Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0.

World Wide Platform: What Makes It Web 3.0

The Genius of the Planet Comes to PaaS

W HITEPAPER

Peter Coffee

salesforce.com inc.

W or l d W ide P l a t f o rm : W ha t M ak e s I t W eb 3 .0

Contents

Why 3.0 Is More Than Just a Number ................................................................................................... 1

Technology is an input, not an experience

Emergence is the product of disappearance

Technology as Enabler .......................................................................................................................... 2

Multi-tenant architecture: key to “Level 3”

Privacy is not confinement

The Future Must Be More Than Merely “Cloudy” ................................................................................ 3

Enabling creation

Avoiding duplication

Assuring satisfaction

The People are the Computer ................................................................................................................ 3

The bad news is that this is a truly intense technical and business undertaking, and not for the faint of heart.

The good news is that what it makes possible is magical.

Marc Andreessen, “The Three Kinds of Platforms You Meet on the Internet”

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law

W or l d W ide P l a t f o rm : W ha t M ak e s I t W eb 3 .0 1

Why 3.0 Is More Than Just a Number For more than two decades, the version number has been part of everyday language. It would be hard to say which

software product update brought the expression, “SomethingSomething 2.0,” into common use: perhaps it was the

March 1983 release of Microsoft MS-DOS 2.0, with its first major expansion of the power (and the complexity) of

the first ubiquitous desktop software platform.

Regardless of who gets the credit for the label, people immediately grasped the promise implied by changing the

number to the left of the decimal point – denoting a substantial increase in capability, rather than the minor

enhancements and repairs implied by a right-of-decimal “point release.” That’s why Tim O’Reilly’s coinage in

2004 of the phrase, “Web 2.0” (in connection with his subsequent series of “Web 2.0 Summit” conferences) has

been controversial ever since—and even those who accept O’Reilly’s 2.0 label may look askance at more recent

mentions of “Web 3.0.”

Following a conference in September 2007, Network World paraphrased industry analysts1 as saying that “the

[Web 3.0] buzzword is really just a marketing ploy used to hype incremental improvements over the

groundbreaking technologies that were labeled Web 2.0…”; one analyst was quoted as saying, “There are a lot of

constituencies trying to hijack the term.”

Technology is an input, not an experience The error that’s made by many would-be definers of “Web 3.0” is the confusion of the tool with the function.

Many have suggested that the original Web was all about the HTML markup language and the HTTP protocol for

linking and retrieving web pages; that Web 2.0 was all about the RSS protocol for sharing content and the Web

services protocols (such as REST and SOAP) for sharing function.

These conceptions of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are too technology-centric. They lead to irrelevant argument over the

role of various technology developments in defining Web 3.0. There’s a pointless war in progress among the

proponents of richer semantic context, of sensor-centered rather than human-centered content, and of qualitative

change in experience resulting from quantitative growth in bandwidth as Web 3.0’s true hallmarks.

Emergence is the product of disappearance For those who use a technology, rather than those who create and deploy it, a technical success is almost literally

invisible. The successful tool is the one that disappears into its function, in the phrase of philosopher Martin

Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art.

The success of the IBM Personal Computer was that it made the actual computer nearly invisible to the

user – unlike earlier hobbyist-oriented machines that exposed far more of the machine’s internal

workings at a level that required the user’s attention and understanding

The success of VisiCalc, the first packaged spreadsheet application, was that it made the products of

custom programming possible without most of the coding effort previously required for similar tasks

The initial success of Web browsers was that they enabled access to a global network while hiding the

acts and mechanisms of connection

The current and growing success of the Wiki and the blog, two of the most common user experiences

associated with “Web 2.0,” comes from letting people create and combine Web content with no need to

understand or control the mechanisms that made it happen

Web 3.0, the next major step, is

therefore best defined by what it

hides, rather than by the

technology it uses: that is, by its

success in hiding the

mechanisms of creating and

sharing new function and new

behavior, going beyond the

sharing of static content or even

dynamic discussions of content.

Web 3.0 is best defined by the

opportunity for everyone to

program: the emergence of the

platform as a service.

1 Brodkin, Jon, “Gartner touts Web 2.0, scoffs at sequel,” networkworld.com, 21 September 2007

Web 1.0: Transact

Web 2.0: Participate

Web 3.0: Innovate

Stages of Sharing The generations of the Web are best defined, not by their technology, but by the possibilities they create and the experiences that they enable.

