Don Marti, of the original sucks-rules-o-meter, wrote a very interesting blog entry entitled On Web 2.0, application uses you! He’s riffing on the idea that Web 2.0 is about what I’ve called architectures of participation, systems whose value is built “from many small information contributions that users don’t mind making. Every user whitewashes a little bit of the fence.”
In the course of the posting, he makes a couple of very interesting points. One was a simple heuristic for whether or not something is Web 2.0-ish or not, and that is whether the API is truly open, or requires some kind of partner signup process. He says:
You could probably do a pretty reliable Web-2.0-or-not-o-meter based on dates in the RSS feed for API announcements vs. dates in press releases matching /partner/i.
Here’s the full context:
So far this Web 2.0 stuff sounds like it’s all about web sites. How can companies that aren’t basically web sites or mail-order catalogs be Web 2.0? Some already are. Remixed FedEx lately? Download their sample code and try their API.
Hold on a second—you don’t have to be a FedEx “partner” to do that? No, and that’s the first concrete difference between Web 2.0 and non-Web-2.0 companies. From a pre-2.0 point of view, the partner program is what enables companies to interact with you. Start thinking 2.0, though, and the partner program looks more and more like pointless bureaucracy that keeps non-“partner” companies out. Just as you want Googlebot to crawl your product pages, (and some of you will go flame Matt Cutts if it doesn’t) you want any company whose stuff can plug into yours to try your API.
You could probably do a pretty reliable Web-2.0-or-not-o-meter based on dates in the RSS feed for API announcements vs. dates in press releases matching /partner/i.