Blogging about "Personalized 2.0", now started

Influenced by the recent attractive movement, aka "web 2.0", I decided to start my project of new cutting-edge software development and blogging about it.

Although my native tongue is not English - I'm pure Japanese and living in Japan - it is worth for me to write this blog in English, because there seems to be enormous numbers of folks who interested in recent web movements, and my idea may attract them - at least I hope so.

Actually I'm now working at an enterprise software company, where I involved some web application software design - especially application security, identity management, or role-based access control. Recently in enterprise environment almost all companies are using Java or J2EE (except for MS), but most web developers seem to be using other script languages, like PHP, Ruby, or Perl. I'm not so familiar with these server-side scripting languages, but this is not so impact to my developing. All things required for developing web 2.0 software service is so common and standard based technologies - HTML, DOM, XML, or JavaScript.

As my blog title shows, my initial purpose of starting this blog and development project is to bring "personalized" feature in web 2.0 services. So far we have seen so many web 2.0 services, but almost all of them were public services, and not targeted to personal. Of course, they often have user accounts, and they can maintain their data by these end users' contribution, but the retrieved information from these services always become public one, that is, not access controlled.

Some might say this users' contribution for public information is the main web 2.0 feature and therefore it is worth, but I think it is limitting the opportunity of web 2.0. Imagine a mashup service which combine your address book records with google map. Such service is attractive and seems to be possible, but it requires the mashup site to correct and keep your address book information. This implies that services dealing personal data, like address book or schedule information, cannot be easily delivered like amazon book search service, yahoo web search service, or google maps - which is the representative of mashup ingredient.

Like flickr or evdb(eventful), there are services which have web API to access their personal data. But all succeeded mashup service using flickr is using public service API, not personalized. If some service providers would want to do a personalized flickr mashup, there are security and privacy concerns in giving credentials for them. Absolutely I don't want to give my flickr password to some unknown fishy sites, even if they are saying that they provide a great mashup service using flickr. I think it is one of the reasons which is preventing identity-aware web 2.0 services to spread.

Another considerable reason is that they only have XML web services API. To make XML call it needs some server infrastructure. All requests are processed or proxied by server, therefore service doesn't scale if given resource is poor. Compare with the mashup with google maps - no necessity to setup cgi, static web site is enough!

With these points in mind, I've started a project - "personalized 2.0", I'm calling. In this project, I will choose user centric approach, which may resemble with an approach called "identity 2.0". Later posts will explain more detail.

Technorati tags: web2.0, identity