:: Web 1.0 What others know, you can find; what others sell, you can buy

:: Web 2.0 What anyone thinks, imagines or creates, everyone can discuss

:: Web 3.0 What anyone conceives and implements, everyone can apply

The advent of the Platform as a Service makes it possible for anyone with functional expertise to package it, publish it, and put it to work wherever there’s an Internet connection.

PaaS is the next step in making our most sophisticated tools “disappear into their function.”

W or l d W ide P l a t f o rm : W ha t M ak e s I t W eb 3 .0 2

Technology as Enabler Technologies do not define the generations of the Web, but they can serve as crucial enablers.

The key conception of the Internet itself, as a dumb network2 with all of its intelligence at the

endpoints, enabled ad hoc introduction of new types of content without the permission of any one

network operator. If a new content type had even a single creator with even a single consumer, there

was value. This enabled the explosive growth of Web 1.0 – which then evolved the security and

payment systems required to support a marketplace of goods as well as ideas.

The Web’s tools for exchanging content became a medium for requesting and delivering action with

the advent of XML and related Web services protocols. This paved the way for publication to

become participation – which enabled Web 2.0 as a forum of communities and services.

To expand the scope of the Web from participation to innovation, there must be scalable platforms

that invite the expression of useful knowledge in a form that’s easy for others to discover and use—

without high costs of entry, and with an affordable model of growing capacity to support an

innovation’s success. The resulting liberation of innovation is the essence of Web 3.0.

Marc Andreessen, co-author of the first Web browser, has labeled the required model as the “Level 3 platform,” or

“runtime environment”—which offers, he has said, a “magical” set of possibilities. In his widely cited blog post,

“The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet,” he elaborated:

The level of technical expertise required of someone to develop on your platform drops by at least 90%, and

the level of money they need drops to $0…The rate of rapid evolutionary application development that can

result from this approach will, I think, be mind-boggling as it plays out.

Multi-tenant architecture: key to “Level 3” Achieving the technical simplification and the affordable access of Andreessen’s “Level 3” requires a complete

rethinking of how to deliver innovative IT function, whether the intended user is the individual or the enterprise.

At global scale, it’s unthinkable to require wasteful and error-prone duplication of IT assets that add no distinctive

value. The fraction of the world’s hard disk space that holds essentially identical (and redundantly maintained)

copies of operating systems and database engines is enormous today; potentially crippling tomorrow.

What’s needed instead is a model in which all common capability is shared, while all distinctive assets—whether

data, logic, or definitions of end-user experience—are rigorously and securely partitioned. A single foundation of

code is shared by all users, while all other assets are represented to that shared platform as metadata.

Partitioning of data, rather than being expensively achieved by deploying multiple instances of a code

stack, becomes instead an element of the platform’s design—in the same way that buyers on eBay or

Amazon.com have confidential access to their individual purchase histories.

Customization of application behavior, rather than being done by modifying application code, is done

instead by configuring metadata that’s invoked on a user-by-user basis—in the same way that

different users of the “iGoogle” personal home page see different arrangements of information and

function when logging in to that shared service.

This model can be compared to an apartment building, with tenants sharing the costs of lobby services and laundry

rooms and other key facilities while still having locks on their own doors and freedom to decorate their own

rooms—hence the label of “multi-tenant architecture.”

Broad statements about the limitations of multi-tenant architecture are often inaccurate generalizations describing

shallow designs. There is no inherent reason why metadata representation can not accommodate the full scope of

an innovator’s originality—but platform choice requires due diligence in recognizing differences in depth.

Privacy is not confinement It’s essential to appreciate that the protections of multi-tenancy are not restrictions. Non-proprietary interface

conventions, in particular those of Web services, allow multiple providers of platforms and resources to offer

complementary environments and tools.

For every integration scenario—custom coding, native connectors to specific software products, middleware

layers facilitating multi-way integration, coupling with personal productivity applications, or user interface

integrations of the type often dubbed the “mash-up”—there are options available that let innovators choose their

own balance between flexibility, capability, and speed of solution deployment while still gaining the full

advantages of a Platform as a Service.

2 Isenberg, David, “Rise of the Stupid Network,” Computer Telephony, August 1997

Multi-Tenant Architecture Paves the Path to Web 3.0 Multi-tenant architecture shuns wasteful duplication and costly, error-prone redundant maintenance while still preserving an open ecosystem for competition and refinement.

:: Data Rather than creating and manipulating separate data structures in identical database stacks, the developer in the multi-tenant environment is actually creating and editing metadata representations.

