to be fair, I do enjoy one application on Facebook, ilike, because it tells me when artists like Ryan Adams and Emmylou Harris are playing in San Francisco.

Labels: facebook, Flex, kapow, karaswisher, nickcarr, robertscoble, salesforce, Silverlight

I sit on the board of Kapow, a company that allows you to turn anything on the web into a data source.

As a thought experiment, I asked their executive team to tell me the most valuable database on the planet?

Here are some potential winners:

• D&B - all the financial data you could hope for - nope
• IMS - all the medical data you could uncover - nope

And the answer is...Google (is it my imagination or is the answer to almost every question these days Google?) The point is that the really valuable information is increasingly moving to the web. That means that the next generation of data adapters will treat the web as a gigantic database (albeit one that requires clever robots from Kapow to take full advantage of).

For example, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (say that 3 time fast) wanted to put together the definitive global warming portal, they found that the best information was all on the web, and turned to Kapow to get that information into a single portal.

Labels: Google, kapow