The Next Big Thing Is Eating The Lunch Of Something That Was Big A Decade Ago

Someone who hasn’t fallen for George Orwell’s trope ‘whoever is winning now will always seem to be invincible.’

Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years - Eric Jackson via Forbes

In the tech Internet world, we’ve really had 3 generations:

1. Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),
2. Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon (GRPN)),
3. and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram).

We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.

With each succeeding generation in tech the Internet, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings.  Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion.  Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it.  Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.

When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections.   MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially.  Facebook got college students.  LinkedIn got the white collar professionals.  Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable.

Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users.  Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm.  Why has Amazon done so little in social?  And Google?  Even as they pour billions at the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.

Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world.  These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application.  They don’t even think of launching via a web site.  They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.

We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.

Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm.  Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies.  It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization.  Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience.  It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year.  It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.

The failed history of Web 1.0 companies adapting to the world of social suggests that Facebook will be as woeful at adapting to social mobile as Google has been with its “ghost town” Google+ initiative last year.

The organizational ecologists talked about the “liability of obsolescence” which is a growing mismatch between an organization’s inherent product strategy and its operating environment over time.  This probably is a good explanation for what we’re seeing in the tech world today.

Are companies like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! obsolete?  They’re still growing.  They still have enormous audiences.  They also have very talented managers.

But with each new paradigm shift (first to social, now to mobile, and next to whatever else), the older generations get increasingly out of touch and likely closer to their significant decline.  What’s more, the tech world in which we live in seems to be speeding up.

People forget how indomitable AOL seemed, and the promise of Netscape and MySpace, before they fell into the dustbin. As I have said before, Facebook is the new AOL, although Johnson is making a different case for that. I have been presaging the rise of social operating systems — which would invalidate Facebook’s near-monopoly on people’s social inclinations — while he points to the rise of mobile, and says

Considering how long Facebook dragged its feet to get into mobile in the first place, the data suggests they will be exactly as slow to change as Google was to social.

And that’s is not a good place to be.

I agree with Jackson: the rate of change is not slowing, so the monopolies of today are likely to be shorter-lived than those of even a decade ago. And the new world beaters are possibly companies that don’t even exist yet, but whenever they crop up we will first notice them when they start stealing users, market, and attention from the formerly indomitable killer apps of the preceding era.

Web 2.0 Expo: Giraffes, hippos, mafias and making sweet music together

Good day, Stowe’s edglings! A quick introduction: my name is Deanna Zandt, and I’m the author of a forthcoming book called “Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking.” I’m attending Web 2.0 Expo this week, and I’ll be posting a daily summary of what I’m seeing and hearing. It’s my first time attending this conference, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to report on it.

The festivities kicked off for me on Monday night with Ignite Bay Area over at Mezzanine. (Not familiar with Ignite? It’s a set of presentations, exactly five minutes long, whose tagline is, “Inspire us, but make it quick.” Each presenter must create a PowerPoint with exactly 20 slides, which advance automatically every 15 seconds. I did one of these in March (on Muppets as model social citizens), and I can tell you it’s exactly as challenging as it sounds. The winners for me from Monday night were:

One Million Giraffes. This guy from Norway is trying to win a bet that he can collect one million giraffes by 2011. His talk was both hilarious and insightful — the creativity of giraffes being submitted is inspiring.

The Forgiveness Engine. Granted, Jesper Andersen got our attention by first showing us his anti-Foursquare app, Avoidr, but the Forgiveness Engine looks right up my alley. Inspiring empathy and catharsis is a radical goal for a service.

A story about hippos. This one can only be covered by sharing the video, which I hope will be posted soon. Great storytelling talents by Chris Hutchins.

Tuesday’s sessions at the conference were a mixed bag; one thing that I’m struggling with is that there isn’t quite the depth that I was expecting at Web 2.0 Expo. Especially after Social Business Edge a couple weeks ago, I feel I’ve been a little bit spoiled by listening to speakers who don’t just sing the praises of the social tech we all know and love, but who take on the cultural challenges and future implications (both utopian and dystopian). A few of the keynotes yesterday left me frustrated with their lack of exploration — Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed, for example, spent some time cheering the notion that information wants to be public, but never mentioned the implications of privacy and publicy for people in different social sectors than his. I wanted to send a paper airplane of danah boyd’s talk at SXSW up to the stage, not to mention a great post from Stowe on Foursquare.

