The Next Generation of Web Services
I am noticing a growing trend amongst my friends and I: we are increasingly using the web to manage our daily lives.
Over winter break I told my mom that I don’t go to drugstores as often as I did a few years ago. Amazon has made this part of my life easier. I buy a fair amount of items on Amazon, and when I do, I always look around my room or apartment to see if there is anything we need. The result of this has been speaker purchases coupled with deodorant, shampoo, paper towels, etc. Does this make me lazy? My mom thinks so, and I do too. But it saves time that I can spend doing more enjoyable things. Don’t get wrong— I’m not advocating substituting online purchases for never leaving my apartment. I still go to the grocery store (and I don’t plan on buying groceries online anytime soon), the mall, etc.
The above example might not be considered a typical life management system in a typical manner, but it illustrates the importance and utility of the internet in my life. Aside from entertainment, it can help with simple errands and other real world tasks. However, it’s not just me. I see my friends doing the same thing. My generation has become dependent on the web. We take it with us wherever we go, and I cannot imagining myself, or my friends, ever wanting to completely disconnect.
Great, now what? Life management services— what does that even mean? Don’t we already have those? To an extent, we do, but, the market is very saturated with services. Users aren’t able to signup and try everything. It can sometimes take time and a commitment to derive value from a service.
Micro services are the future applications that will power the web— services that are so lightweight that we gain instant value in using them (think about a micro-service using the Skype API for free VOIP wakeup calls compared to using linkedin where you need to grow your network before its useful).
Next generation web services need next generation platforms. You don’t need to build the next Facebook to be the next Facebook. What I mean by this statement is that accumulating 50m-100m users is not necessary. These platforms will power micro-services via APIs (note: i consider facebook a platform, not a service).
Twitter is comparable to the next gen platform, however, I envision companies where users don’t sign up at the initial repository of data, meaning if you download twhirl (next gen micro-service), you would never have to go to Twitter.com to signup. You could be completely oblivious of Twitter’s existence to use the service.
New platforms will be lightweight, and have a core set of functions that allow micro services to be built on top of them. Again, no user will ever need to access the core service directly. In this model, Twitter could serve as an Instant Messaging client, or what it is pitched as today: “What are you doing?” (a distributed facebook status). The platform is the same, but the end result, depending on the service, is different.
One of the great benefits of being dependent on technology is that we have become very technical. There is an increasing curiousity to understand how things work. More and more of us are learning to build webservices; HTML is taught to students in school at a young age, and many people my age are either self taught programmers, or taking classes on the side. Our growing technical ability will mean that we can create prolific “i need that too” services based on an API platform.
The next gen product life cycle vastly differs from what it is today. A typical cycle starts with early adopters with hopes to spillover into mainstream adoption. Companies will need to be able to adjust to a significantly smaller group of users. These micro services don’t have the “cool” effect. Some users may signup for facebook because everyone they know is already on it. I don’t think people will signup for a VOIP wakeup service because some of their friends have it. The spillover effects will be marginal. The only people who will use the services are the people that need it.
At a high level, it is apparent that we want tools to manage our networks of personal friends. This is where facebook delivers its value. However, within my network of friends, my needs are different than yours. This is why some of my facebook apps are different than those of my friends. My life management needs differ as much offline as they do on facebook. We’re going to see some really interesting, valuable micro services in the future. There will be some overlaps, some will be more popular than others, but even those with few users can still be valuable (note: i am talking about services, not facebook apps).
