The same day we were assigned Tim O'Reilly's piece on Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly tweeted about TurboVote. It seems like the right moment to test whether TurboVote passes Tim's Web 2.0 test.
He articulates the six core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:
First, these "companies offer services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability." In the Web 2.0 era “software is delivered as a service, not as a product”. Google began its “life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the trappings of the old software industry are present.”
TurboVote passes. TurboVote does not need to be downloaded or purchased as a product but can be accessed on the internet as a service immediately. Regarding scalability, TurboVote is launching nationwide, and once launched, can serve 100 Americans or 100 million.
Second, these companies have "control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them". O'Reilly writes, “the race is on to own certain classes of core data,” because whoever owns a certain class of data can beat out the competition, “the now hotly contested web mapping arena demonstrates how a failure to understand the importance of owning an application’s core data will eventually undercut its competitive position.”
TurboVote passes. What is the core information in our database? Election dates for the over 500,000 elections in the United States every year. These dates can only be found on local websites, the sites for a local school board, town clerk, county executive, etc. The data we collect cannot be copyrighted. It is just a collection of dates that anyone else could collect. TurboVote simply provides the architecture that makes it easy to collect and organize this information. It is closer to Amazon’s database than MapQuest or Google’s because we will be building a database and enriching a database rather than just building an application on top of an existing one. Map Quest and Google share the same database of information and compete by offering different interfaces. TurboVote has to first compile the database itself. Like Amazon, we will “relentlessly enhance” the data, “embracing and extending” it with information about the candidates and ballot initiatives.
Third, the company must trust "users as co-developers" and "operations must become a core competency…the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis.” Users now expect an online web business to constantly unveil new services and be in a nearly constant state of beta.
TurboVote certainly passes this test. We rolled out as soon as possible and have been adding and tweaking our services every single day as we get feedback from users about language and functionality.
Fourth, the company should "harness collective intelligence." By harnessing collective intelligence “the service automatically gets better the more people use it”, and will have an implicit “architecture of participation”. O'Reilly writes that “Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.”
TurboVote passes. The most important way that TurboVote accomplishes this feat is in the construction of the election calendar. There is no centralized database of elections in any state. For example, I cannot download a csv that tells me all the races in New York State with their corresponding dates. We ask TurboVote users if they would be willing to volunteer to help maintain the database for their region. We will crowd-source the collection of this information in order to build our database. Like Google, we will draw our power from building a useful interface on top of an exhaustive database. Unlike Google, we will ask our users to help build and maintain that database by looking up single election dates.
Our architecture is participatory, albeit not in the fundamentally intrinsic way that Google is participatory. Google is different than Yahoo! or Open Directory Project, which respectively paid or used volunteer labor to build their directory of sites, because it uses PageRank to harness the involuntary behavior of Internet users to deliver better search. TurboVote is following the ODP model. It will hopefully be more effective in our context than it was for Yahoo! because we are building a database of finite information.
Fifth, the company should “leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.”
TurboVote passes for one key reason: our focus on serving every election instead of just presidential elections.
I think we pass, but as our service evolves, it will be important to check back with with O'Reilly to make sure we're on the right path. That said, I'm looking forward to learning more about Web 3.0 because if I'm not planning for 3.0 TurboVote might get left behind.
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