MNteractive

From my perspective, it’s more interesting to look at the underlying infrastructures of “Web 2.0″ - the building blocks - that makes the new generation of web experienes possible. These tools change more than websites - they change how people work, and lower the cost of failure, and provide a solid foundation to start, while allowing growth, customization, and change down the road. Most of all, they’re either cheap, free, open source, or all three.

• RSS/XML-RPC: this is the magic key from my perspective. It’s how applications (web or desktop) talk to each other. Without XML-RPC as a publishing mechanism and RSS as a distribution mechanism, the web as we know it doesn’t exist.
• Ruby on Rails : an open source framework biasing speed, iteration, and simplicity. Rather than needing everything up front, RoR makes it easy to develop as far as you know.
• BitTorrent: Now that customers are doing your marketing through their weblogs, bittorrent lets them do your distribution as well.
• WordPress : an open source publishing system that is so easy to install, use, extend and enhance that I’ve written 5 plug-ins for it and have lost track of how many installs I’m maintaining. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s everywhere, and it’s really easy to make it do what you want.
• Joyent/TextDrive: a web services vendor focused on being the vendor of choice for web developers. If I’m having a development problem, their forums are the first place I go after Google. I do all my hosting with them. Primarily because of their lifetime-customer plans.
• Skype: The start-up’s telecom and collaboration solution.
• Amazon S3 storage: Crazy cheap bandwith and storage for files, so reliable and cheap that Basecamp uses it for customer files.

None of these are really dotcom properties. To me, the things built with these technologies and services are far less interesting than their aggregate potential and promise.