Of the workshop/panel sessions, my favorite was “5 Reputation Fallacies (And How to Avoid Them)” with F. Randall “Randy” Farmer (MSB Associates), Bryce Glass (Manta Media, Inc.). Entertaining us with stories about the Sims Mafia shakedowns, they showed us key insights on designing reputation systems that went beyond the obvious — how 5-star rating systems, for example, are often only used by interested, engaged fans to show their approval. Uninterested users tend to just walk away and not register a vote at all, creating J-curves of skewed recommendations.

In keynote land, the closing session of the day rocked the worlds of everyone I talked to. I won’t do it justice with a review, so just go ahead and watch Ge Wang show us the mind-blowing future of music tech — and its intrinsic link our primal human needs for connectedness.

Tim O’Reilly on Web 3.0

Tim O’Reilly, one of the fathers of the Web 2.0 meme, joins the fray on Web 3.0 by debunking the heavy-handed efforts of Jason Calacanis to align the meme-from-hell with his Mahalo startup, and Nova Spivack’s more altruistic attempts to link the meme to something meaningful:

[from Today’s Web 3.0 Nonsense Blogstorm]

Nova Spivack started it by describing the as-yet-to-be-revealed Radar Networks as Web 3.0, but now Jason Calacanis has his competing definition, neatly tailored to fit his own mahalo.com. The resulting storm of derision is entirely to be expected.

[…]

I’d say that for “Web 3.0” to be meaningful we’ll need to see a serious discontinuity from the previous generation of technology. That might be another bust and resurgence, or more likely, it will be something qualitatively different. I like Stowe Boyd’s musings on the subject:

Personally, I feel the vague lineaments of something beyond Web 2.0, and they involve some fairly radical steps. Imagine a Web without browsers. Imagine breaking completely away from the document metaphor, or a true blurring of application and information. That’s what Web 3.0 will be, but I bet we will call it something else.

I’m with Stowe. There’s definitely something new brewing, but I bet we will call it something other than Web 3.0.

Well, leaving aside all the folks sharpening their knives to butcher the fatted calf that they all long for Web 3.0 to be, there still might be something worthwhile in wondering about what is over the far horizon. Hey, Tim, let’s do a conference on that!

Attention Convention

Over at Groundhog Day, David Rogers demonstrates that he is pretty bitter. He lumps me together with Clay Shirky and Doc Searls (which I am ok with) as fringe lunatic types who seem to think that the Internet can do good things. Yes, I think so.

[from Competing Messages: What Matters?]

[editorial: Apparently Doc called David up and asked if he wanted to work on Vendor Relationship Management, which sparked his screed.]

I pretty much can’t stand the internet anymore. At least, the things it seems to be doing to people, or the way it causes people to think.

The beret-wearing, continuous partial attention blowhard, Stowe Boyd, embraces Marshall McLuhan’s view that we make our tools and then our tools shape us. And I think that’s true. But like all visionaries and advocates who try to sell their expertise and insight to those discerning enough to recognize the clarity of their vision and the keenness of their insight, they never think past the end of their nose.

[It’s a cap on backwards, not a beret.]

We created the automobile, and the automobile changed our culture and civilization far more than one might have anticipated from such a simple artifact. Where were the advocates who foretold the rise of suburbs, the traffic jam, carbon emissions, forty to fifty thousand deaths every year? Where were the visionaries who offered the insight into the changes in our architecture, or the stress of a daily two-hour commute?

And all those things are, of course, merely peripheral changes. Changes to how we do things, not what we do. But, of course, many people seem to believe that how we do things is “everything.” As in, “This changes everything.” (Pant, pant.) Or “the world.” Did the automobile “change the world?” I’m not so sure.

[Um… David… I am not advocating an automobile-based society. Oh, I guess it’s some kind of analogy. But could you please thread it together for me? I am suggesting that exactly the sort of thing you talk about happens. For example, the rise of cell phones has changed social relations. There is good and bad involved, depending on your viewpoint.]

Then there’s that internet sage, Clay Shirky, with his pithy analysis of the criticism of the whole “Web 2.0” phenomenon - “Old Revolutions, Good; New Revolutions, Bad” with his illuminating insight that, “This improved ability to find both content and people is one of the core virtues of our age.” One wonders how much of a “virtuous” age ours may be, when “finding content and people” is considered a virtue. Shirky also illuminated the “virtues” of youth in another piece, because “old” people have “cemented past experience into knowledge.” Thus, old people have cement in their heads. Must be why we “nod off” so often.

[Um… David… what’s wrong with finding content and people? You lost me. And, the fact that youth has virtues does not mean that being old is bad.]

