Some of the first things to take up residence in the cloud were human relationships. Indeed it was around twenty years ago that people started to post message and share personal information in what were then termed virtual communities. Today, the descendants of these early online meeting places are called social networking sites. The most popular - Facebook - now also has around 400 million active users.

  The fact that people have been socializing online for a couple of decades servers as a reminder that today’s cloud computing revolution is not occurring in a vacuum. Rather, the trend to upload data and to link people and applications online have been growing steadily since the birth of the Internet. To fully understand cloud computing we therefore need to step back just a little to appreciate its broader context.

  Unless you spent the years 1988 to 2000 living on the far side of the Moon(or perhaps at university) you are likely to have at least some recollection of the Dot Com boom and bust. In the late 1900s, careless investment in Internet ventures was taking place right, left and centre. However, claims that the laws of economics had fundamentally changed - and in particular that generating web traffic had become more important than making a profit - were to prove misguided. By March 2000 things finally came to a head and the speculative bubble of Dot Com mania burst.

  In common with serveral previous technology-driven boom-bust cycles, the Dot Com bubble left a positive legacy in its wake. As had also happened following the construction of the canals and then the railways, after the folly of speculative over-investment ended a new communications infrastructure was in place. However, post Dot Com, there was also a significant risk that the potential of the Internet would be disregarded due to financial folly of a relatively small minority.

Enter Wev 2.0

While the First Internet Revolution was still trying to peel itself off the floor, the concept of Web 2.0 emerged. The term “Web 2.0” was coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004  to signal a second-coming of the Internet. Some still argue that Web 2.0 is no more than marketing hype. However, O’Reilly’s intention was to find a label for the sorts of things that were proving successful online in the wake of the Dot Com collapse. In doing so, he was trying to signal the the Internet revolution was far from over. He was also hoping to indicate a positive way forward for our use of the web.

  Defining exactly what is meant by Web 2.0 is about as difficult as nailing jelly to a wall. However, we can say with some certainty that WEB 2.0 refers to the user of the Internet as a social tool and a service delivery mechanism. This means that Web 2.0 is concerned with establishing new or improved forms of online connection between people, between websites, or between people and software applications. Isolating these three possible types of online connection also allows us to identify the three key aspects of Web 2.0 as being:

* Interpersonnal computing

* Web services, and

* Software as a service(SaaS)

  Interpersonal computing is where two or more people communicate online. Web services is then where two ore more websites are automatically interlinked. Finally software as a service is where people connect to online software applications. To help clarify these definitions, figure 2.1 illustrates the three key aspects of Web 2.0.

  Easy part of figure 2.1 shows two people with some websites floating between them in the cloud. At the top of the figure under ‘interpersonal computing’, the two people are linked mind-to-mind via a website, such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. In the ‘web services’ section, Web 2.0 developments are enabling two websites - and potentially two organizations - to interlink and automatically share information with no human involvement. Finally, at the bottom of the figure. We have ‘software as service’. This is where a person is linked to an application out in the cloud, such as the Google Docs word processor discussed in the last chapter.

  An understanding of interpersonal computing, web services and software as a service will help you appreciate may of the cloud computing concepts, services and future developments  discussed in later chapters. We will therefore now explore each of the three key aspects of Web 2.0 in turn.

Interpersonal Computing

During the 1980s and 1990s most computers were standalone devices used for used solitary activities, such as word processing or playing games. However, we all know that today most computers are connected to the Internet and used as much for communication as for entirely individual activities. This means that the PC or personal computer is inappropriately named. As the veteran technophilosopher Timothy Leary argued many years ago, by now we ought really to be talking about ‘IPCs’ or ‘interpersonal computers’.

  Most people who are aware of the term Web 2.0 associate it solely, or most strongly, with interpersonal computing websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and Wikipedia. Given that the ten most popular websites on the planet are either interpersonal computing sites or search engines, this is hardly suprising. Interpersonal computing was the technological phenomenon of the noughties, and was most peoples’s introduction to cloud computing. It also falls with some level of blurriness into four different categories.

