Wiley Web 2.0 Heroes: Interviews with 20 Web 2.0 Influencers
Contents
1. The general philosophy is Stop wor Big companies love rying about having to manage your control they need infrastructure start worrying about predictability Wall your products and your innovation Smeet doesnot libe And thats a great messaBe So if you can focus your business and your unp redictability lt employees to do things that truly mat ter to the bottom line and not worry about infrastructure to support your software and manage it as a service it makes a lot of sense Big companies are going to be reluctant because they don t want to have core business infrastructure in a place that they don t control Big companies ai 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 11 Max Mancini eBay TI love control they need predictability Wall Street does not like unpredictabil ity and if you release that control too much you run the risk of catastrophe Thats why it will take a long time to get there Shifting back to Web 2 0 what has eBay done in the Web 2 0 space that you would consider really cool First we built a widget in May of this year called eBayToGo You can take a look at it at http togo ebay com As simple as widgets are the reason that this one is meaningful is that it creates a compelling interactive eBay Anywhere experience delivering unique and customized content from our site and publishing it on a third party site or blog From our perspective it also helps show that distributing e2. I consider the first mashup the Craigslist Google Maps mashup as an embodiment of my view of Web 2 0 Somebody once described it as the atomization of the Web Its taking all of the components and making them available so that people can combine them in ways that you would never have considered or that are very personal for an individual experience So the components that I see really defining Web 2 0 are platform or web services innovation that s built on top of that platform or web services and distribution of that information You see some of the embodiments of that sort of thing today for example the proliferation of widgets across MySpace Facebook Google and Yahoo Now you can combine informa tion from multiple sources easily and distribute that information around Distribution means that you can t necessarily rely on individual sites being where the Internet economy is going Rather you must ask what com pelling value are you delivering and how do you monetize that value Getting back to eBay its easy for us because the service that we provide is all centered on transaction engines and payments through PayPal As a result there are inherent monetization models both for eBay as well as for developers and people who are using things that are distributed Another defining moment for the What needs to evolve trend in Web 2 0 was the development is the monetization of ad supported models that made it models Oth
3. ve done at eBay justify the cost of development It depends on how you compare cost I would say that one of the other beauties of the Web 2 0 evolution is that it s a lot cheaper to develop things like this because it s easy to write or integrate with a REST API or to lever age a web service Now you re seeing some tool companies come out with creative tools that automatically read in the WSDLs that define different web services that are out there and allow you to drag and drop to create things things like Yahoo Pipes All of these tools are designed to make it easy to leverage web services to create widgets and distribute applications The cost of development is going down for those things but the early days of development are pricey although not as pricey as writing a desktop app I can tell you that It s all relative For me its cheap compared to core development core infrastruc ture costs Thats another reason that there are so many companies out there right now because they can actually launch their company without having to ai 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 13 Max Mancini eBay 13 invest a lot of development dollars The differentiation is not going to be investment dollars on the technology side the technology is getting easier and easier to use Its going to be entirely based on user experience and what information are you combining in the right way Is there anything about Web 2 0 or eBay that
4. you d like to add Just that the sheer volume of content and interesting stuff which is pro liferating at an accelerated pace coupled with the ability to find it has enabled this economy if you will the ability to create widgets and distrib ute them Without the early days of personal home pages evolving into blogs evolv ing into creating mashups easily or whatever self publishing in any way obviously video through YouTube all those things are really foun dational elements It is important to note that Sound Bites eBay is one of the best known successful web sites When you add PayPal and Skype to the mix you have a company with great web experience Max Mancini who runs the Platform and Disruptive Innovation team for eBay is in a great position to provide insights on Web 2 0 and more Some of his per spectives follow Internet users expect rich interactive experiences On sites differen tiation will be based entirely on user experience and how information is combined A defining moment for Web 2 0 is people opening their platforms to allow others to use the information in ways that the platform provider never thought of Web 2 0 is really defined as enabling people to create new things Atomization of the Web is taking all of the components and mak ing them available for combination in unconsidered ways or in ways that are very individual You can t necessarily rely on individual sites as being where
