Predicting Teh Intarwubs 2.25
Went to Mashable’s Social Media Camp SF last week. Despite my highest hopes, I have to say I was slightly disappointed: though pretty well organized, the crowd attending seemed tragically, for some reason or another, out of date. The sessions included (kid you not) a “Twitter 101” seminar and during the intros, I’m told that everyone’s favorite service was still Facebook. Really, I should’ve gotten a burrito or big ass stack of nachos or something and gone to the Microformats meetup instead. Ah well…
Nevertheless it got me thinking alot about what the future of web services within the next twelve to eighteen months will look like, what I’ve taken to calling “Web 2.25.” I’m hesitating from using something super grandiose like “3.0” (semantic web?) or even “2.5” here, since I think it’s tough to call these new generation of businesses an entirely new model of online interaction and mostly since I don’t have enough geek cred to buzzword with the stars.
Though it’d be wrong to think that the ol’ saw about user-generated content is remaining static. There’s no doubt: we are in a process of transition in some sense. But what we’re seeing are more modest tweaks to the user-generated, social-networking, collaborative landscape that attempt to repair in some way the outcomes from the existing wave of services (the greatest catalog of which is probably Anil Dash’s “Elsewhere” list on the sidebar of his blog). Indeed, I think the premise of Web 2.25 is a direct response to each of the failures of Web 2.0. It’s a microtrend that’s hitting the field, and I think we’ll see growth in all these types of web businesses/projects over the next year/year-and-a-half or so. I’m sure the ones I’ve listed are only partial, they just happen to be the ones I’ve run into — drop a comment if you know of any more though!
1) Information Consolidation
The obvious failure of Web 2.0 is that there’s just too many social networking services floating out there with different social groups operating on unique sets of networks. The information about them remains mostly separated up, and there’s no easy way of viewing them and all their content/updates in an aggregate (though easily sortable) way. This obviously puts limits on the ability for individual social networking sites to be effective, and otherwise puts huge frictions on easy use of these services. Thankfully, stripping RSS feeds has been a way for companies like Friendfeed and Yoono to gain a brief handle on this problem. Neither are quite there yet on the level of a “Trillian for Social Networking,” but it’s a start.
2) Identity/Authentication/Interoperability
But beyond receiving information from your friends across all these networks, there’s the problem on the flipside of the coin. A service landscape that features many separated Web 2.0 services still require me to directly manage each network, and don’t allow me to easily share or sync my own data on profiles, friends, etc. As a normal consumer, I still mostly have to login in and manually change things. There’s some patchy solutions in this regard, usually leveraging an e-mail address book to sync up friends (i.e. Flickr, Twitter), but it remains a huge, time-consuming pain to keep them all linked up. To my knowledge, the main project building infrastructure out there that would lay the groundwork for this sort of functionality is OpenID. At this point, any kind of standard that would join the networks and made it easily usable would gain an assload of traction in the market.
3) Advertising
Despite all the information that’s being scraped off of our profiles and content we upload and tag on the web, let’s face it: ads still suck. In fact, they suck so much that we still identify them as ads. This is because they’re still largely useless to us in exposing products that we might actually want or need (as opposed to something like the ubiquitous Craigslist, which is in fact a site made completely of ads, but aren’t identified as such since they actually help us — or how good trailers are “trailers” and bad trailers are “ads”). In fact, Facebook, who by now should have a close-to-clairvoyant understanding of the college student mind by the sheer amount of data they have — still suggests that I might want to “join my frat bros and party” or “Girls! Spring Break In Cancun!” No doubt, Google AdSense is already head and shoulders above Punch the Monkey, but we’re still a long way from being directly useful (as opposed to intrusive interruptions). I’m thinking this may become more possible as problems #1 and #2 get solved — a consolidated identity would give a critical mass that would allow users and ads to become more targeted.
4) Community Construction
Despite all the years of experience now and business hype around user-contributed work and activity, gatherings like Social Media Camp still seem at a complete loss to answer one little question: what drives users to create content and build constructive communities around something? It’s remained totally unaddressed and unresolved, and has caused total failures when companies have assumed that “just throwing up a wiki/blog/contest” would be enough to have users do the company’s work for them. Notably, its led to some hilarious fiascos. Clay Shirkey has written pretty perceptively about the need for users to care about the maintenance of a community to stay in and develop content — and I think strategic community development work will definitely become a bigger part of the 2.25 economy.
Just some thoughts, I’m sure the web 2.25 economy will resolve other issues from the 2.0 world, but these strike me at least as some of the biggest. Thoughts?