Social networking sites

Firstly, there are social networking sites whose primary function is to allow people to leave messages for each other, to exchange photos and other media, and so to establish virtual community groups. The biggest social networking site(SNS) by far is Facebook. Other popular social networking sites include MySpace, Bebo, Ning, Friendster, Twitter and LinkedIn.

  As rising stars, both Twitter and LinkedIn are worth an individual mention. Twitter is a great example of how less can be more, with the whole site being based around messages or ‘tweets’ of no more than 140 characters. This said, tweets can and often do contain a link to other resources. These can include photographs uploaded to companion sites, such as TwitPic.

  Once you have Twitter account you can choose to follow the tweets of other users, and anybody else can follow you. You can also group those people you follow into lists to allow you to navigate through their tweets more easily. For example, you can group your tweets into ‘personal’ and ‘business’ categories.

  LindedIn is a business-oriented social networking site where users can log their professional profile including their career history, education and interests. By sending and accepting invitations, LindedIn members form networks of connections. They can also advertise the sorts fo communications that interest them. For example, a LinkedIn member may express an interest in consulting jobs, new ventures or certain areas of expertise. For those who use it wisely, LinkedIn is becoming a very powerful business networking tool.

  Like all household-name social networking sites, Facebook, Twitter and LindedIn are open to anybody and can be joined for free. However, social networking tools are now also starting to be used privately within companies in in what is increasingly called ‘Enterprise 2.0’. Many IT companies have launched online tools to which companies can subscribe if they want to build their own internal social networking and online collaborating tools called LotusLive. Available form lotuslive.com, these allow employees to meet privately, share files, chat, manage projects and network online. The result, as IBM puts it, is that ‘working together gets easier’.

Wikis

The second category of interpersonal computing site is the wiki. These are websites, or parts of them, that allow the collaborative authorship of documents. By far the most popular wiki is Wikipedia, the public, web-based encyclopedia with over three million articles. Anybody can create or edit an article on Wikipedia, which is both its strength and its weakness.

  Increasingly, private wikis are becoming popular in business as a means of running projects or replacing committees. Documents and questions can be posted for comment, with those in charge being able to decide who has the right to view and edit which documents. Anybody can now also create a public or private wiki in minutes using a free service, such as Zoho Wiki at wiki.zoho.com, Go on, have a go! You know you want to.

Blogs

Standing for ‘web log’, a blog is a chronological, journal-style websites maintained by an individual in the form of an online diary. A whole host of websites enable anybody to start their own blog, with the best including Blogger and WordPress. A special blog search engine called Technorati currently tracks over 100 million blogs.

Video sharing

Last, but by no means least when it comes to interpersonal computing, are video-sharing websites including YouTube. While years ago the Internet turned anybody into a publisher, video-sharing websites serve as anybody’s online movie masterpiece with a chance of actually being found and watched.

  YouTube and other video-sharing websites - such as Vimeo and DailyMotion - are powerful interpersonal computing tools because they allow everybody not just to add, but to augment and associate online video content. Adding content means actually uploading a new video (and preferably one that you have made yourself, rather than illegally stolen off the telly). This said, relatively few people upload video content, thereby making content augmentation and association in some ways more powerful.

  Augmentation occurs when somebody registers on a site such as YouTube and rates an existing video or posts a comment on it. While augmentation dose not involve an original creation, it is not as passive as just watching another person’s upload. The discussions that surround some videos can even be as interesting as the videos themselves!

  While relatively few users add or even augment content, everybody who uses an interpersonal computing website forges content associations. For example, when a YouTube visitor watches one video an then another, these two videos become associated. This means that the contents of the ‘Related Videos’ listing next to any video are directly influenced by what each visitor watches.  Also driven by visitor viewing habits are YouTube’s lists of featured and promoted videos, as well as its homepage content, such as those movies being ‘watched right now’.

