What happens downstream?: Scott Mattoon's blog

Start Up style enthusiasm was in no short supply at the second CommunityNext conference held at the Plug And Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale last Saturday.  Several companies represented were not even online as of the first CommunityNext conference held last February, yet many have since built thriving communities with millions of users.  The secret to their success, and the theme of this gathering, was viral marketing.

While February's day long event featured lessons on How to Tap The Wisdom of Crowds, Saturday's teachings might best be described as Getting Inside The Teenage Brain.  The scope of possibilities seemed to have devolved in the intervening six months to a level more concerned with how 14 year old girls will place a widget on their MySpace page than how the network effect can improve the lives of millions.  I left the event feeling like the social networking party had moved to the trailer park and the Anchor Steam on Draught had been supplanted by Pabst in cans.   But I don't spend much time on MySpace, so take my sentiments with a grain of salt (and a lime).

Amid the inanity of Profile Bling and Breakup Alert best practices there were sensible exchanges about building net communities the viral way.  Some insights from the viral front lines :

• Metrics matter - measuring effectiveness against goals are as important to running a widget based viral marketing campaign as any Madison Avenue ad campaign.  
  
• It turns out that wikis are for everyone - given a wiki as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich, teachers will use it to develop curriculum and engage their classes, as PBwiki discovered.
  
• The Facebook platform was deemed by many widget developers here as the API sine qua non.
  

Perhaps most relevant to a field architect like me was the implicit adoption pattern threaded throughout the presentations: widgets get combined with other widgets to make new and interesting platforms that are essentially loosely coupled composites of fine grained apps.  This seemingly chaotic trend toward Widget-dom foreshadows an adoption pattern that runs orthogonal to the SOA model so many enterprises are pursuing, where heavy duty governance is critical and service discovery with its attendant infrastructure represent costly overhead.  Corporations are spending millions planning multi-year SOA initiatives.  Meanwhile the Facebook platform allows developers to build composite applications quickly, all the governance is essentially embedded in the client libraries, and services are discovered virally - registries and WSDL are not critical to the ecology of a Widget World.  Granted, student social calendars and virtual food fights are a far cry from a CRM/ERP/BI mashup, and identity management and access control through a RockYou widget would make any CIO cringe, but with the addition of JSON support to platforms like Facebook I expect we'll see more complex integrations emerge soon, and WS-XACML shows promise for protecting data exchange between loosely coupled apps according to some rich policy.  How quickly will this hosted RESTful approach displace enterprise owned and operated SOA infrastructure is hard to predict.  No doubt the transformation is driven by many of the same factors driving the redshift market transformation Sun is betting on.

The explosive growth experienced by many of the companies at CommunityNext reaffirms Sun's focus on designing for network services at scale.  The results of that focus, such as Project Blackbox, the Niagra processor, and the Sun Grid, ought to figure heavily in the future of many of these start ups.  Sun's SOA technology, which looks more and more RESTful by the day, could be the best bridge for Enterprise IT to cross into Widget-dom, and a good platform for social networking platforms to adopt in order to penetrate the Enterprise market.

My cryptic and incomplete notes from this Sun sponsored event are below.