To drive the right
decisions in what they do product designers, marketing teams, software architects, developers, strategy officers, and other key roles in today's generation of online businesses need to have a solid handle on an extensive array of Web topics. This ranges from appreciating why plain old HTTP is so good at underpinning the Web to more
sophisticated topics like modern application architecture, the latest in online user experiences,
next generation computing models (grid/cloud/utility/SaaS/PaaS),
cost-effective scalability, user identity,
network effects,
Jakob's Law, analytics, operations, user community, as well as the many compelling new distribution models that are nearly mandatory in the first release of most products.
An excellent summary of the truly massive, but largely underappreciated scale of these new Web application models was last week's
TechCrunch piece on the progress of Google's OpenSocial, an increasingly successful model for creating portable social networking applications that will run on any OpenSocial-compliant site. Erick Schonfeld reported that OpenSocial now has a total reach of an astonishing 350 million users and it will soon be
500 million. There are over 4,500 OpenSocial apps today, a healthy number for the application format but a small drop in the bucket compared to the number of Web sites in the world. But the key is that these applications are integrated much deeper into the social fabric of an engaged audience, interjecting themselves into the daily personal and work habits of the "captive" users of social sites and even have access to the personal habits and data of users of these sites. Facebook's story is impressive as well with over 37,000 applications that have been installed over 700 million times.
Unfortunately, the number of capable practitioners of these new distribution models remains relatively small compared to the large body of experts in traditional Web product development. Demand is also low for these new skills as most organizations have been painfully slow to appreciate how much online product development has changed. A quick search of the job aggregator
SimplyHired tells the tale: Nearly a thousand Web designer positions are available while only 36 OpenSocial and 40 open API positions are open, for example. This despite the the latter skills being able to project a product across the Web into hundreds of social sites or create an API that allows the product to be incorporated into countless other products for far less cost per customer than traditional methods.
Organisations need a Manager who can be on top of this web technology knowledge. He will need to hire the right people (programmers & designers). Who do we call such a Manager? The term
Web Strategist would be approapriate.
Congratulations to Kris Allen who had just won American Idol 2009. From a student to a Superstar. Now that's a story. He beat Asam Lambert to win the American Idol crown.