  What content association very significantly highlights is how interpersonal computing is not just a conscious activity. The two minds interlinked at the top f figure 2.1 may never exchange a direct communication, such as a Facebook message or a tweet. However, the viewing decisions of one of these individuals can still directly influence the viewing activities of the other. In this way, the Web 2.0 phenomenon of interpersonal computing allows the cloud to become a mechanism for capturing what Tim O’Reilly calls ‘collective intelligence’. In other words, the more we use interpersonal computing websites, the more the cloud is becoming an interlinked web of recorded human decisions that may guide us all.

  All of this means that our online activities are increasingly being shaped by and shaping the actions of others. Which videos will you watch when you watch visit YouTube? Simple. The recorded viewing habits of previous visitors will guide you to the most popular. This is why interpersonal computing is so powerful. It is also yet another reason why cloud computing will so radically change the computing and information landscape.

The Ris of Web Services

While interpersonal computing is still getting all of the attention, web services are where much of the Web 2.0 action is currently at . Web services are online gadgets that automatically exchange information between websites. So, for example, if you visit a shopping site and click to pay by PayPal, you end up interacting with two automatically interlinked websites. The first is the one selling the goods, while the second(PayPal)is one that takes your money. The fact that these two sites communicate automatically out in the cloud is very clever indeed. However we hardly tend to give it a thought and may not even realize that it is happening.

  PayPal is far from the only company to offer a web service that can be plugged into another website like a piece of Lego. Indeed, when it comes to taking payments online, many shopping websites link behind the scenes to a payment service provider or ‘PSP’, such as Netbanx or RBS WorldPay. It is simply easier for most companies to plug in a PSP web service than to muck about technically and financially to set up their own online payment facility.

  Anybody can now plug a PSP web service into their site and start taking payments online in a matter of days or even hours. For people who want to sell just a small range of items, Google even offers the opportunity to add Google Checkout ‘buy now buttons’ to any website. As Google explains, these clever little buttons:

...will direct customers to a Google Checkout-hosted purchase page where they complete their purchase with Checkout. For digital goods, buyers will be able to download their order automatically once they compete payment.

  The above signals the way is which web service are turning the construction of websites, and indeed businesses, into a plug-and-play activity. Plugging together services from different websites is now known as ‘mashing’. Websites that draw their content from different services mashed together are then known as ‘mashups’.

  Alongside payment service providers, maps are now also very commonly mashed from one website into another. For example, look up a property on the estate agency website Rightmove.co.uk, to which the Rightmove site passes location information. AboutMyPlace in turn obtains the maps on to which it overlays local information form Microsoft Virtual Earth’s Bing maps. When visitors view a property on Rirghtmove, they are therefore seeing a single web page mashed from three different service providers (Rightmove, AboutMyPlace and Bing).

  Many interpersonal computing websites also allow people to mash content. For example, a great many individuals and companies upload their videos to YoutTube and then embed them back on their own website. This is easily done because once a video has been uploaded to YoutTube the required embed web code is displayed by default(although users can opt to turn this off if they wish). The embed code can then be copied and pasted into another web page to make the video available there. Twitter also offers the facility to embed a feed of tweets into another website. This allows anybody to include a news feed on their website that they can update from anywhere use by posting a tweet.

  Thousands upon thousands of web service gadgets are already available from the cloud. Many can also be mashed into other websites with little technical skill. As illustrated in screenshot 2.1, Google lists over 170,000 mashable gadgets on its Google Gadgets website, most of which have been programmed by third-party developers. Popular web service gadgets include calendars, games, currency converters, hotel and travel booking services, and some rather addictive virtual pets.

  Two of my favorite web service gadgets are Sitepal and Google Translate. Sitepal allows anybody to add a photorealistic or a cartoon-style talking character to a website, and is available from Sitepal.com. While this is pretty cool, Google Translate is even more so, and is even free. Once embedded, Google Translate automatically allows visitors to translate a web page or elven an entire site into over fifty different languages. This happens virtually instantly, and the first time you see it takes you breath away. It must also be worrying for professional translators. If you want to add Google Translate to your website, just go to translate.google.com and look under ‘Tools and Resources’.

