Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability – Digg

In the past, most of the business companies were using web 1.0 with the idea of “Get Big Fast” that was not that effective, well it was the opposite that makes some business companies loss their business in the long term. However, businesses start using Web 2.0 feature, which was an excellent step to be successful. As we all know that Web 2.0 provides and offers a lot of great features that gives the opportunity to people and business to do more for less, and that is what they called “Lightweight Models and Cost Effective Scalability”. It means that people can start their business as well as increasing their budget without the needs of applying the “Get Big Fast” theory. Also, it means that there is no need to have a lot of employers to be successful and to get that business to be recognized and famous.

The best example that I can write about is Digg. Digg is a place where people can share and discover content from anywhere on the web such as news form different websites and blogs. It provides a large number of content from many different categories that could get people attention. Also, it is another way that people can socialize as well as making new friends.

The start of Digg was in 2004, with $2000 and $99 per month for single hosted server. After two years, Digg become bigger in a remarkable way, they were having 90 servers and over 100 million page views by the users. Also, there were 15 people working for Digg (at the moment there are more than 70 employers), which make the point of in Web 2.0 the number people working in the website does not matter comparing with the quality and creative idea of the website. In 2006, Digg announced that the have more than 500.000 users visited Digg everyday. Digg never spend any money on advertising for the reason that in 2008 Digg received $28 million form investors such as Highland Capital Partners.

A similar web 2.0 application that could be compared with Digg is Wikipedia, for the reason that it start with the same way and methods that Digg start off with.

So, what do you think is these days’ websites need to be famous such as Digg and Wikipedia?

Read Full Post »

SongDNA

The new technologies from Web 2.0 are offering a lot of features that lead to human and technology growth. So this week blog I will be talking about API and giving you an example of Innovation in assembly . API is an application programming interface, it is a software-software interface and the user has nothing to do with it. The applications talk to each other’s without any user input, information or knowledge. User cannot see the process for the reason that the applications are working together behind the scenes.

One good example on how API works is ordering a pizza online. There are two options to buy your pizza online, cash payment or credit card payment, if the person chose to make a credit card payment that person will enter his/her credit card information. The pizza online order website will use APIs to send the credit card information to another application that prove whether your information is correct or not. If the credit card information are correct or not the application will send a response back to the website to show the user the result of the process, if it is OK or not.

One good example on Innovation in assembly is SongDNA. SongDNA is an iPhone and Android application that provides the user with the most information about any song. All the data is collected from more than 7 sources on the Internet. Also, it shows the information of any song in many different types such videos (YouTube), Artist information (BBC Music), social media (Twitter), Chart information (Billboard), Artist tourdates (BandsInTown), Images inspiration (Open Clip Art Library), Facebook integration (Facebook) and Images integration (Mobypicture). SongDNA make finding information about any song easy and simple through collecting many different data from different websites and put it in one application

So, this week question will be, what would be your best websites to collect data from? And why?

One more thing, to make easy to understand how the API work, the Coca Cola commercial can explain it in easy and fun way.

Read Full Post »