Why did Google, for example, recently decide to offer free 411 service? I haven't talked to people at Google, but it's pretty clear to me why. It's because of speech recognition. It has nothing to do with 411 service, it has to do with getting a database of voices, so they don't have to license speech technology from Nuance or someone else. They want their own data stream.

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WN: So you think that (control of data) is actually more characteristic of web 2.0 than social networking or Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) interfaces?

O'Reilly: Absolutely. Anybody who thinks that this is about Ajax is completely missing the boat.

I do think building rich Internet applications is an important part of web 2.0. I don't want to dismiss it, because we are able to build richer application platforms today. But it's ultimately about network effects, and where do you build services that get better the more people use them? And it's also about the databases that get created as a result of those network effects.