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March 20, 2007

Web 2.0 Is Over: Time For Flow

Peter Rip says that the gas in the Web 2.0 balloon is leaking out. I particularly like the Alexa graphs that show a general fall off in Web 2.0 readership (GigaOm, Techcrunch, and Technorati showing the same trends).

He suggests we are headed for something else:

[from EarlyStageVC: Web 2.0 - Over and Out]

Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn't going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn't exist today.

The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today. Ask anyone who uses a SaaS application.

I am not alone in observing where the world is going. The hard problems in the vision of a true web-as-platform involve all the usual hard computer science issues. How can we normalize information from disparate sources to make it interoperable?

I don't think the web-as-platform is the right metaphor for what's coming. I personally believe we are moving away from the web-as-a-bazillion-web-pages to a flow model: there the web becomes a conduit for traffic flowing through social networks. That's what I believe is happening with the take-off of Twitter, too.

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Web 2.0 Is Over: Time For Flow:

» Beyond this wave of Web 2.0. Lies Web flow? from Clunky Flow
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Cualquiera sabe. Mucho se especula sobre lo que será o dejará de ser la web 3.0 Mi opinión es que deberíamos quedarnos en la 2.0 una temporada, para aprender, hacer cosas interesantes que surjan modelos de negocio ... (claro, igual la web 3.0 es la [Read More]

Comments

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gosh - i declared web 2.0 geekwise dead right after lift07... enter transitional web apps *s*

you can read more here guys http://henrietteweber.com/2007/02/12/communities-are-getting-used-to-social-whats-the-next-tendency/

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