Part 5 of the mini-salon with three though leaders of the Chinese Internet world, which appeared in late December on Mai Tian’s blog. It’s interesting to see the extent to which they’re all engaged with the larger conversation going on among the digerati globally about what Web 2.0 really is, and whether Facebook and its ilk have the potential to create a new “operating system for the Web.” Translation is mine, along with all errors thereof. Click to read earlier installments 1, 2, and 3/4 at these links. Brief bios of the participants at 1.

5. “Web 2.0 is a type of structure, not a vertical application.”

Mai Tian: I pretty much agree with Xie Wen’s perspective. Actually the real crux of what Xie Wen said is that one way to understand it is that Web 2.0 is a structure, not a vertical application, and it’s a renovation of a structure. Some applications will come out of this type of new structure, for example Flickr, the photo application, or various SNS applications. These sorts of applications will constantly be emerging from this structure. Why is Facebook so hot? I think that from the perspective of structure, many Web sites have done “features,” like blogs and albums have all been done, but they haven’t really productized them. Facebook is the first in this structure to do a really precise and clear application-focused product, which can be used. So I really agree with Xie Wen: Lots of people, when they talk of Web 2.0, they say “I’m going to build a social so-and-so,” but in fact that’s not Web 2.0, that’s just a “feature.”

Xie Wen: That’s just what I was about to say–that is, nowadays everyone sees these foreign web sites that have developed in the last three to five years, which from a revenue perspective do about a billion dollars, and there are still people asking where the Web 2.0 business model is. I just don’t understand it. This billion dollars wasn’t stolen: it was earned. Among these, I look at Facebook. The least you could say is that it’s creeping closer to the 2.0 revolution, that it’s more fully realized. You could say that from blogs, photo sites like Flickr were an innovation for personalized expression. It then allowed these people true relationships. Most notably it was able to take offline relationships and put them online. Using a particular framework these relationships were done in a simple way to master, and in a way that was easy to spread. If you look at sites with comparable Alexa rankings and then you look at user trends, the speed of Facebook’s growth is really scary. We haven’t even seen the next inflection point.

But back to what we were talking about, you said Facebook has incorporated everything in 2.0? It hasn’t. At the very least, not from my perspective. It hasn’t done a complete job with social search. I’m saying it doesn’t have a social engine. So in my Powerpoint I said that by 2010 there will be the beginnings of some semblance, and I think it’s still going to take three years before it will emerge. If we don’t start working hard toward this now, we’ll become an Internet colony of Microsoft with only a small market, a residual market, or what’s called a niche or minor market. If we get to that point, it will be too late for regrets. And those things are impossible to recover from. Unless you wait around for the next big revolution.

Mai Tian: I’ve seen all three of Xie Wen’s Powerpoints. I also attended the conference where you gave the second .ppt. My own feelings–and I don’t know whether I’m summarizing this accurately–are that Xie Wen had a concept running through it, and that is that he believes Web 2.0 is in actuality an operating system. I think that…

Xie Wen: Using the terminology”operating system” makes it a little difficult to understand. Really it’s a platform, not a single feature or the hardware counterpart of a feature. It should be a platform with an organic system, a platform that keeps the interest level of everyone playing on it high, and a platform that allows you to do a lot of things on it. If some examples of platforms would be Windows or IE, then you could say that even Google is a platform, because it’s an integrated application..

Mai Tian: If you assume that every individual separate PC on the Net is access point to the Internet, then this framework is an operating system. Facebook now has the rudiments of that. The social graph part has basically already become a part of it, and separately may quickly have socialized search and socialized commerce may be a part of it. Keso, how do you see this: Will there come into being a grand unified operating system-like platform–a platform that possesses the ability to become a monopoly?

Keso: In the overall process of the decelopment of the Internet there will definitely come such a company, but I think in the end the Internet will still be distributed. It’s not like one day that company will go out of business and I’ll have nowhere to go. There’s danger in this. I think that in the future there will be some people who’ll develop this into something quite rich.