  In the last chapter I indicated how cloud computing will be essential for netx-generation computing applications. The growth of web services provides just just one example of why this has to e the case. If individuals and organizations want to make use of the kind of ‘embeddable functions’ just described - let alone in development - then they have no choice but to embrace cloud computing.

Web 2.0 and Software as a Service

So far we have discussed how Web 2.0 developments can link people to people via interpersonal computing, and atomatically link one website to another by creating a mashup of web services. The final aspect of Web 2.0 involves linking people to computing resources, which in essence is what the remainder of this book is all about.

  ‘Software as a service’ or ‘SaaS’ is the technical term for a computer application that is accessed over the Internet instead of being installed on a computer or in a local data centre. Because the idea of people accessing software applications from the cloud was introduced in the last chapter - and because the whole of the next gargantuan chapter is devoted to online software applications - there is no reason for us to delve into the details of SaaS here. However, it is worth noting a couple of broad points in the specific content of Web 2.0.

  Firstly, while it makes things easier to divide Web 2.0 developments into ‘interpersonal computing’, ‘web services’ and ‘software as a service’, there are overlaps between all three areas. For example, one of the reasons that companies are starting to use online office applications, such Google Docs, is that they offer powerful collaborative facilities. In other words, some online software applications also function as interpersonal computing tools. As noted in the last chapter, in Google Docs it is possible for two or more people to work on a document, spreadsheet or presentation simultaneously. It is also possible to open up a real-time chat window concurrently with document to allow its many authors to discuss what they are doing.     

  Secondly, it is also worth noting that many online software application allow their output to be embedded into another website as a web service. For example, if a spreadsheet or chart is created in the free software application Zoho sheet(sheet.zoho.com), it can then be embedded into any web page. This allows, for example, a pie-chart graphic on one website to be update automatically every time the relevant data is changed in the Zoho Sheet cloud computing application. As another example, the sales figures in a private company wiki(possibly again hosted for free on Zoho) can be updated each time a salesperson enters data into the relevant Zoho Sheet spreadsheet, perhaps via their web-enabled mobile phone.

  What i hope to have just demonstrated is why it is impossible to truly appreciate the power of software as a service without placing it in the context of interpersonal computing and web services. I also hope I am starting to show why ignoring cloud computing will place many individuals and businesses at a distinct disadvantage. OK, so now you probably just want to know more about software as a service! But please, stay with me and Web 2.0 for just another few pages. Patience is a virtue, or so they apparently used to say.

Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing Strategy

In the broadest sense, cloud computing is all about moving computing infrastructure online. The highly related developments of Web 2.0 then encapsulate some of the things that people use that infrastructure for. What this implies is that a successful Web 2.0 then strategy ought to form part of any successful cloud computing strategy. This may perhaps sound rather obvious. However, the point is significant because many companies have yet to move beyond a strategy for their website, let alone the development of a broader Web 2.0 strategy and a clear vision for their uptake of cloud computing.

  Today a good web strategy is as much about an effective use of cloud resources as it is about website design. As already noted, many Web 2.0 development lead to the capture and exploitation of the collective intelligence of the many users of a website. It is indeed because websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become vast repositories of information and recorded human decisions that they are so popular. This popularity is also something that most business can take advantage of. A key part of any Web 2.0 strategy must therefore be to seek out where relevant collective intelligence has been pooled online and to establish a presence there.

  Unfortunately, many companies still labour under the illusion that, when it comes to the Internet, all they need do is to create a nice website. Such a ‘build-it-and-they-will-visit’ approach effectively makes the assumption that customers will come to them. However, it makes far more sense to adopt a Web 2.0 strategy f inhabiting ‘magnet’ websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Such websites are where significant collective intelligence has already been pooled. By establishing a presence on these sites, a business is therefore making the sensible decision to actually go to its customers.

