Tim O’reilly, in his description of Web 2.0 said that

The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence

This insight defines the success of Web 2.0 companies as reliant on a new development in the software design world: the value of a system that increases as its users increase. The network effects realized for those types of systems provide a fair amount of value but what is important here is that the user becomes part of the application. In O’Reilly’s example, flickr can’t work without users tagging picture, Google can’t work without people creating web pages, etc… These participatory applications will have a large impact in the way we interface with systems and may represent the first breakthrough in terms of adding intelligence to our systems in a proper way.

As we all know, computers are not particularly smart. However, they are very good at processing large amounts of information. What has been missing, up to this point is the idea of what information to feed them and how to help them head in the right direction. With concepts surrounding web 2.0, these cues are no longer computer cues but they are human ones. No one programmed del.icio.us to figure out how to create a taxonomy of pages. However, every user of the system has helped create some level of taxonomy in the system.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system took the next logical step, which was to provide a software platform to automate such interactions. It is similar, in nature, to the way computing work was distributed on efforts like SETI@Home but adding the human element to it. As such, as the boundaries between human interaction and software systems get softer, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell how smart (or dumb) a system really is. People are part of the application but are applications part of the people too? When I google something I don’t know, do I enhance myself by discovering the new information and then storing it in my brain? Where is the line?

Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds, like SecondLife or World of Warcraft represent another logical step in this evolution: creating virtual economies out of thin air. as I write this, there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of people working on creating financial value within virtual communities. They may be selling things within games but, ever since those games started becoming more involved, people have been willing to pay real money to get virtual goods. Seeing such developments, some companies have set up worlds where actual trades are happening and are integrated with the rest of the financial world.

A couple of weeks ago, one of those games, Project Entropia, announced they would issue an ATM card to take virtual currencies into the real world.
Edward Castronova, the leading researcher on that subject, considers this “a blurring of the distinction between the game economy and the real one.”

As computing power continues to increase, this blurring is going to become more and more scary. At the current time, videogame platforms like the Xbox360 or the PS3 are presenting us with videogames that look close to reality. When those types of things start appearing in online community models, the lines will become so hazy that it will be difficult to tell what is the real world and what is a virtual one.

This is the fifth article in a 6 part series. You can read the following parts here:

• Part 1: Intro
• Part 2: Always on
• Part 3: IPzation
• Part 4: Sensors
• Part 5: Participatory Applications
• Part 6: Conclusion

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Future Tense — Participatory Applications. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Wired article points out that this is just the beginning, though. Drafting a candidate is a very different thing from trying to get that candidate to be elected and it is obvious that the Internet will be a critical element in establishing who the nominee will be on the democratic side of the 2004 presidential campaign and will probably be a critical element in the overall campaign.

New tools like weblogs have enabled people to have a clear impact on the presidential process. Moving forward, the use of technology is only going to increase and presidential candidates might find themselves in a state where they become software producers to gain an edge over their competitors. Once that happens, one could start asking questions relating to use and distribution of the software they create.

Should it be open-source? That would be a good idea from an ideological standpoint but a potential disaster in a race as it would allow one’s competitors to quickly play catch-up. Should it be completely closed? If that’s the approach taken, good software developed during a primary race would not necessarily be used in the general election, possibly hobbling some good potential for the winner of a primary. Should it be turned over to the party (either Republican or Democrat) after the nomination conventions? And if that is the case, will it be used as a new bargaining chip in politics? (Imagine a campaign saying “Well, we’ve built this great software platform to do X and we will turn it over, along with support from our people, if you give me Y position in your campaign”)

And what about supporter lists? Let’s say that one candidate ends up with a million subscribers to his/her RSS feeds. Should those feeds then be redirected to the feed of the primary campaign winner? Or are they just falling under a single-use goal in the primaries.

Last but not least in the thoughts I have on this is the question of digital preservation. Since we are talking about software applications here, how will those be preserved for future generations of historians? The use of technology will have an impact but where will those collections sit in the future? Should all the software be turned over to the Library of Congress at the end of an election process? or should a non-profit organization like archive.org hold them? And if those are turned over, what limitations would be put on using the code?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Politics and the Net: What about the software?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.