Indie 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe posted this excellent up-to-date diagram and accompanying text on “Tips for Building Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications”, in preparation for a talk he’s giving at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco 22-25 April. Given this teaser and preview, the talk seems it would be well worth catching (either live or hopefully posted on the web afterward).

What’s “next generation” Web 2.0? Hinchcliffe writes,

We’re currently seeing that newer Web applications are much more federated than in the past, meaning they’re made of distributed parts instead of being just one app on a Web server at one domain and are increasingly leveraging external Web services and APIs. We’re also seeing Web app functionality being bundled up into user distributable components such as widgets, gadgets, badges, and SNS embedded apps. Next generation Web apps are also much more social than in the past with features such as friends lists, activity streams, and aggregation from other social sites as well as using that information to really learn about your customer like Facebook does [Paul Buchheit.] And new Web apps are leveraging powerful new development platforms like Ruby on Rails, grid environments like 3tera , or cloud computing platforms like Amazon’s EC2 and Google App Engine (my comparison of the latter two is here on ZDNet.) And these are just three of the larger aspects of the many new things taking place in on the ‘edge’ of the Web today.

And he ends his post with six common sense but very useful tips/reminders for anyone embarking on building a Web 2.0 platform in mid-2008.