  The majority of people visit one of a handful of popular interpersonal computing websites most time they go online. It is therefore crazy for any company not to set up shop where at least some of their potential online customers are actually known to be. A ‘build-it-and-they-will-visit’ Web 1.0 strategy is like waiting at home for people to knock on your door when you know that all of your friends and family are at a party across town. If you want to talk with these people then you must attend the party yourself.

  Inhabiting magnet Web 2.0 sites is also not difficult. In fact, uploading videos to YouTube and then embedding them back on your own website as a web service is usually easier than hosting the video yourself. Not least this is because video hosting is YouTube’s core business. Using YouTube or another popular Web 2.0 site to showcase yourself also siginificantly maximizes the chances of your online content actually being found.

  It is very simple. For example, host a video solely on your own website and people only have a chance of seeing it if they choose to find and visit your site among millions. However, host a video on YouTube and its one hundred million visitors a month will also have the opportunity to find and watch your masterpiece. Anybody who finds, watches and enjoys your video on YouTube may then also click-on-through to visit the website of its creator.

  To provide a practical example, the video content for my own ExplainingComputers.com website is hosted on YouTube. On the first 200,000 views of these videos, around 93 per cent took place on YouTube itself, with only 7 per cent of people watching the videos on ExplainingComputer.com or other website where they are embedded. About one third of the visitor to ExplaningComputers.com now also enter the site from its YouTube channel.

  As I hope my personal experience demonstrates, using magnet Web 2.0 sites to capture visitors really does work. It just requires an acceptance that a successful online presence need not be entirely on your own website. As discussed in the first chapter, detaching yourself or your business  from your own computing resources is what cloud computing is all about.

Towards Web as Platform

Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O’Reilly suggests that most Web 2.0 developments share two common characteristics. The first is their pooling of collective interlligence, while the second is what is known as ‘web as platform’. We have already considered the implications of the pooling of collective intelligence on popular Web 2.0 sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. I will therefore now bring this chapter to a close by examining O’Reilly’s second Web 2.0 characteristic of ‘web as platform’.

  A platform is a framework for running things on. For example, Microsoft Windows is the most popular platform on which people currently run desktop computing applications. What ‘web as a platform’ therefore means is that we will increasingly run things out in the cloud on the infrastructure of the Internet. As we have seen in this chapter, such things may be services and software as a service. However, over time, the web will also become the platform on which we undertake an increasing proportion of our social and economic activities.

  Web as platform is the concept at the very heart of cloud computing. It is also the idea that joins Web 2.0 and cloud  computing at the hip. To a large extent Web 2.0 is a collective label for that increasing number of computing activities that cloud not exist without the platform of the web to run them on.  In this sense, when it comes to cloud computing, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia and their online kin have therefore shown us the way.

  In particular, when popular Web 2.0 sites have demonstrated is the value of keeping information and applications not on our won computers but on a single, public computing infrastructure. The web is becoming to computers what the phone network has always been to phones. Imagine how useless a phone would be without a single, global network to connect it to. By the end of the decade, a computer without a connection to the cloud - to the platform of the Internet - is likely to have just as little value.

  The Web 2.0 developments of the second half of the noughties have already shown us the kinds of applications - such as interpersonal computing, web services and software as a service - that will soon be the mainstay of cloud computing.  However, perhaps even more significantly, the popular uptake of social networking and online video in particular have also begun to powerfully change attitudes towards computer use.

  The hundreds of millions of people who today use social networking and online video sites  have already begun to accept the value of storing information out in the cloud rather than on their own computers. Today’s web service and SaaS pioneers have similarly let go of old ideas and have accepted a future in which most computing applications will be ‘out there’ in the cloud. Persuading more and more people to use trust the cloud as their primary computing platform is without doubt the hardest challenge for advocates fo cloud computing. However, what Web 2.0 developments have already shown is that most people can be persuaded to store and process data online once they are clear about the benefits that this may bring.