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.

Google's Management Doesn't Use Google+ - Michael Degusta

Michael Degusta makes a pretty convincing case that Google’s senior management doesn’t want to fool with Google+, and that’s just another indication of being socially challenged.

See Can Google Go Social from a year ago, long before Google+, where I suggested that Google will fumble the social future:

Google made a pile by harvesting the latent value of all the social gestures we were leaving around the web in the form of links. These form the core of Page Rank and Google’s search/advertising business.

This was born in the paleolithic of the social web, where mostly we were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, turning over rocks, based on keyword search. The idea of social in those days was to send email alerts to people so they’d remember to read your blog and post comments.

But the social web has grown based on social networks — relationships between people — not hyperlinks between web pages. We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion. But they desperately want in on the next wave, but they haven’t found a formula yet. It’s not Wave or Buzz, obviously. And now they are plotting a knockoff of Facebook: how 2009!

There are many unplowed fertile fields out there, where Google’s scale and engineering soul could do great things. As just one example, modern social network research has shown that the social ‘scenes’ we are situated in — the millions of people that form the ‘friends of my friends’ friends’ network — are the single best predictor of our likelihood to be fat, smoke, or be happy. And by extension, buy Chevrolets, listen to Country music, or read manga. And no services have tapped into that reality, yet, except in the most inadvertent ways. (For more background see Social Scenes: The Invisible Calculus Of Culture, It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence and Jeff Jarvis on The Hunt For The Elusive Influencer.)

This is why actions like buying Slide are likely to be diversions, like Jaiku and Dodgeball turned out to be. Meanwhile, there are real advances to be made — like building sociality into the operating platforms of the future. Obviously Google is in a position to do that with Android and Chrome, but I honestly don’t think they know what to build.

Audi Urban Future Initiative

THE AUDI URBAN FUTURE INITIATIVE IN NEW YORK, 6TH TO 9TH MAY 2011


The results of the Audi Urban Future Award 2010 were first presented parallel to the 12th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2010 in the Scuola Grande della Misericordia within a walk-through architectural environment created for the exhibition by Raumlaborberlin, a collective of architects and artists. An international jury selected Jürgen Mayer H. as the winner from among the participating architecture practices whose proposals were exhibited. In May 2011 the four most important theses will be on show in New York in the form of a compact exhibition. The
exhibition will be presented in cooperation with the New Museum in New York and has been integrated into the “Festival of Ideas for a New City“, which is taking place for the first time.

THE CITY OF THE FUTURE WILL BE MANY THINGS AT ONCE – THE MOST
IMPORTANT THESES OF THE AUDI URBAN FUTURE AWARD 2010

01 Free of barriers – Seamless City

The urban mobility of the future will be organized barrier-free to a much greater extent than it is today. In the city centers pedestrians, cyclists, cars and public transport will share the public space that is available to them. Road boundaries, road signs and traffic lights will be superfluous, because all participants in traffic will be electronically networked with each other and each participant’s need for space will be continuously determined. In this way frozen structures in the urban space will come into flow.

02 Owned by its inhabitants – Reconfigured City

Optimized systems of mobility will increasingly permit free areas to emerge within the city. This
will make it possible for the city to grow inwards and for certain areas to become denser. At the same time “green zones” for recreation but also for food production will arise in particular places. Calmed districts will furthermore enable their residents to combine work and leisure pleasantly and to carry out their daily tasks and business in a relaxed manner.

03 Interconnected – Networked City

In the future the city will be characterized to a high degree by different kinds of network. Everything will be connected with everything else by control loops. Automated travel, energy management, personalized electronic systems and digital social networks will play a leading role. This will go hand in hand with a radically changed perception of urban space. In the networked city all participants in traffic will, on the one hand, cooperatively control their interaction, and on the other hand they will all be enabled to create their individual view of the city.

04 A place of neighborly cooperation – Social City

Social interaction will be intensified, because the city of the future will consist of many heterogeneous areas instead of forming a homogeneous unit. New neighborhoods, and new forms of cooperation within these new neighborhoods, will emerge. Be it car sharing, urban gardening or neighborhood assistance, social exchange and common use will take the place of individual ownership in some fields.

I am willing to accept that future cities will have cars in them, semi-reluctantly. And the social/networked themes here are smart.



related

Enhanced by Zemanta

We will still be social but the way we use the networks will change

Social doesn’t mean Facebook. Half of the world isn’t on Facebook for example with many other social networks doing their best to connect people around the world. That said, the fastest growing group on Facebook right now is 50, 60 and 70-year olds coming online to join that party their children and grandchildren have been talking about. That massively changes the dynamic of Facebook believes Bell.

“People want to engage in new types of storytelling; Twitter, YouTube, Hashtags are all being used. All those mediums will eventually find their place in sociality.”

In 2010, YouTube grew up and was conquered by media companies to promote Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. It’s no longer small boys sticking fingers up their noses as they set fire to their cats. As the networks mature, so will the way in which we use them and eventually they should become the tools for every generation.

Stuart Mills, Genevieve Bell, Intel anthropologist - 10 visions of the future

Liquid: The Mobile, Social, Connected, Webbed World

We are clearly at the tipping point of a new era in computing, and we haven’t got a great name for it. Steve Jobs used a ‘post-’ characterization recently, saying that the iPad represented the gateway to the post-PC world. But we need a term to characterize what this is, not what it isn’t.

And what is it? It’s a convergence of a number of trends, some of which are more-or-less independent, but all are coming together in a class of new devices and the tools and practices that are popping up around them.