5. 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 7 26 Page 1 Max Mancini eBay You blur the lines between a desktop experience and a Web experience and that really where everything is headed Max Mancini f you ask anyone about online auctions chances are the first place they would name is eBay Ironically eBay is more than just an auction In fact eBay s business is transactions It just happens that their most known transac tions are those of people selling items to buyers on an auction site that carries their name Hello there Gaon Sng wh Change Skype Toke a deep breath CEI gt eC a shoo saro Hee ame ian ooy araea tae Tar y mui Tar PayPal JS traezh Si Ea oo Y Phap Soi My nPoy Crinemouity Hop la e J Hy ayan hin you ign is AP Li hale Site Mao A Raat atl E a jasna ianh pal a20 arira Y nire na ii nimi Mon evr Shop your Favarite Categories Welcome ta eBay a fe o iai Welcome 7 ate o 3 ew to eBay gt nad a It s free to downlo masar apisiroe wn fat ann fras New ON Tie better when you win It Sear Buy 8 onl spo a mun so StubHutid _ ae Get em before they re gone IGNOW ENDING NOW vst al cstegaros ENDIN www ebay com 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 2 2 Web 2 0 Heroes eBays business is centered on charging a fee for bringing a seller and a buyer together This transaction fee is h
6. Bay off of eBay com is very important to our business The other cool thing is desktop ebay com which my team is developing This application is written on Adobe s AIR platform which creates an expe rience that you just can t get on the Web today in this environment on your desktop For us once again it s distribution I J look at delivering the eBay experi if you can create a ence off of eBay com in four places compelling experience The first is delivering it across the for the consumers Web through dised dunn of widgets Hien tats really and core functionality Tm talking i buying experience now not selling important so this is enabling widgets not just promoting items that are on eBay for sale but also allowing people to pur chase directly from the widget That s something that were working on internally and we talk about Hopefully in Q1 of next year we ll start to see this stuff proliferate across the Web Thats cool because you can put some thing up on your blog and not have people leave the blog but stay in that experience and have very relevant very tailored kinds of products depend ing on what you re talking about So that s distribution across the Web The second place is distribution on the desktop There are a lot of desktop PCs that are shipped and it s always great to have a desktop link on ship ping PCs While having a Web link is okay if you can create a compelling experience for the consume
7. cale yet All of that will happen but you address it when it happens Much of that will evolve with Web 2 whatever On Web 2 0 everyone has his or her own definition Is there anything about Web 2 0 you believe people are misunderstanding Thats a good question Everybody seems to have a derivative or a variant on the same theme at least among the people I talk to Let me ask a different question then AJAX Adobe s AIR Microsoft s Silverlight a lot of these technologies coming out how do these fit into a Web 2 0 world People have defined Web 2 0 as AJAX so thats missing the boat AJAX is a component its an enabler to things that are evolving with Web 2 0 and its a contributing technology but in and of itself it doesn t define Web 2 0 ai 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 7 Max Mancini eBay 7 I can speak more specifically about Adobe AIR because we ve built a product on that There s a lot of momentum around creating interactive experiences leveraging Web 2 0 technologies and web services so what Adobe is saying is Why can t we do even better by taking those same technologies and bringing them to the desktop and allowing you to leverage the web services in the same way and as simply as you were able to through the Web Adobe is jumping on something that could be quite significant in terms of how we experience the web which is the web really isn t about a web browser we experience it
8. cause of advertising models frankly and affil iate programs They have a longer rope if you will but that still doesn t create the real economic value that needs to be put in place in some of these businesses You mentioned 2000 2001 and the bubble that burst Do you see a bubble now as well and is there a risk it will burst There s a bubble now I don t know if it has the same risk of bursting because the previous bubble was created entirely as a result of the IPO mar ket and that mechanism The current bubble seems more tied to the M amp A market but its not as aggressive as what the IPO market was And there s a bit more revenue backing to some of these startups So there is a different kind of bub p ble although I don t know how early The bigger the we are in it its certainly very target the more aggressive right now I don t think it attention you get from has the same risk of bursting as ihe bad guys 5 quickly as the previous one did f You mention monetization and the sharing of information This leads to the question of security Do you see security continuing to be an issue Security hasn t been addressed yet in a lot of these models I m in a unique position of being able to sit back and see some of these things We saw the value in creating this kind of model due to the selling side of our business and we re expanding on the buying side much more aggressively now ai 41998c01 qxd B
