Change from web to web Platform development mode

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The way the web works is changing.

By 10, the advent of the internet had opened the door to a vast amount of information for anyone with a network connection. Now, smart data technologies used on public Web sites are making information available to meet the specific needs of users.

The Google Maps interface, which allows people to find cheap petrol, is a proxy for this technology. More and more independent developers are using the tools provided by the network Giants to develop more and more fun programs, and their efforts make the content of these sites more and more rich.

For site owners, this bodes well for a big change, especially for those who want to meet the Web 2.0 era. Analysts believe that, unlike in the past, which only viewed the web as a convenient information-publishing tool, today's web companies need to start playing the role of software companies that encourage programmers to develop services on their own platforms. "As a result, many smart web operators are beginning to understand what software companies already understand: to keep your organization innovative, you need to develop community help," says Stephen O ' Grady, an analyst at RedMonk. The larger the community, the more innovative you will be. ”

By imitating the practices of software companies, developers are encouraged to make use of the data of their own websites, which can give users more specialized services while making their products richer.

Big web sites are already doing so. For example, Amazon.com published its "Network Service Program Interface" (Web Services APIs) three years ago.

At the same time, Google and Yahoo have hired the software industry experts, such as the famous engineer Adam Bosworth and so on.

A pretty wild network ideal

Allowing individuals to use network data has made the site a lot of surprises. For example, a 24-year-old programmer, Adrian Holovaty, made use of Google Maps to make a chicagocrime.org website that could show where the Chicago crime took place on the map.

Holovaty, who works for a newspaper, says he wants to provide services to residents in Chicago.

Another app uses Amazon's book Search service, a site called Bookburro, that allows users to compare the prices of books. The construction of such a network service is fairly straightforward: it does not require developers to build book search engines on their own, just using the tools and other data sources Amazon offers.

Inviting third-party developers to develop their own web sites, as Microsoft attracts external programmers to develop applications for their Windows operating systems, creates a healthy business model.

ebay, for example, has 20% product listings that were obtained by an automated auction program developed by an external programmer. Users can still use the ebay site for product search, but the director of the Ebay program Development Department, Greg Isaacs, believes that automated systems can make sellers more efficient. Isaacs revealed that the automatic system program developed rapidly, its number has risen from 2003 to 300 to now more than 18,000.

As the Web site becomes more and more open to its own application interface specification, the Web application development boom has been formed.

Today, the XML (Extensible Markup Language) protocol makes access to data more standardized. Many scripting languages and framework structures (frameworks) have also become free items that give individual users powerful tools to help.

Beginning

With the success of Google and Amazon's program development model, some start-up web companies are getting developers involved in their core business plans. Photo-sharing site Flickr and the social networking Services website, things, have published their own application interfaces.

Flickr users can use special tools to search for photos through photo tags (tag).

And 3Things encourages developers to customize their own service development.

All this suggests that the web is undergoing a change. This change is a change in the nature of the network. A Web site is more than just a publishing system, it's becoming something that can be programmed, just like a PC's operating system.