Microsoft & Web 2.0:a view from the trenches

—or—

why I’ve stuck around

Cathy Marshall14 November 2007

did I mention that Windows Vista is >50,000,000 lines of managed code?

Web 2.0? What does that mean?

• Fluid interaction with Web applications?• Applications that leverage a user’s social

network?• Mash-ups?

• user-contributed content that’s shared and combined and repurposed…

Web 2.0 = user-contributed content

• Consumers entrust digital content that they really care about to Web 2.0 apps

• Then benign neglect takes over and they might not think about the stuff for a long time…

it’s not about technology so much any more; it’s about stuff and the social

interaction around it

technology

social interaction

digital stuff

3 Web 2.0 consumer concerns• trust/security/sustainability

will my stuff be there tomorrow?who else can see it?what can they do to it?will it go away when I tell it to?

• digital stewardshipwho’s taking care of my stuff?

• a constellation of web 2.0 appshow does it fit with everything else?who is the audience?does the app match the use?

will my stuff be there tomorrow?the effect of benign neglect

32 %

19 %

8 %

the case of the disappearing podcasts

“i hosted my podcasts early on on a free service called Rizzn.net… he then changed rizzn.net to something called blipmedia.com and then!! he decided to sell blipmedia … and he never emailed people about it.. suddenly the files were gone and the only news i heard about it was when i had to hunt online for what happened… and in blipmedia's google help group it was only when people ASKED HIM ABOUT IT that he explained.”

who else can see it and what can they do to it?

fear about content vulnerability

“I don’t know if I’d want to [have my] artwork, letters I read at my mother’s funeral [online]… I feel more private about that than my money.”

“128 [bit] encryption, yeah. We’d have at least that much [to protect our online photos]…64 bits has been hacked easy.”

3 Web 2.0 consumer concerns• trust/security/sustainability

will my stuff be there tomorrow?who else can see it?will it go away when I tell it to?

• digital stewardshipwho’s taking care of my stuff?

• a constellation of web 2.0 appshow does it fit with everything else?who is the audience?does the app match the use?

digital stewardship (pre Web 2.0)consumers rely on ad-hoc IT

“I tried to install it [Firefox] and then John [her ex-husband] said, ‘Don’t install anything on your computer.’… I usually defer to John. Because he’s the one that’s got to come over and maintain it. .. But Jack [her 18 year old son], y’know, Jack will just do whatever he wants.”

information management is a communal affair

and… this is all complicated by the prevalence of viruses and malware

so Web 2.0 solves that digital stewardship problem,

right?

not necessarily…

digital stewardship:circular reasoning about data safety

The local version is archival, so no archival copy of the web content needs to be made

“The good thing about the photos is that there’s always an intermediary step. I mean, like the photos go off of my camera onto my computer before they go up to Flickr. So I always have master copies on my PC. So that’s why I don’t care so much about Flickr evaporating.”

But… when they lose the web copy, they realize that they’d added an awful lot of stuff using the app

“I didn’t lose the pictures, but I was sorry that I had lost the collections and the organization, and you know. I’m sure I have the pictures somewhere still. But fishing them out and recreating it was not feasible.”

What makes matters worse is that the local copy may be entirely hypothetical. This often happens over time, as people move from PC to PC…

digital stewardship: what about content that’s born Web 2.0?

Structure, metadata, and sometimes even primary content is added via web-based services (e.g. blogs, bookmarking services, etc.)

“There’re literally hundreds of posts. And not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t even necessarily have a perfect memory of, like, y’know, whether a post existed or not.

So even if I did look through every single [recovered] post, it’s not possible for me to really know for sure if one got missed or not. Because I just wouldn’t remember myself.”

3 Web 2.0 consumer concerns• trust/security/sustainability

will my stuff be there tomorrow?who else can see it?will it go away when I tell it to?

• digital stewardshipwho’s taking care of my stuff?

• a constellation of web 2.0 appshow does it fit with everything else?who is the audience?does the app match the use?

an ecology of web 2.0 apps[11:09:24 PM] g says: [There are] 6 [online places where I store things] in all. 1.) school website, 2.) blogspot, 3.) wordpress.com (free blog host, different from wordpress.org), 4.) flickr, 5.) zooomr (for pictures, they offer free "pro" accounts for bloggers, but even for non-pros, they don't limit you to showing your most recent 200 pics only unlike flickr), 6.) archive.org

[11:10:42 PM] Cathy Marshall says: I ask just because you seem to have stuff in a lot of different places (so far two different blog sites, flickr, youtube, msnspaces, ... maybe yahoo?)...

[11:11:07 PM] g says: oh right.. youtube because people always tell me that they don't feel like downloading my quicktime files from archive.org

running into the walls:5 copies of one student animation

downloaded 387 times 3,869 views, 45 views, no “likes”

viewed 245 times “really nice vid here, i enjoyed this one a lot.”

so what does a big corporation like Microsoft brings to Web 2.0?

• sustainability and a track record with consumer contentthink Office

• the potential to perform server-side IT functionsthink OneCare

• opportunities in the overall Web 2.0 ecologythink OWA, MSNSpaces (and even Passport)

a brief aside about consumers, security, and Web 2.0…

This may well be the perfect analogy to pesticides…

c.f. consumers, pesticides, and Frierson Lake, a small lake in East Texas