Portal [2.0]

I got an email from a Web 2.0 Consultant this week claiming that Portals are dead and we shouldn't use the term any longer. His perception of a portal was of a dinosaur technology/terminology that didn't fit in with the new Web 2.0 way of thinking. He supported his argument by linking to a couple of news articles quoting Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of Myspace.com where Murdoch stated that "young internet users don't have to go and work their way through Yahoo's home page or MSN's or someone else's."

Now, whilst I agree with Murdoch's comment, I don't think that NewsCorp have gained enough credibility through buying MySpace stop me from using the term portal. I also don't believe that Web 2.0 is about throwing the 'baby out with the bathwater', it's simply another milestone on the road.

The major problem I have with ditching the term portal is that I believe portals have been instrumental in the conceptual development of Web 2.0 thinking, technology and interaction.So that left me needing to go back to the definition of portal to sense check this concept. This is some of the interesting stuff Wikipedia had to say on Portals:

'Web portals are sites on the World Wide Web that typically provide personalized capabilities to their visitors.'

Some features of enterprise portals are:

Single touch point - the portal becomes the delivery mechanism for all business information services.

Collaboration - portal members can communicate synchronously (through chat, or messaging) or asynchronously through threaded discussion and email digests (forums) and blogs.

Content and document management - services that support the full life cycle of document creation and provide mechanisms for authoring, approval, version control, scheduled publishing, indexing and searching.

Personalization - the ability for portal members to subscribe to specific types of content and services. Users can customize the look and feel of their environment.

Integration the connection of functions and data from multiple systems into new components/portlets.

For me that supported the concept that web portals developed in the late 90's created the user and technological foundation for the 'revolution' of Web 2.0. So what happened to them? I don't believe that when OReilly flicked the switch into the age of Web 2.0 all these great Portals just disappeared in a puff of blue smoke.

Well when you look at where the market is now it's obvious that the Portal didn't disappear, it evolved. Today's portals such as Google Personalised Homepage, Microsoft Live, Netvibes and many others still align themselves with the guiding principals of "single touch point, Collaboration, Content Management, Personalisation and integration" they just do it better.

So now I believe there is a real justification in the use of the term Portal. It's a term that the public are used to and have an anticipation of what functionality to expect from them. The internet is too grown up to simply adopt technical terminology such as 'Ajax homepage' for public consumption. The end user doesn't care about the hype or the technology only that that they understand what its for and how to use it.

So lets ditch the hype, the talk of revolution, and guide users through the ever increasing speed of innovation and development. It's just going to get faster and more intense, lets not lose our customers on the first bend.

Besides in the sprit of Folksonomy I can tag portals anyway I like!