9. ce around eBay Anywhere To give some context our developers program which is the responsibility of my platform team is seven years old As part of the program and central to our platform strategy we offer a series of web services that let any third party create applications that tie into eBay s ecosystem Our ecosystem is composed of developers as well as applications and cus tomer needs Critically our ecosystem has a clear value proposition for ai 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 3 Max Mancini eBay 3 third party developers And today more than 25 percent of the listings on eBay come through third party tools Disruptive Innovation s role is to inspire innovation through experimenta tion We study trends and provide infrastructure and resources that encourage developers internally and also externally to think and create within the boundaries of their known silos The trends we concentrate on shift over time Presently the two big trends we see eY y i are first that buyer expectations ou cant necessarily have grown in terms of what they rely on individual demand from online commerce sites being where the Today people expect rich interac alee Internet economy tive experiences things like Flash and AJAX and JavaScript enabled is going across the Web The second trend we are closely monitoring is social commerce which relates to the comfort people have sharing contact informati
10. erwise a possible to monetize things that would lato f companies wii have otherwise been unmonetizable So integrating ads to contextually rele go out of business vant information whether it s some bodys blog or somebodys personal home page whatever it happens to be meant you could make money off of these things in ways that never existed before or couldn t scale before Of all the things you mentioned are any more important than others Right now there s an explosion of web services that have opened things up Thats an important enabler However that s not going to be the definition of success in the long run it s going to be expected out of everyone ai 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 5 Max Mancini eBay 5 What needs to evolve is the monetization models The commerce based transaction model and the pure ad model as they exist today need to evolve significantly I don t know what that s going to look like but it will have to evolve otherwise a lot of companies will go out of business Having some companies going out of business seems to be a part of how things do evolve That s true I like to look back to 2000 2001 because the deal flow and VCs venture capitalists and everything else sure look similar to today in fact you re starting to see some similar companies pop back up on the radar screen The difference is that these companies have a way to last longer and bootstrap more be
11. going to happen if you re willing to pay ai 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 8 8 Web 2 0 Heroes enough you can get it right I just don t see the average person being con nected continuously with the exception of through their mobile device In developing countries mobile is the way most people connect to the Internet Although there s a lot of innovation and excitement around Web 2 0 certainly in Silicon Valley the mobile investments are starting to pick up again The first wave of investments may have been too early I don t know what it was I don t know if this next wave is going to stick but if I were looking at where the real opportunity to reach the majority of the world is it s not going to be in the PC in the home That leads into the question what do you see as the next big thing coming Thats a good question There s plenty of opportunity in mobile people are just going to have to be there to engage with people when they re connected It s hard to tell I believe in enabling your business to operate no matter what the next big thing is and letting other people catch up Let me describe what I m talking about I would rather spend money building our platform structure and web services so that when the next big thing happens our platform is that next big environment For eBay obviously we have our three major busi nesses PayPal Skype and eBay marketplaces and those are i
12. logging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 6 6 Web 2 0 Heroes So getting back to the definition of Web 2 0 its creating a lot more open ness so you can integrate things that you would have had to build from scratch before how you manage rights and security within that model has yet to be determined In the early days even Facebook was hammered on how much they shared information They probably have the biggest head start in terms of creating a model where you can define trust a little bit more specifically A d Tm not sure that s addressing all of the SESS eG UGS OUT security issues Social networking isn t cell phone service is really addressing any of it right now in the United States but people are going to address this I cant imagine ne security always shows up It s a func i i tion of how much monetization occurs a situation where in the model and how early and were we always have not quite at the big levels of monetiza tion yet where security becomes as big connectivity l of a concern as it should eBay has done security and what we internally call trust and safety pretty significantly Obviously being a huge marketplace means that people will try to figure out how to take advantage of others The security model gets built in and the bigger the target the more attention you get from the bad guys With the exception of something like click fraud in CPC kinds of models none of the Web 2 0 stuff is at that s