Mai Tian: That’s why my perspective on this is pretty much in line with Keso’s. I don’t think there’s any problem with talking about the notion of such a structure, but I think this would pose the threat of monopoly. Suppose that Tencent had already rolled out such a platform. There would certainly be a lot of users on this platform. However, there would be people who didn’t use that platform, who used another platform. So I think there would be differences between this type of platform and the operating systems we used in the pre-network age.

Xie Wen: I understand what the two of you are saying, but I think you’re right and you’re wrong. You haven’t really proven me wrong. There’s no real argument here. What did I mean? Imeant that a revolution has come. In the beginning it was scattered breakthrough, and then things became established through use, and gradually came to be accepted by everyone. A lot of commonly accepted things will precipitate out from this, and as these things precipitate out, they will come to embody this structure, and will become standardized. As you’re creating it, you’ll be creating the new on this foundation. But what you can’t deny is, those in control of this kind of a platform, the developers, they’re the biggest beneficiaries of its profits. Before the next revolution comes, they’ll be the ones guiding the direction of this industry, its configuration and its characteristics.

Mai Tian: That’s why I say I acknowledge that this type of structure will become a kind of mainstream structure, but that I believe this type of structure will exist in a distributed manner.

Xie Wen: It doesn’t matter what shape you say that the realization of this will take. It doesn’t matter whether it’s distributed or centralized. I don’t think that’s important–distributed, terminals, on your machine, it’s not imporant. What’s important is that it represents the relationship between upstreem and downstream.

Mai Tian: And Keso, your take?

Keso: My take is that there will definitely be this kind of company, and it will control the industry value chain upstream here, and the industry standards. For example if Facebook continues to grow as fast as current forecasts, and isn’t driven far off its trajectory, I think it can basically become a framer of standards. I think in this field, if you want to play, you have to deal with Facebook. I think that in reality that’s already the situation. Perhaps the concept of Google’s OpenSocial is somewhat different. Its concept is one in which everyone can make use of this platform, without having to make contributions to it. In this regard Facebook’s openness is materially better than OpenSocial’s. Participants can derive definite advantages from it. I think this represents a kind of symptom, to wit, Facebook may become a mainstream of this field. Its potential can’t be embodied in its $15 billion dollar valuation. It’s potential value is even bigger.

Xie Wen: It has its competitive elements within it, as well as the foreground of a platform within it. And it has its innovativeness, as well as its “in-process” nature, all within it.

Mai Tian: Right, so I acknowledge its platform-like nature, and I recognize that Facebook now… but I don’t recognize that the Facebook platform is the only comprehensive Web 2.0 application. My own perspective is, now there really is a situation where we have a few companies with a single application platform. But I wonder whether there will emerge something like DOS, which dominated the age of non-networked computing.

Xie Wen: No, I said three to five companies, not just one company. Every country, except for China, every country has one or two (Web sites) that dominate. We’ll continue to see this evolution. But companies like Facebook and Myspace–with their clean and simple structures, you need only change Unicode, and I can turn English into French. I don’t need to make any other changes, and the new version is done. Facebook in fact is the number 2 in England, and the number one in Canada, and the third in France. The other day I saw that Syria had blocked Facebook. They said that Israel had penetrated their community. Middle Eastern languages are actually quite difficult. They just casually changed Unicode. I think it really is the cleanest structure. I don’t expect that China will be able to build a world-class platform. I would be happy if we had just one of the three major platforms which accounts for 80% of Chinese users. At least we won’t have turned in a blank exam book.

Mai Tian: So far in China I don’t think Xiaonei’s bad. It doesn’t matter how it came up, but thus far at least its market share on campuses is still pretty good.

Xie Wen: You’re just trying to butter me up (laughs). You know, in a time when the average level of innovation isn’t very high, a relatively serious copycat can also create tremendous power.

Stay tuned for Part 6!