Danese Cooper recently asked for permission to re-use a quote from a talk I’d given at an Intel open source event in Asia, in which I sounded my usual theme about understanding how some of the deep themes of open source, such as user participation, have transformed businesses that are not normally thought of as open source. I was tickled, because I hadn’t heard myself make this point quite so compactly:
The likes of Google, Amazon, and Ebay take the intelligence of
all their users–and put it in the interface.
This was actually the second replay I'd gotten in a few days of myself in "off the cuff" mode. I'd had a meeting with MapQuest a few days after the Where 2.0 conference. Antony Pegg sent me email a few days later with some of the notes he’d taken on what he referred to as “Tim-icisms”:
“As far as the average consumer is concerned, Close Enough seems to be Good Enough”
“The API is a reflection of the richness of the data”
“Change the Business Model, Change the Rules”
“Syndication of Data is the Future”
“It will Self-Brand if you do it right”
“Drive Usage THEN figure out how to monetize it”
“To push your API, do something NOT business-related”
The MapQuest meeting actually felt a little embarrassing. I was just riffing on what seem to me to be some of the emerging Web 2.0 concepts, and they were taking notes like I knew what I was talking about :-) Seriously, though, if any of these phrases strike a nerve, let me know, and I’ll expand on them. I’m trying to work myself up to a long “what is Web 2.0” writeup, and interaction often jumpstarts the writer’s mind.