The thing about Boyd and Shirky is that they’re competitors in an economic environment. The new and the novel is their raw material, and they produce “analysis” that “explains” the new and the novel to “the rest of us.” Naturally, to make the new and the novel more appealing, better able to seize and hold your attention, it has to be “good,” maybe even “virtuous.” So competition distorts how some choose to perceive change.

Of course, change is inevitable, and maybe it’s neither good nor bad, or perhaps it’s almost certainly both. But if someone speaks up and criticizes the visionaries and their products, well then they’re labeled trolls, and thus, not to be taken seriously. They’re harshing our buzz, man.

[I missed the slight of hand where Clay and I become competitors. I have always thought of Clay as a collaborator in a very loose sense: we are often talking about the same things in a similar way. He made ‘social software’ a well understood concept; and in 1999 I introduced the term ‘social tools’ — we have been pushing at similar ideas. But I don’t view it as a competition, and I doubt he does either.

Nor do I think that I am explaining to the ‘rest of us’ — I am involved in a line of public inquiry, and the interaction I have with the community involved in that discussion is the single most important source of insight and inspiraiton I have encountered.

But I agree with you about trolls. There are people out there who are the enemies of the future (as Virginia Postrel styled it in her book of the same name), and they need to be outed whenever possible.]

Competition. We live in a competitive environment. I think it’s a consequence of the law of natural selection. Various groups of our species compete in different ways. Most seem to be competing economically, in the commercial sphere. Others are competing in the political sphere. Although violence plays a role in both spheres. We can’t seem to escape from competition. It’s in our genes.

Doc wondered if I might be willing to help or contribute somehow to the conversation about vendor relationship management. I told him I was skeptical. I think anything that facilitates commercial interactions, does so at the expense of social ones. It’s not that I regard all companies as “evil,” though most of them are far from “virtuous.” As I explained to him, even if all companies were “good,” they still must compete with one another for our time and attention. And the universe of competing commercial entities seems to grow without limit; and they are all learning organisms, so they adapt to changes in their environment, and exploit anything that can give them a commercial advantage.

I’ve explained here many times, and did so again to Doc in conversation, that the notion of “authority” is an important one, one that requires a clear understanding. But because we live in a competitive, increasingly commercial society, important ideas are exploited and distorted to try and achieve a competitive advantage. I again pointed to Technorati as an example, and their claim to being “the recognized authority” on something, while simultaneously - and on a totally different page - disclaiming any responsibility for relying on that “authority.” It totally guts the notion of authority, all for the sake of Technorati looking a little more competitive.

We should all be offended, but we aren’t. We say, “It’s just marketing.”

And then we market ourselves into unnecessary wars, and we wonder how we got here.

None of this VRM, or Web 2.0 bullshit is important. It’s all crap. You and I have a certain amount of time here in this life. “Changing the world,” isn’t why we’re here. That’s just a line of shit they feed you, so that your time and attention and energy are devoted to serving the needs of the competing entities. We aren’t consumers, we are the consumed.

I don’t believe that wanting to change the world means capitulating to commercial interests. I don’t believe that its a line of shit we are being fed, or that I am creating a line of shit when I advocate social applications or other Web 2.0 advances.

Everyone has to decide what is important for themselves, David. Of course, authoritative voices like Doc, Clay, and, yes, me might point the way to certain technologies or tools that we believe are positive, that enlarge life or make it more rich. And I believe your mean-spirited attack on the revolution we are involved in puts you into the category of troll for me.

tags: david+rogers, web+2.0, clay+shirky, doc+searls, never+feed+the+trolls, virginia+postrel, the+future+and+its+enemies, social+tools, its+not+a+beret+its+a+cap+on+backwards

Stowe Boyd on Web 2.0

I was interviewed a few weeks ago, by CIO.com’ Diann Daniel, at the Cutter Consortium’s Summit, where I presented a keynote on Web 2.0:

[from Stowe Boyd on Web 2.0 in the Enterprise - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership]

[…]

All the sudden you have this renaissance happening on the Web and with such technologies as open source challenging the established software players. It’s all very destablizing, and the natural tendency for a lot of people is to say, I don’t like this and I’m going to resist it for as long as I can and I will try to rally people around me to help me resist the invasion of these new ideas. I hate to say it but that change-resistant behavior is, for many, human nature.

It’s all about fear and avoidance, alas.

They also interviewed JP Rangaswami (see Web 2.0 for the Suits: One Visionary’s Take), who came over from London to support my panel session.

Tweaked on Twitter: Ev Williams on David Sachs on Web 2.0

David Sachs: web 2.0 = networkification vs. web 1.0 = electronification. that may be the bset [best] explanation I’ve heard.