13. ndepend ently very huge markets for us m not specifically looking beyond our marketplaces business and how buyer experience and social commerce might affect those Shifting back to an earlier comment you mentioned Web 3 0 Some define Web 3 0 as the Semantic Web Do you have any opinions or thoughts on the Semantic Web Well I don t think it s the Semantic Web The next generation of search and find for discovery across the Web will be much more like what my interpretation of Semantic Web is which isn t necessarily what everyone else shares Its a trend I did mention on Web 2 0 one reason Web 2 0 happened was that it became so easy and 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 9 Max Mancini eBay 9 cheap to publish right As an individual I can create a hugely popular blog with almost no marketing experience or background team Self publishing has enabled many things to happen frankly its supporting a lot of the economy from a page view perspective in that you can distribute widgets in content things like that So I think that the same thing will happen with the Semantic Web or next generation finding experience on the Web which is How are people iden tifying content in a way that can be aggregated and useful to browse through or search through or discover The concept of meta tags and tag ging clearly had some early momentum and we acquired a company StumbleUpon see Chapter 15 for more on StumbleUp
14. of catastrophe Enable your business to operate no matter what the next big thing is and let other people catch up
15. on which takes into consideration this concept of not only identifying the social bookmark aspect of it but tagging things I over simplify the concept of e Semantic o AA I o fore Stop Worrying about see people assigning detailed attrib having to manage ute definitions to everything that s your infrastructure in their content out there I think l start worrying about there s a huge opportunity I used to run a company called Consumer your products and Review and our objective was to get your innovation pa product reviews from passionate enthusiasts on particular product categories Consumer or community generated content is huge It creates huge value and it s even easier to do now The Semantic Web can evolve out of stuff like that over time I just don t know how the value chain works Where s the incentive structure Another company that eBay has acquired Epinions was a consumer gen erated review site They set up a virtual economy for motivating people to do things but ultimately the majority of the contributors are a small per centage of the population So in order for the Semantic Web to really come about there needs to be a shift in people s ability and willingness to help tag and categorize infor mation across the Web Some of the bigger companies are going to have to participate a bit more in standardizing around this 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 10 10 Web 2 0 Heroes Do y
16. on and defining their relationships online across their social graph in every place it exists i e Plaxo LinkedIn Facebook or MySpace How much we share directly impacts the overall trust models that exist Thats something on which eBay has been building so we think its important to experiment with social environment participation and learn how that affects what other people are doing in commerce and how that affects the business Across eBay PayPal and Skype eBay accounts comprise a lot of our social graph with a high empha sis on the trusted relationships where commerce flourishes Are you finding that people are willing to share more information now Absolutely Thats the trend we re seeing We ve launched a Facebook appli cation as well as neighborhoods within eBay Obviously there s a different twist to what you expect to do when you re on eBay versus when you re on Facebook On Facebook you re in a social environment and what interests you is dis covery with an entertainment factor what are your friends doing What are their friends doing that I might have some interest in It s not as action oriented as you would expect on a site like eBay of course In eBay s case youre there to have some amount of entertainment but also to look for and discover new things ai 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 4 4 Web 2 0 Heroes This leads into the primary question How would you and eBay define Web 2 0
17. ou believe that shift will come Do you think people will be willing to tag information I actually do but I don t know what the trigger is going to be Let me tell you why I think that I hate to use Facebook as an example but they changed a lot of things with some basic activities By opening up their platform they got every major Internet company to ask How do we open up our platform more Google responded with OpenSocial which while its a marginally off of a paper napkin kind of launch might just take off They started off with the right things and they know they need to get into the game more aggressively off their platform than they have in the past and get other people to do the same thing OpenSocial encourages other companies who have typically held their information very tightly like a LinkedIn discussed in Chapter 9 and a Plaxo to open their platforms more SalesForce has understood this concept for a long time We ve understood it Yahoo has understood it to a certain extent And Amazon actually jumped on this bandwagon a few years back and has made great progress Let s jump to another term that is being used today Software as a Service SaaS or Software plus Services S S What is your thought on these Great ideas Once again the real test for adoption on those won t be small companies it ll be the big companies The small companies will adopt it because economically it makes a lot of sense oie
