The name 'World War I' was only applied to the war once called 'The Great War' after World War II commenced; once people of the time needed a term that would distiguish the new bloodshed from the historical carnage that had been referred to "The War" for the previous decades.
In a similar fashion, the first era of the Web has been diminished by the arrival of new blood (figuratively speaking), and many have adopted the rubric Web 2.0 to distinguish this new era from the first, and at the same time, many suggest that it's all one big experimental brew, and the version numbering is at best a trick to capitalize on faddishness and at the worst some sort of fruadulent metaphor mixing.
In this installment in my ongoing series -- The Social Web: What's The New Web Worth -- I intend to poke at a number of shopworn metaphors of the Web 1.0 era, and use that as a refection of the aspirations and challenges of that time. My principal goal is not technoid nostalgia, but to set a context for what is happening today, in the New Web, commonly known as Web 2.0.
Certain aspects of the Web 1.0 metaphors are still with us without seeming antiquated. Search, for example, as currently exemplified by Google, is the mainstay of today's web, and reflects perhaps the most fundamental unification of core Web 1.0 style technology carried to the Nth degree, such as the gazillions of server farms Google manages all over the world (and could have almost come from 1960s science fiction stories where a global computer netwrok becomes sentient and decides to exterminate humankind). However, the reliance on a core social artifact -- links that people create to web pages -- intermixes a social glue into the algorithmic alchemy of Google. This means Google is at once the leading Web 1.0 company, and one very likely to remain at the head of the pack as we move into the New Web.
The Web Of Pages
The basic metaphor of Web 1.0 is the Web Of Pages: the Web is envisioned as a giant, ever-growing network where the nodes are HTML pages and the arcs are hyperlinks. While this view has an element of dynamism -- pages are endlessly being added, for example -- it leaves out a whole lot.
Most especially, the social dynamics are totally implicit: Why are people creating pages? How do they find them? What are they doing on the pages and what sorts of information are on them? How do they share what they find? The answers to those sorts of questions motivated all sort of Web 1.0 innovation, while Web 2.0 is moving ahead with a better metaphor: The Social Web. I am deferring more discussion of the Social Web and the revolution it is engendering till my next post; in the remainder of this post I want to saunter through the Museum of Tired Metaphors.
E-Commerce
E-commerce originally positioned the Web as a giant emporium, where every part, product, and service can be catalogued, priced, weighed, bought and shipped. Amazon, for books (and later other consumer products), and eBay, for collectibles (and later for all sorts of goods, new or used), are perhaps the best examples of this trend. Various other giants have emerged in niche areas: Monster.com for job search, CraigsList for classifieds, and Expedia for travel.
These services are based on a catalog metaphor, where sellers can offer goods or services, and buyers (generally consumers) can find them and acquire them. The volume and low overhead of online services hollowed out the markets in most areas thet they touched, for example, sideswiping brick-and-mortar bookstores, blowing up the travel agent business, and strongly cratering the head hunter marketplace.
Netflix, a relatively late entrant, but still a decidely Web 1.0 company, has caused major damage to the brick-and-mortar video chains: Movie Gallery, the #2 chain after Blockbuster, recently filed for bankruptcy citing pressure from brands like Netflix.
As new web notions start to percolate, the dominant players have worked to incorporate what they can. Amazon is harnessing its huge community to create tens of thousands of (free) book reviews. eBay has devised a not-tremendously-sophisticated, but absolutely central, reputation system based on user reviews. Netflix has rolled out a 'friends' capabilities so that people can share movie recommendations.
Still, the core architectural premises of the online catalogue define the user experience of these solutions, and also determine their limitations.
Information Portals and Extranets
The initial rise of Yahoo was due to the difficulties in the early Web in finding things. So many new sites were being launched, and in the absence of comprehensive search (Google wasn't around yet), a huge human-based index of web sites seemed like a great idea. It fell to pieces when the rate of growth went exponential, and the editors at Yahoo couldn't keep up. Google came along with a triumphant bottom-up mechanistic approach that demonstrated that top-down manual techniques were dead.
But the idea of human editorship making sense of an exploding Web seems to never die. (In a sense, that's what Internet Evolution is: a specific group of people blogging about technology, instead of a random collection of information about technology offered by an information appliance like Techmeme or Technorati, Web 2.0 information sieves.) We saw the rise and fall of the Information Portal notion, where media companies dreamed of setting up the definitive website for Weddings, or Digital Cameras, or Photo Sharing. Largely, these portals have been superceded by New Web upstarts based on social technologies or just by the explosion of the blogosphere.
Likewise, the 1990's metaphor of extranets -- online websites that would operate more or less as web versions of a shared drive on the company's intranet -- led to the rise and fall of hundreds of now largely outdated companies. The emergence of Web 2.0 offerings like Google Documents, Slideshare, and Basecamp has invalidated the extranet model, and inverted the dynamics of online sharing away from 'web as storage' to 'web as operating system.'
Museum of Tired Metaphors
So, looking back, the thing we most can afford to lose from the Web 1.0 era is not the plumbing -- which we still rely on as a foundation for the New Web -- but rather the tired metaphors. It's not a bunch of tubes, as Senator Ted Stevens famously remarked, the old Web is a bunch of outmoded ways of thinking about our relationship to communication and community. We are moving past broadcast media and e-commerce based on ginormic catalogs. Portals and extranets have lost their sizzle (if they ever had any).
We are searching for better ways to think about the Web and our relationship with it, and through it to ourselves. The new Web is -- among other more tangible things -- a collection of innovative ways to view our social engagement, and the tools that are engendering a revolution.
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