Web Platforms, Not Web Portals

In talking to different startups in the past weeks, it’s very clear to me that businesses haven’t grasped yet how the Internet has shifted from the destination paradigm to the platform paradigm.

In a post titled “The Web in Danger“, Anil Dash compiles and adds to the thoughts of Tim O’Reilly, Doc Searls and Chris Messina about how the web is in danger of losing its essence: the destination URL.

So far people have thought of websites by the URLs they enter on their browsers to consume its services. But today, they are thinking of businesses as omnipresent services. They want to be able to do everything they  normally do on the URL, using their iPhone or on Facebook or on their Chrome OS powered netbook.

They want to fire up your application using an icon; not enter an address on a URL window.

I don’t want to paint this post with undertones of doom: I think we will still have browsers and URLs and it’s not like the Web is going to disappear.

But, thinking as a business, these are some points to think about for your technology roadmap:

1. How pervasive is your business? Can people interact with your business only on its URL? I would recommend at least doing a mobile-compatible version of your site with a minimal set of tools available. I would also think about doing a Facebook application in the short term (although I’d wait until Q1 next year after Facebook decides what it’s going to do with their new apps roadmap).
2. What is your user authentication process? If you are still requiring users to register for an account (and on top of that, you ask for lots of information) you are very much inciting prospective users to leave. You need to offer at least Facebook Connect. If you also offer Twitter and/or OpenID, even better (hey, there’s RPX, so no excuses).
3. Do you have an API in place or in your roadmap? The more people you get to use your tools, the better. I agree that some businesses don’t need an API, but I see lots of business that should have an API or a more robust API than what they have.

In the end, I think there’s no danger of losing the Web’s openness. It’s true that some companies are blowing up in terms of growth and look like monopolies in the short term, but if you think about all of the big ones (Twitter, Facebook, Google) their real strengths have been to become platforms and not portals (remember AOL? I don’t either). It’s up to developers to continue creating ecosystems on top of these platforms, but if the past is prologue, I think there are still many opportunities for new platforms to come and transform, yet again, our good old Internet.