Tubbydev

Sous le titre “Forget Platforms And Applications, Data Is The Real Asset On the Web”, Publishing énonce quelques vérités .. évidentes  que quelques geeks et webx.0 ont du mal à prendre en compte parfois.

“A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.”

Applications — the front end technology — are no longer the core business asset, at least not in the long term. It’s way too easy for anyone to clone anyone else’s application.

So what is the business asset? The users — and their data. The “social graph” is what drives value for users on Facebook. They have all their data on Facebook. Their friends have all their data on Facebook. That’s it. Done. The users are happy. They’re locked in, but they DON’T CARE.

The most successful companies on the web are those that created a virtuous cycle between their users and their database, where the more data users put in, the more value they get out. That’s the essence of Web 2.0. Data has limited value locally, or walled off on a single site. But pool that data, and the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts, allowing everyone who puts data in to take much more value out.

That’s what drives the search economy. That’s why NYTimes.com realized they were better off putting their content (data) into the search engine index (database), because they derive more value from putting data into the search ecosystem than they do keeping it to themselves.

YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook didn’t get big because they created technology that couldn’t be cloned — their applications were cloned dozens (hundreds) of times over. They got big because they were the FIRST to create a well-designed application that drove a virtuous cycle of data input and data output for a particular group of users, e.g. college students. And once they got the data, no competing applications could create the same value for users, because they weren’t sitting on top of the same massive database.”

Voilà pourquoi les applications comme youtube, comme Google et d’autres n’ont aucune valeur et voilà pourquoi des applications qui servent uniquement pour transférer des données n’ont aussi aucune valeur (horlmis celle que peuvent payer des gens qui penseraient qu’elles en ont ) car elles ne sont que des outils (netvibes en est un cas typique à notre avis), parfois utiles mais outils.

Voilà aussi comment une bulle peut se créer et éclater dans le nouveau web.

L’informatique, les applications, les sites, les extranets, les intranets, les blogs NE SONT QUE DES MOYENS et non des buts ou des objectifs !!