18. ow eBay makes money regardless of whether a marble a car or a piece of land in Texas is sold It really doesn t matter what is sold as long as a transaction occurs eBay also provides a number of other services for doing commerce includ ing PayPal which like eBay makes money when transactions happen but instead of buyers and sellers exchanging products PayPal makes it easy for two people or other entities to exchange money Using this simple transac tion model eBay and PayPal both became leaders in the spaces they target If You Can Create a Compelling Experience for the Consumers Max Mancini is the senior directory of disruptive innovation at eBay Prior to this role he led over 70 developers at eBay focusing on eBay Stores registra tion sign in merchandising and more He has also worked with eBay s clas Can you tell a bit about who you are and who you work for Tm Max Mancini I work for eBay and I run eBay s Platform and Disruptive Innovation team Platform and Disruptive Innovation team is an interesting title Can you expand on that 10 le j Sure There are two parts of my team ur Tole 1s On the platform side our job is to to inspire enable innovation We want to ensure innovation through that eBay is an E Commerce operating experimentation system or platform that can be P accessed by third party developers to create applications and other innova tions that accelerate commer
19. rs then that s really important Our eBay desk top product is one of those examples ai 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 12 12 Web 2 0 Heroes The third is distribution into the digital living room which is one of those fits and starts Its tried but hasn t gone anywhere Third parties have cre ated things for eBay through our platform like this company called BuyOff in Austin Texas when they launched with Time Warner cable in Austin They re also launching across a lot of Time Warner areas with eBay in the cable set top box Pretty interesting We ve got a third party who developed a Windows Media Center application We re really looking at that but it s more of an early Hey lets see whats going on But it s pretty important to learn and know how these things develop And then the last one of course is mobile from a distribution perspective One of the other eBay is going to be much more about beauties of the eBay across the Web than it s going to Web 2 0 evolution is be about eBay com Every big company A needs to think that way Although the that its a lot cheap T trend is there big companies I don t ie 29 to develop things think are necessarily its a tough one It s a lot easier to control and pre From my point of view in five years dict behavior when it all happens on your web site Do you see Web 2 0 features justifying their cost Do some of the things you
20. that way today but it doesn t have to be If you think about it and I don t I beli bli think this example is the best I believe in ena 1ng Yahoo s desktop widgets don t take your business to advantage of the same dynamic that operate no matter normal web widgets do which is what the next big viral distribution Thats another important dimension of whats hap thing is and letting pening on the Web other people So the concept of Adobe AIR and catch up i in theory Silverlight although I m not familiar with it is smart in that you blur the lines between a desktop experience and a web experience and that s where everything is headed A colleague on my team likes to say that Web 3 0 really happens when peo ple stop talking about the Web the desktop and Web 2 0 it s just the way we interact with our computer It s transparent whether it s local or on the Net AIR is just a first step in that direction That brings up the issue of online versus offline and the topic of connectivity Do you foresee a day when connectivity availability is not an issue I ve thought a lot about that since we ve invested in our eBay desktop product on the AIR platform One of the benefits is that you can do offline activities As messed up as our cell phone service is in the United States I can t imag ine us in a situation where we always have connectivity Id love for us to get there I don t know when it s
21. the Internet economy is going Rather you should determine what com pelling value you are delivering and how you can monetize that value Another defining moment for the trend in Web 2 0 is being able to monetize things that would have otherwise been unmonetizable The ai 41998c01 qxd Blogging Heroes 2 24 08 neey Page 14 14 Web 2 0 Heroes monetization models really have to evolve The commerce based transaction model and the pure ad model as they exist today need to evolve significantly Web 2 0 is creating more openness in integrating things that you would have had to build from scratch before Nobody has even started looking at how you manage rights and security within that We re not quite at the big levels of monetization yet where security is as big of a concern as it should be Blurring the lines between a desktop experience and a web experi ence is where everything is headed There is a lot of momentum for creating interactive experiences leveraging Web 2 0 technologies and web services We re taking these technologies bringing them to the desktop and allowing people to leverage the web services in the same way and as simply as they could through the Web After all the Web really isn t about a web browser we experience it that way today but it doesn t have to be Big companies love control they need predictability Wall Street does not like unpredictability and if you release that control too much you run the risk
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