Web 2.0, "Web as place" and the value of networks
I'm normally not one of the people who finds themselves agreeing with Dion Hinchcliffe (ZDNet
blogger and CTO of
Sphere of Influence). To me a lot of his posts have a bit too much evangelism and not quite enough practicality in them. Maybe it's just me.
But I think he's really hit the nail on the head with a recent post "
A round of Web 2.0 reductionism". Basically he rounds up a number of the points of view out there on what Web 2.0 really represents, and then goes on to provide a kind of synthesis, explaining that although the elements of Web 2.0 aren't new, there has definitely been some kind of shift:
However, up until recently, most uses of the read-write Web were for publishers, online shopping, or other one-to-many and solitary, point-to-point uses. And while that may still be the case today, the trends are now telling us a dramatically different story: the read-write Web is being used in a participatory way in a widespread fashion. It was the widespread adoption of blogs, wikis, and other read-write techniques that ushered in a common I-write-and-everyone-reads-it usage pattern. This is the harnessing part that a pure conception of a read-write Web does not focus on and the public at large is just starting to understand.
This is what I call "Web as place" - the third wave of development of the Web. In the report on this that I'm writing at the moment (when time permits ;-) I've just finished drafting some text that reads:
The Web is becoming less a set of online resources, and more a sprawling marketplace where people stay – to talk, to listen, to explore, to learn, to play and to shop – for long periods of time. This is the third wave of development of the Worldwide Web – "Web as place". What is commonly referred to as "Web 2.0" is primarily a mixture of enablers for, and consequences of, this evolution of the Web.
...
What's really enabling the third wave of Web development is a critical mass of services, resources and users which are together making participation an expected feature of more and more online experiences. Of course Web-as-place has been a long time coming: bulletin boards and newsgroups have provided distinct "places" for people to meet and exchange ideas online for many years. But Amazon, eBay and others changed all that, by creating storefronts that were wrapped in community services and building large-scale, international communities of shoppers and enthusiasts with shared interests.
...
"Web as place" is notable for the way in which links are returning to their roots: as resource integration hooks which are universal in terms of what, and where, they can point to. The huge popularity of blogs, and the emergence of wikis and other "social software" have vastly increased the number of links between Web-based resources – making the Web a more coherent entity [...than it was when all the focus was on building storefronts - where links were primarily used as application navigation mechanisms.] As a result the boundaries between resources under ownership of different people are blurring rapidly.
So there you are: "Web as place". That's what's happening now. And fundamentally, all the interesting aspects of this phenomenon can be abstracted into one simple (and slightly flippant) observation:
The value of a network is in ... the network. All telecom operators know this. It's no accident that despite mobile network operators' massive investments in third-generation (3G) networks, content and services, the lion's share (by far) of data revenue that these companies see still comes from text messaging. If you can build services that take advantage of the fact that your users are networked together, your value proposition is multiplied: you aren't just originating content for others to consume; you're acting as an enabler and facilitator for others to participate in conversations.
Of course I'm not the first person to point this out. Doc Searls did a good job
here.
More to come on this as I finish the report!
