Seven Ways to Fully Embrace the Network

• Network Enable Your Application.  This might seem obvious but it's a critical prerequisite and has more than the surface potential for creating interesting new applications outside of pure Web plays.  For example, a Web 2.0 application does NOT have to be Web-based, but should be able to at least connect to the Internet.  iTunes is an excellent example of Web 2.0 outside of the browser, but even mobile phones and text messages, made better ala TWTTR, shows the potential to think outside the box when it comes to thinking about a network.


• Enable Data Sharing and Data Defaults.  A big part of harnessing collective intelligence via Web 2.0 techniques is by making the experiences of tertiary users in a given situation easier and smarter.  By this I mean when a user does something using the Web 2.0 application, that information should contextually improve that situation for the next user that comes along.  I often cite del.icio.us/popular as a great example of leveraging the work that the Web users that came immediately before you are making your upcoming experience that much better (less searching for new and relevant content.)  More specifically this could mean expert guidance in completing online forms, improving shopping recommendations, collaborative spam filtering, and much more.  Capturing information from your users and making it available to others (without violating privacy of course) is a key "plank" of Web 2.0.


• Linkify Everything In Your Web 2.0 App.  And I mean everything.  The hyperlink is one of the most powerful mechanisms existing for triggering network effects.  It's how users show up to your site in the first place and everything else thereafter.  A hyperlink structure must be how the information on your site is organized, shared, bookmarked, e-mail, IM'd, etc.  Granular URLs are the key here.  A site should have a URL structure that has clear axes for its URL segments (the things between the slashes in a link) to navigate through a user's information, the shared folksonomy etc.   Something like site/user/tags/xxxx is a classic example but there should be many interesting (and user-defined) paths to get to the same information.  Once available via links, the knowledge of the page, data, or minicommunity to which the link navigates can propagate with amazing -- even alarming -- speed.  And propagation over the network is the name of the game when it comes to network effects.  If that link contains something people want to share, they will e-mail the link to a group of friends, who will IM it to more friends, who will put the links in their blogs, and so on.  Pretty soon everyone is involved and you're buying bandwidth upgrades in bulk quantities.  The Message: Consistently think in and design in hyperlinks.


• Syndicate Your Content:  It's unclear in my mind how powerful this truly is, but the blogosphere is proof that it can be quite potent.  Furthermore, it greatly increases the discoverability of whatever content is on your site.  You should support RSS at least, but probably Atom as well.  Other people have written more authoritatively about this than I do here but it's an important checklist item.

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