I had the pleasure of giving a Web 2.0 presentation to the New York City chapter of the Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) this evening, using the Web 2.0 mind-map that I’ve been working on for the past several months. Surprisingly, roughly half of the audience indicated that they were unfamiliar with, unaware of, or generally confused by the concept of Web 2.0 — though, as NYC SPIN Chairman Tony Hutchings observed to me afterwards, virtually everyone has heard of various example, components, and themes of Web 2.0, such as Wikipedia, MySpace, blogs, and/or mashups. But it does appear that a significant percentage of the “professional” software community has not yet organized all of these examples, components, and themes into a coherent “mindset” that makes sense to them.

During and after my presentation, I was peppered with a number of interesting questions — questions that reflect, at least to some extent, the kind of reaction that professional software developers have about Web 2.0. I’m one of those guys who has a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time (which explains why I stopped chewing gum a long time ago), so it’s no surprise that I had trouble responding to the questions, and writing them down for subsequent review. Indeed, it was a couple hours later that I wrote down a dozen of the questions that I remembered; there may have been several others that I’ve completely forgotten. For what it’s worth, here are the questions and comments that I remember:

1. What about security? My immediate response to this question was, “I haven’t thought about it very much.” Having now had an hour or two to ponder the question, my reaction is: Web 2.0 is more about “reputation” and “trust” than firewalls, passwords, identity theft, and the various other aspects of “conventional” computer security. We can still insist that the people who create Web 2.0 content have user-id’s and passwords; we can still insist that they not access or tamper with confidential data; etc. But it’s a little more difficult to authenticate the source of information when we allow virtually anyone to publish material on the Web; after all, how do you know who really wrote this blog posting (assuming that you care?). And how do you know whether you should trust the information contained within this blog posting?
2. Why are agile development processes important for Web 2.0 projects? Ummm … well, does it really make sense to imagine a waterfall development process for a Web 2.0 project? Or, for that matter, does it make much sense to imagine a waterfall development process for any project these days? One of the common themes of Web 2.0 products and services is that they are in “permanent beta,” which obviously implies constant iteration, refinement, and improvement. Whether you accomplish that with extreme programming (XP), Scrum, or any of the other variants of agile development, the point remains that you need to have an iterative approach.
3. What’s the next wave of collaboration tools that we should expect for Web 2.0, and are any of them likely to be open-source initiatives, so we can acquire them without spending a fortune? The person who raised this question commented that wikis are a fairly rudimentary tool, and that they don’t really facilitate a “rich” form of collaboration for innovation and invention. I don’t specialize in the area of collaboration tools per se, so I didn’t have a good answer for this question. I’ll ponder it some more and see if I can think of something intelligent to say.
4. If we make it easier for an ever-larger community of non-technical people to create “content” on the Web, won’t that create a need for an ever-larger community of specialists to fix problems, provide support, and answer questions? The person who raised this question used spreadsheets as an analogy: the introduction of Visicalc 25 years ago made it possible for non-technical people to accomplish an enormous amount of “number-crunching” that previously would have required a professional programmer to code something in FORTRAN or COBOL; but while this was a good thing, it also created the need for a new cadre of support people who could explain the nuances of Visicalc (and then Lotus 1-2-3, and then Excel) to these non-programming problem-solvers, as well as tracking down bugs and problems, etc. My response was that — at least in my opinion — the spreadsheet-specialists did not require the same degree of technical expertise as the professional programmers who hand-coded programs to add rows and columns of numbers. Arguably, you needed a degree in Computer Science to be a really good COBOL or FORTRAN programmer; but you didn’t need anywhere near that much training or expertise to be able to help an accountant with his problems using Visicalc or Excel. I think the same is true for Web 2.0; we don’t even have to teach HTML to end-users any more.
5. Are there any interesting Web 2.0 companies in New York? Ummm … yes, there are. I got a list of interesting, local Web 2.0 companies from Joel Spolsky, which I’ll blog about at some later time. And someone in tonight’s audience mentioned a local technical association – the name of which I’ve forgotten, but know how to track down – where these folks meet. More information about this in the coming days… It’s called NY Tech meetup, and it meets on the first Tuesday of each month; the next meeting is October 3rd.
6. Did you know that YouTube now gets 138 million downloads a day? Isn’t it likely that YouTube (and, by extension, other popular Web 2.0 sites like MySpace) will implode because of bandwidth overload, or other technical problems? Wow! Last time I looked, YouTube was bragging about a mere 100 million downloads a day; if it continues growing at this rate, it will consume 100% of all Internet bandwidth by July 13, 2007. Just kidding — I don’t know if it will continue growing at this rate, and I don’t know who’s paying for all that bandwidth, and I don’t know if YouTube is making a profit. I suppose it’s a valid concern; but on the other hand, if they changed their business model to a subscription-based approach, where registered users had to pay a few dollars to watch their favorite video clips, the demand would drop fairly dramatically.
7. Have you seen the hilarious YouTube mashup of Al Gore’s Penguin Army, as a spoof on his “Inconvenient Truth” documentary? Ummm … no, I haven’t. But I’ll track it down.
8. You mentioned that you sometimes work as an expert witness, on lawsuits associated with failed software development projects. Have you seen any lawsuits associated with failed Web 2.0 projects? Nope, not yet. I haven’t even heard or, or read about, any significant Web 2.0 failures yet; and given the ponderous pace of the U.S. legal system, it will be 2-3 years after such failures before any of this ends up in court.
9. What about lawsuits involving failures of the semantic web, because the inference engines used to identify patterns, or make decisions about potential terrorists or credit risks turned out to be flawed? Wow. No, I haven’t heard of such things — but as someone in the audience remarked, the same kind of thing could be said about flawed data mining, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Web 2.0.
10. Does Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace indicate that he’s an “early adopter” of Web 2.0 technologies? This question was aimed at some comments I had made about the “technology adoption cycle” described in Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm; I suggested that, in general, Web 2.0 technologies and practices are well past the initial “innovator” (lunatic fringe) stage, and are about to move past the second, “early adopter” stage, into the third “early mainstream” stage. So, yes, from that perspective, Rupert Murdoch — and his News Corp. — does appear to be an “early adopter” of Web 2.0 technologies. But there are a number of far more important examples for those of us in the computer field: Google, Yahoo, eBay, and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and the other major vendors.

If you attended the SPIN meeting this evening, and recall any additional questions being asked, please post them as a comment, or send me an email. I’ll add them to the list, along with whatever answer I provided at the time, and/or whatever answer has occurred to me in the meantime.