It used to be that people would visit their favorite web sites using a browser, and they would hop from site to site to do everything from research to e-commerce to news gathering. Now, however, there’s a new usage pattern emerging: people aren’t visiting sites as much any more. Instead, they’re letting a new breed of services and applications bring the content of sites to them. It’s this inversion, or “turning inside out” of the web that I’m talking about.
This new usage pattern on the web is signaling a transition from the old model of: “I’ll come to you”, to “you come to me”. This is why I use the term “inside out” - it’s as if people are using the web in a way that nobody intended to a few years ago – like wearing your sweatshirt inside out. Didn’t Madonna do that already?
Visiting a bunch of web sites has become too labor intensive for many web users. So, an innovative new kind of site has started to crop up that does the “legwork” or aggregating of info from groups of disparate destination sites – like hotels. Take hotels.com as an example: here’s a site that eliminates the need to visit dozens of hotel destination sites and enter the same information in over and over.
“Middle man” sites like hotels.com have introduced a huge challenge to the original destination site providers of hotels, airlines, and product manufacturers because those providers now have to suddenly find a new way to “export” or syndicate portions of their own sites into the “middle man” sites, or risk being cut off at the head. This phenomenon is called “disintermediation”, and you see it when you go to a site like cheaptickets.com and buy an airfare based totally on price and other mundane factors, but not on the brand name of the airline, or the snaziness of the airlines’ site.
Middle man sites have started a trend of bringing services to the user, rather than forcing the user to hunt around for a set of comparable services, and this trend is just the beginning of a much bigger trend that’s literally turning the web inside out.
Now consider the Web log, or “blog”. Blogs are basically online diaries, updated frequently by individuals, and read by groups of friends and colleagues. Blogs, too, have taken on a life of their own in the last two years, and have become micro destination sites for individuals interested in particular topics. Now, more than ever, people are visiting blogs as a way of getting aggregated information on specific subjects they’re intimately interested in. What’s more, companies have been creating blogs of their key executives as a way to extend their corporate reach. There may even be more people reading Jonathan Schwartz’s (Sun) blog than people visiting Sun’s web site itself (who knows, if not now then maybe in a year from now)!
Given the explosive growth of blogs, imagine if blog owners started putting ads for services in their blogs. Blogs would then become a new level of intermediate web site that would totally eclipse, or disintermediate, the destination sites of today. The wild thing is that there are a staggering number of blogs – and that number is growing fast.
But another emerging technology has come along too - the aggregator. Aggregators have started to perform the tasks of finding, filtering, sorting, and formatting the information from a whole bunch of blogs. Aggregators are like personal portals – ultra personal portals, that is. Think of everyone having an aggregator as being like everyone having a desktop with a browser on it. There are going to be potentially billions of aggregator apps out there – a concept that gets Microsoft’s attention.
In addition, there are aggregator services popping up on the web. Some examples are del.icio.us, feedster, and technorati. According to del.icio.us’ own description, “del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others”.
So, what does this all mean? One way to look at it is that the web started out being a powerful “thing” (think noun) to make information available in a connected worldwide way. Now, however, the web is becoming a powerful “service” (think verb) that gets the right information to the right people at the right time. People don’t look for information on the web. Rather, they let the web find the right information for them. Just look at the explosive rise of the Google service as an example.
Now, let your imagination do a fast forward. Image a totally “inside-out web” where there are no longer “user visited”, “UI type” web sites any more – but instead, billions of aggregators, and billions of information feeds. In this world, every user has his or her own powerful aggregator that serves as a gateway, or portal, or presentation layer to the right information gathered from the web at the right time. Aggregators can also aggregate from other aggregators – creating a fabric of n-tier information transforms. The aggregator does everything to provide each user with his or her own personal, filtered, prioritized, and organized view of the world - a view that’s updated in real time. Think of it as the concept of portal to the absolute extreme. What’s different in this world is that the number of aggregators or users (i.e. “sinks”) far dominates the number of originating service providers (i.e. “sources”) that we know of today - by potentially orders of magnitude.
In this world, if you’re a service provider, you have the huge new challenge of finding a way to get your service plugged into and visible in the billions of aggregators/personal blog/portal sites that will be out there. But how do you do this? You need to think about ways of making your currently “stationary” web-based services become “portable”, and then sending them out into the world to get syndicated into millions of other aggregation layers.
Validation of this phenomenon is demonstrated by what Google is doing right now. Google’s search service is arguably the “mother of all” aggregators today – a 100,000 server “Hal” in the sky. Imagine the world where Google adds to this “virtual aggregator” a desktop aggregator portion that becomes the portal and presentation layer for whatever a user wants to see in the whole world – tied into the Google server farm in the sky. Move over Microsoft… As Google sees it, the value of the web is not rooted in the connectivity that the web provides, but rather, it’s rooted in the service of prioritizing potential connections that can be made on the web, based on supply and demand. Google is the ultimate matchmaker, willing to introduce user X to service Y based on the fact that one or both of these parties is willing to pay a fee to get the best match.
It’s no wonder that Google has moved into the email and blogger space, and has launched an initiative to bring on veteran “desktop software developers” like Adam Bosworth, to build out the “consumer portion” of this mother of all aggregators. That’s my opinion.
In summary, this phenomenon of “turning the web inside out” is forcing service providers to find new ways of syndicating and embedding their services in the form of micro-apps into the millions of other intermediate aggregation layers that are cropping up on the web. Add to this the fact that mass syndication leads to mass customization, and it’s like fast food. If you provide a service to millions of people, you had better make it “Have it Your Way” to quote Burger King’s slogan, and that’s where Bowstreet comes into the picture.
Bowstreet provides the product (The Factory) that enables service providers to mass customize and syndicate their web-based services into thousands to, who knows, millions of partner sites. If the total inversion of the web comes true, then we may be talking about billions.
3:05:06 PM 
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