Web2.0 - The Hard Act To Follow

What's next for the Web? It was the unspoken question of many who gathered at the Web2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week. For Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, it all came down to a number - 6,527. Or, the exact number of days until now since Tim Berners Lee made the first webpage. All the innovation, the new wealth, disruptions in traditional media and the millions of Wikipedia entries - a seemingly impossible scale of human endeavor - had been created in that relatively short span. So, what are we likely to see in the next 6500 days?

For a start, it's becoming clear that 2008 will be an inflection point for the industry. In her annual high altitude scan of the new media landscape, Morgan Stanley internet analyst Mary Meeker pointed out that relative amount of time that consumers spent on websites has changed dramatically. When you look at the metric of global minutes, over the last two years YouTube and Facebook have gained over 500 basis points of relative share, at the expense of traditional portal incumbents Yahoo! and MSN.

Behind this statistic are two underlying trends. Firstly, Facebook has become the Outlook and webmail client for an increasing number of people, especially kids. And in just the same way that free webmail anchored consumer loyalty to MSN and Yahoo in the early days of the Web, Facebook is building a new loyal base of socially networked fanatics. In his interview at the conference, Mark Zuckerburg revealed that 50% of Facebook users use the site daily. That's serious addiction.

The second trend is even more unexpected. In the last year, YouTube has become the second most popular search tool for consumers. By August of this year, search queries on YouTube reached 9.2 billion (a 123% increase year on year), surpassing Yahoo! sites which had 8.5 billion queries. When I asked John Battelle, author of 'The Search' and CEO of Federated Media about this he said that YouTube’s growth was consistent with the trend of search being the navigational interface to information. For Battelle, Google's original innovation was allowing people to search for things using natural language phrases. The next interface evolution we can expect will be all kinds of inherent searches, whether it be through content recommendations or mobile phones allowing real time product comparisons.

And in a way, that's exactly what Kelly envisages as the Web's Hollywood sequel. Or as he puts it - the World Wide Web as World Wide Database. Rather than simply sharing links to documents, the next generation web will be about accessing the implicit data. In Kelly's view, every object we manufacture will have a sliver of intelligence in it. The entire world and everything in it will go into a globally connected database of things, that is then shared and linked. We won't worry about how different devices operate or access content. They will all be windows into the same universal network.

Ironically enough, it was a hardware guy that pointed out how this vision could impact on consumer lifestyles. Intel has been aggressively developing and releasing new types of low cost, mobile chipsets designed to power ubiquitous computing devices. Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, demonstrated a device capable of augmented reality applications such as translating Chinese street signs in real time or showing you an animated overlay to a product in a toy store. It was, he admitted, a sleight of hand. A couple of giant computers under the couch were doing the heavy lifting for the demo. But, he said, by 2011 you could expect that a low cost chip as powerful as a current desktop PC would be available for your mobile device. Moore's Law, naturally. And, as Otellini pointed out wryly, no CEO of Intel wants to be the first to break it.

Cloud computing, massive scale driven platforms, semantic webs, ubiquitous mobile devices, augmented reality - its a tall order - even for 6500 days. And if you find all of that a hard cocktail to envision, don't be surprised. As Kelly himself acknowledged, when he started Wired magazine in the nineties he expected the Web to be TV, just better. This time he's sure of one thing. Whatever comes next won't be the Web, only better.

It will be something completely different.

Comments

[Scott Maxworthy]

Great post.

[chris simon]

It is not passing traffic that is so significant to me, as the time a person spends with the content.

Is the number of friends that MySpace or Facebook records sometimes nothing more than the charge of the light brigade? (Light interest or passing interest with your page or profile).

My understanding is that metrics used by moderators of such social portals register everyone that ‘looks in’ for a split second and might never come back.

Your comments (and John Battelle’s) about YouTube allow me to ‘rest my case’ that my intuitive choice of original migration, 5 months prior to WotNext’s local closure were absolutely the right direction. I had much choice in late 2006 and throughout last year as to where I would make not only a social, but data-transfer hub.

So Kevin Kelly predicted the Web to be better TV. It was!

I believe data driven video will remain part of what will always be next, (and I include in that any and every form of file transfer across any device).

I do not mean consumer revenge and mash up tools, or being allowed to put your spin on editing a Baz Luhrmann AUSTRALIA trailer. This type of interaction or editing device has existed since Peter Gabriel and David Bowie hung out on the internet in nappies. Also, it’s about making someone else’s pre-determined creative communication or application.

In its most ambitious form, I believe 3.0 video could be a mobile or online/cloud archive of millions of seconds of unrelated video files. Some might be one second from an ad; some might be one second from a training video; some might be abstract; some might be music videos; some might be action movies; some might be animations; some might be anime. The list could be limitless and, in certain cases, unrecognizable.

Then make a feature or message that is coherent from the above, but entirely unrelated to any of the above. Not a mash up, but a story.

We will become more and more ambitious and 'collective' with doing this.

Ultimately and getting very close now, it would be like posting a white space, but not a site; a video and filling that video not only with content, but direction.
© Chris Simon 8.11.08.