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.

I don’t think Via.me has a chance of dislodging Tumblr, Instagram, Path, or a long list of other incumbents.
Zoom

I don’t think Via.me has a chance of dislodging Tumblr, Instagram, Path, or a long list of other incumbents.

It’s funny how hard it is to pick an interesting image from a giant grid on a web site. It’s also funny how many images we look at each day. What’s not funny is how much all that digital viewing numbs our senses and sucks our souls. I’m speaking in terms of science, of course. But when you display one image at a time in a series that’s essentially customized, based on time, something profound happens. More weight and significance is placed on each image, just because you have to consider it, at least for a split second, in your feed. Instagram forces you to focus.

It might seem trivial, but showing one photo at a time is a design decision that creates more value for each image, and enhances your viewing experience. Plus it doesn’t hurt to have the images trapped inside a beautiful iPhone screen. It almost doesn’t matter who you follow—their photos probably look better one at a time. From a UX perspective, we keep learning that interfaces with constraints are successful, and it seems like such a straight-forward principle (140 characters, ahem), but it’s kind of worthless on it’s own. Obviously you can’t introduce constraints without other elements, which is why this is the last point. There’s something enticing about knowing that most Instagram photos are created on the iPhone, since it introduces a NASCAR-like equality. That makes it fun to see what other people can create with the same technical constraints you have. Photography has always been all about the equipment, and not at all about the equipment. Knowing millions of people are creating with roughly the same camera and app as you makes it exciting creatively. So constraints, combined with quality and an audience are what makes Instagram so addictive.

Nate Bolt, Why Instagram Is So Popular: Quality, Audience, & Constraints

(h/t arainert)

If you want a community with stronger ties, provide more definition to your social object.

Chris Wetherell, There’s been some interesting critical discussions of some…

A great aphorism buried in a long screed about the apparent lack of love for Google Reader within Google.

I have long argued that social communities pivot on creation and sharing of social objects: the medium is the message, again. And Wetherell argues that Reader is just right in the scope of its messaging, where people share stories.

He also explicitly disses Google+, arguing that it is too broad in scope:

The social object of Google+ is…nearly anything and its diffuse model is harder to evaluate or appreciate. The value of a social network seems to map proportionally to the perceived value of its main object. (Examples: sharing best-of-web links on Metafilter or sharing hi-res photos on Flickr or sharing video art on Vimeo or sharing statuses on Twitter/Facebook or sharing questions on Quora.)

So, restating: one measure of the depth of connection to a social network by members — and the strength of the connection between members — is the fit between the network’s social objects and the members’ goals.

Flickr and Instagram are great because they pivot around image sharing, and support social interactions around them. Reader, Wetherall argues, does a similar job with stories, but I will quibble there. I don’t think the Reader model is primarily social: it’s sociality seems like an afterthought, as with Delicious, and others. I think Tumblr and Twitter are better places for sharing stories, but neither one is all the way done, yet.

However, his insight, quoted at the top, is worth reflecting on, esepecially for those involved in developing social tools of whatever sort.

(h/t deepthinking)

thenextweb: Explore photos being shared around the world on Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and PicPlz via a map in near real-time. When you’re zoomed out, you’ll see only the latest images being shared, and as you zoom further in to a particular area you’ll see more images from a longer time period. (via Teleportd: Search photos shared on Twitter, Instagram and more)
Zoom

thenextweb:

Explore photos being shared around the world on Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and PicPlz via a map in near real-time. When you’re zoomed out, you’ll see only the latest images being shared, and as you zoom further in to a particular area you’ll see more images from a longer time period. (via Teleportd: Search photos shared on Twitter, Instagram and more)

3 Things I Wish Instagram Would Add | @NewCommBiz

Tac Anderson via New Comm Biz

2- A real website with profiles and activity streams: This is because the community is so great I want to be able to access it from my desktop instead of having to pull out my phone. Some sites offer this through Instagram’s API but they don’t quite have the same feel and experience that Instagram delivers.

Pretty please.

(Source: underpaidgenius)

Fooling With plus.google (Google+): What Does ‘Share’ Mean?

I got invited to the plus.google beta (I begged my way in and Bradley Horowitz caved).

I am calling it ‘plus.google’ because that’s the URL, and avoids the problems with searching for a name with a plus sign in it.

It’s too early for more definitive thoughts, but here’s something I posted there:

‘Share’ in plus.google doesn’t have the same semantics as in the outside world, where it leads to a list of services. I guess there is no integration with Instapaper, Tumblr, Twitter? We are confronted with a gigantic plus.google system, where things can be shared among its parts, but not externally? (Ditto on pushing stuff into plus.google).

Someone may tell me that plus.google is in test phase, that those features will come later, etc.

But operating in the context of my existing flows will be the only true test for me.

This sort of experiment might be good for people to compare plus.google to another world-straddling social network — Facebook — that has attempted to do everything, but it isn’t for me, because I don’t rely on Facebook.

So I see the ‘share’ shift of meaning as indicative. plus.google is intended as a Facebook killer, but I have already defected from Facebook and I don’t believe in a single, monolithic, all-encompassing social world in the hands of one bunch of overlords, however benevolent.

I also think that the real angle for Google isn’t his giant social Disneyland they have constructed, but the primitives that underlie it, and the way that those will be built into Android, so that other app developers can take advantage of them.

Imagine how much more interesting this would have been if five partners had built social apps that were accessible on plus.google right now. Imagine if Instagram or a With were integrated?

And the rift between iOS and Android pops up in here even at this early date: I can’t upload photos from my iPhone because Google decided not to put that functionality out, yet, or ever.

So the apparent competition with Facebook may turn out to be the big florid opening act, while the long term war is with Apple over the social operating system of the near future.

So, instead of clicking the ‘share’ button and posting this to Tumblr, I will cut and paste from the closed world — at least currently — of plus.google.

More to follow.

related

Facebook’s Purported Upcoming iPhone Photo Sharing App

John Gruber is not buying the Facebook iPhone photo app like all the other SF fanboys:

MG Siegler:

Either way, based on the images in front of us, the best way to think about it appears to be Path meets Instagram meets Color meets (Path’s new side project) With — with a few cool twists.

Sounds great, except for the Path, Color, and Facebook parts.

It’s the Google Wave of photos. (barf.)

Two kinds of image perhaps, and two kinds of dreaming — the saturated dreams of sleep, and the distracted daydreams of the everyday. A richer, enchanted and surreal world magnificence; a passing recollection of nostalgia. Dreams of future, dreams of the past.

The image, too, looks in both directions.

- Adrian Chan, Instagram vs HDR: cultural observations

Chan thinks about HDR and Instagram snapshots as two sides of a coin, two parts of our cultural mind, two forms of dreaming.