The operators of the shared environment can optimize performance, perform data backups, and incrementally add capacity without disruption.

:: Logic

Rather than letting individual customizations leak into a foundation code base, multi-tenant environments rigorously separate custom logic from shared platform facilities.

Updates to the foundation code need never break or interfere with distinctive customizations. New features are not imposed, but rather offered for enablement—immediate, or deferred, or declined—on a user-by-user basis.

:: Integration Non-proprietary interfaces such as Web services let the innovator choose from multiple providers of complementary tools and resources.

The Future Must Be More Than Merely “Cloudy” If the goal is for the tool to disappear into the function, it follows that a left-of-decimal uptick—such as the one

from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0—must represent a significant growth of function, and not merely an impressive

enlargement of the tool kit.

Moving the present day’s cumbersome and error-prone process of application development off of local

infrastructure, and into an Internet “cloud computing” facility, simply is not enough to justify the uptick to 3.0.

There must be a radical simplification, not merely a relocation.

Enabling creation A Level 3 caliber of Platform as a Service can enable a Web 3.0 transformation of experience—but only if it

liberates creative energy. The platform must be open to the definition of data models that map closely to an

expert’s understanding of a problem or a task. It must have powerful notations for expressing knowledge in the

form of reliable and powerful logic. It must give the expert a blank canvas on which to draw a user interface that

makes the power of knowledge and data readily discoverable by the person with a problem to be solved. The

Force.com platform from salesforce.com meets these needs with its database capabilities, workflow and Apex

Code tools, and Visualforce user interface technology that enables astonishingly rapid design and refinement.

Avoiding duplication The tyranny of “good enough” will cripple the potential of Web 3.0 if a Platform as a Service requires redundant

re-implementation of systems that are already working. The Force.com platform shuns wasteful duplication by

offering an extensive variety of integration points, ranging from custom code interfaces to packaged integration

appliances; the developer can gain full leverage from legacy IT assets or from the best of the emerging ecosystem

of complementary Web services or from storage, computational, or other bulk resources available in the cloud.

Assuring satisfaction Widespread adoption of the Web has generated high expectations (and rapidly rising demands) for availability,

security, confidentiality and data integrity. Web 3.0 offerings can not expect a favorable reception if they offer the

“new” at the expense of the “now.” The applications built with the creative vigor and entrepreneurial spirit of Web

3.0 must be born, so to speak, already grown up: that is, with the same robustness as existing Web offerings. The

Force.com platform gives creative and entrepreneurial developers the assurance of proven reliability, auditable

security, and enterprise-scale robustness as a foundation for what they bring into the world.

The People are the Computer If Tim O’Reilly gets the credit for “Web 2.0,” then Sun Microsystems’ John Gage must get the credit for the

coinage “The Network is the Computer”—but Gage, like O’Reilly, has been overtaken. The collaboration in

content of Web 2.0 has been succeeded by the liberation of creativity of Web 3.0 and the Platform as a Service.

The appeal of PaaS is internationally acknowledged. In June 2008, industry analyst Fredric Paul asserted3 that

PaaS resources “make leading-edge technology available to everyone, including consumers, often at a far lower

cost than businesses pay for similar or inferior services.” Another industry observer, in Bangalore, reported in the

same month4 that PaaS is “driving a change on how future application software will be and should be developed,

installed, delivered, and managed” and that it is being considered by “every major [developer], in any space.”

When the burdens of hardware and code disappeared into mass-market technology, the network added the value;

as the physical network disappears into the abstractions of the Web, we can rediscover that it is people who are the

true source of value. Web 3.0 brings global talent to PaaS.

3 Paul, Fredric, “SMBs Will Rise To Cloud Computing,” informationweek.com, 21 June 2008

4 Akhouri, Priyanka, “SaaS Healing Business Pain Points, Say ISVs,” cxotoday.com/India, 27 June 2008

What a Web 3.0 Platform Must Provide Web 3.0 is merely potential unless it offers something more, not merely something different, than earlier incarnations of the Web.

:: Creation Web 3.0 must make it radically easier to create new capability, and not merely move today’s cumbersome process of development into the cloud

:: Leverage Existing IT assets, and the best of the emerging ecosystem of new cloud-computing resources, must be accessible resources for the Web 3.0 developer

:: Assurance Platforms as a Service must be highly available, certifiably secure, reliably confidential, and robust in capacity and performance

The Force.com platform from salesforce.com is ready to serve—and to liberate the planet-wide wave of creative output that will make “Web 3.0” a label worth defining