Boston – the Epicenter for A Faster Web

Note: Most of the content of this post was initially published on BostInnovation.com except for the pieces that are not appropriate for BostInnovation.com audience. See Boston’s Hidden Gem: Website Performance Companies.

Over the last few weeks, two articles stirred up a lot of conversations around an identity crisis here in Boston: “The Road to Awesome” from Scott Kirsner and “Dear Boston: Stop Outsourcing The News” from Galen Moore. Both articles (essentially) discuss how Boston needs to be cool like Silicon Valley and create more consumer tech companies.

I don’t know about you. To me,  Boston is cool and Boston is awesome. From where I see (through my little office window at Canal Park in Cambridge), I see many cool companies that are vibrant and hip(cross street from where I am is Hubspot and ZipCar. I am jealous of both), though a little bit more rumor about them from the media would certainly help. More importantly, I see Boston playing the leading role in many really important areas. One of such areas is web performance.

Web performance is a big deal. To website owners, improving site speed reduces operating costs. More importantly, faster website speed improves top line results.  Yahoo found that a 400ms improvement to the speed of their site increased their page views by 9%.  Firefox shaved 2.2 seconds off their average page load time and increased download conversions by 15.4%.  Shopzilla reduced their loading time from 7 seconds to 2 and increased their page views by 25% and revenue by 7-12%( see “Secret Sauce for Successful Web Site: Web Performance Optimization (WPO)” for sources). Furthermore, in June 2010,  Google publicly announced that it had begun to incorporate a website’s speed into its search ranking algorithm. To web visitors, web performance is obviously a big deal. When a site is slow, user experience suffers. If all web pages load one second slower, how many man years are we losing?

Let’s face it, the web is still too slow. Though Internet connectivity has been improving, the complexity of web applications and the volume of web traffic increased many more times.  How many times have you abandoned a site because it took forever to load? Fortunately, there is a recent movement towards a faster web.  Boston is leading this movement.

First of all,  there is Akamai in Cambridge. If you use the Internet for anything – to download music or software, check the headlines, book a flight, you probably benefited from some  performance boost through Akamai. Though a little bit older than most web 2.0 companies and some injection of web 2.0 culture can be helpful, Akamai dominates the multi-billion dollar content delivery network (CDN) market in helping to make the web faster.

One of the reasons for the web speed movement actually comes from Google.  Everyone knows that Google has always been obsessed with its site speed. But in the last couple of years, Google openly stated that making the entire web faster is  one of its key missions.  It believes a faster web is critical to Google’s own future and started to invest heavily to help make web faster.

Aha! No, Google is a Silicon Valley company, not a Boston company, as you would say. True. However, one of main Google projects to help make the web faster is called “Page Speed” and the Google Page Speed team is actually based in Cambridge. Page Speed project includes a browser plugin that provides performance recommendations similar to YSlow,  an Apache web server module called “mod_pagespeed” that performs speed optimizations for web pages and Page Speed Online that provides recommendations online. I reached out to Bryan McQuade (who is leading Page Speed at Google Cambridge) for comments. He said: “Page Speed is all about helping make the web faster. Our Cambridge team is glad to be part of this web speed movement.”

Of course there is W3C at MIT. In the summer of 2010, the W3C formed a “Web Performance Working Group” with a mission to “provide methods to measure aspects of application performance of user agent features and APIs”. One of the first output from this group is Navigation Timing API, which enables developers to measure the speed of web pages on supported browsers. Currently Navigation Timing API is supported by Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome 6+ already(source: Chris Weekly, W3C Navigation Timing API: Better Page Load Time Measurements in Chrome and IE).

Web performance is what my company Yottaa is about. Based in Cambridge,  Yottaa makes websites faster by providing cloud services to help website owners assess, benchmark, monitor and optimize their websites. We build some deeply sophisticated cloud stuff that runs on many cloud computing providers all over the world. But never mind that, all the complexities are hidden away under a consumer web 2.0 like user experience. With just a few clicks,  Yottaa can double the speed of your website. But we are definitely not the only start-up in the web performance space:

There are plenty of news for better web performance. Waltham based Zixi announced $4M financing for speeding up video delivery over the Internet in April 2011. My company Yottaa recently announced Yottaa Optimizer, a cloud service that enables web sites and web applications to double their speed with just a few clicks. Yottaa Optimizer is the industry’s first real time web performance optimization service. Feel free to give it a try at http://www.yottaa.com/optimizer-trial.

Come to think about it, making the web faster directly impacts billions of consumers. What else can match this scale of social impact. Isn’t it cool? Isn’t it awesome?

More importantly, Bostonians, we have incredible stuff going on here in our street corners, from industry leaders to innovative startups.  We are leading the wave in many hugely important areas.  For this faster web movement,  Boston is at the epicenter. We are leading the wave that can benefit billions of consumers. How cool is that? How awesome is that?

Image source: http://fbfund.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/speed.jpg