Tim O'Reilly - Visionary

Reading Tim's recent article, I remembered his presentation at OSBC last year when he was talking about his ideas on the architecture of participation. He went on about the difference between Amazon applying principles of participation, as opposed to B&N which did not... and then continued to talk about how mapquest (and the other mapping services at the time) had not figured out a way to do that and so they were not able to create value. It marked me that he should single out mapping the way he did. Why pick on mapping? It just seems so visionary for him to go on about how mapquest was failing when he could have picked so many other examples... visionary because 'Google maps' is, for me in any case, the poster child of Web 2.0, not only because it helped to popularize Ajax, but also because of its use of APIs, which has made it a staple of so many mashups today.