What are these trends?

Social — The emergence of the social web — as typified by Facebook, Twitter, and ten thousand other tools — has led to the rewiring of our economy and probably our minds. The streaming metaphor of communication and connection will be the dominant motif of all important software of the next decade.

Mobile — The most interesting and explosive devices being designed and released are mobile, like the iPhone, Android phones, tablets, and the miniaturized MacBook Airs. People are increasingly using these smaller and more capable devices in ways that formerly required stationary desktop devices. This is opening up new classes of software based on geolocation, as well as the ephemeralization of many other devices and their markets, like music players, cameras, and GPS devices.

Connected — Whether sitting at a desk or standing in line at Starbucks, we are beginning to take connectivity for granted, and so will the next generation of software. We can remain connected though social tools to our family, friends, and colleagues. Although earlier solutions — cell phones, pagers, and cell modems — made this a 90% possibility, in the near future we will be 99.96% connected. (Consider that 10% of the US 25 year old and younger crowd think it’s OK to text during sex, for example.)

Webbed — The most well-established operating systems today — Mac OS X and Windows — treat the Web as an afterthought. Consider the role of the browser: a specialized program that allows us to wander around the Web reading HTML documents, following links, all of which is done in a completely different way than we wander around on our own hard drive. We use different search tools, different editors, and different conventions for accessing files and applications in these divided worlds. The rise of mobile and ubiquitous connectivity is making this look amazingly archaic, and the next generation of operating environments — like iOS, Android, and Windows Phone — will rapidly pivot into being webbed platforms, where applications will take advantage of always on connection to the web, and through the web. Among other things, this will mean the browser will decrease in importance, down to something like the Terminal utility on Mac OS X.

What is over the near horizon is a liquid world, in which social nets, ubiquitous connectivity, mobility, and web are all givens, forming the cornerstones of a vastly different world of user experience, participation, and utility. This is the new liquid world, just a few degrees away.

The result of these trends all swirling together will be an increasingly fluid and immersive experience, where both services and our expectations lead to an increasingly ambient mode of interaction with devices, that will increasingly just be on and working all the time. We will opt for notification of all sorts — like updates from friends, status changes in business and perconal appointments and plans, offers from nearby stores and restaurants. We won’t have large billboards calling our names, a la Minority Report, but we will be pinged a thousand times a day by dozens of apps on a dozen dimensions of our increasingly liquid life.

I’ve written recently about liquid media, and I think the term can be expanded beyond the narrower media sense, into something broader and more pervasive. We are sliding into a liquid state from a former, more solid one. Our devices and software is where we are seeing this first, but it is already transforming the media world. Witness the headlong transition from solid media (media destination sites with their proprietary organization, with inward-focused links, concrete layout, and editorial curation) to liquid media (media content is just URL flotsam in the streaming apps we use, rendered by readering tools we choose and configure, and social curation).

What is over the near horizon is a liquid world, in which social nets, ubiquitous connectivity, mobility, and web are all givens, forming the cornerstones of a vastly different world of user experience, participation, and utility. This is the new liquid world, just a few degrees away.

So Is Web 3.0 Already Here? - Sarah Lacey

Oh god, not another attempt to label something as Web 3.0’! Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly are smart guys, but why flog the Web 3.0 angle?

Back a few years ago, Jason Calacanis tried to dub what he was doing at Mahalo as Web 3.0, and I wrote this:

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.

The new new deserves a good name. This new world arising from the collision of a number of semi-independent trends:

  • social as the primary mode of human-computer interaction (meaning that human-human interaction is primary, not human to computer),
  • ubiquitous connectivity,
  • touch mobiles,
  • and post-desktop, internet-based operating systems.

So, I will start referring to this as SoCoMoIO (pronounced ‘so-co-mo-eye-oh’). But that’s just shorthand, not a sweeping terminological handwave.

And I think the meme of using ordinal numbers is generally tired, and never has caught on for any number past 2.0, anyway. By the time we get to what might realistically be a third generation, no one remembers what preceded 1.0.

Whatever this new new winds up being called, I don’t think it will be defined by mounds of data being pored over by algorithmic ‘engines of meaning’ (as Bruce Sterling said).

The next decade will be defined by the enormous social leverage cracked open by SoCoMoIO: this will dwarf the the rise of the web to date, and it will make what we are doing today look like the foothills overshadowed by the Rockies.

But no one will call it Web 3.0.

The New Information Age - Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek Wadhwa falls into the web 3.0 trap, like so many others, making the case that the data underneath our feet will be the most important aspect of the new information age.

But there is much, much more happening in the Web 3.0 world. It’s not just “social”.

In 2009, President Obama launched an ambitious program to modernize our healthcare system by making all health records standardized and electronic. The goal is to have all paper medical records—for the entire U.S. population—digitized and available online. This way, an emergency room will have immediate access to a patient’s medical history, the effectiveness of medicines can be researched over large populations, and general practitioners and specialists can coordinate their treatments.

The government is also opening up its massive datasets of information with the Data.gov initiative. Four hundred thousand datasets are already available, and more are being added every week. They include regional data on the efficiency of government services, on poverty and wealth, education, on federal government spending, on transportation, etc. We can, for example, build applications that challenge schools or health-care providers to perform better by comparing various localities’ performance. And we can hold the government more accountable by analyzing its spending and wastage.

There are more than 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, and far more video is being collected world wide through the surveillance cameras that you see everywhere. Whether we realize it or not, our mobile phones are able to keep track of our every movement—everywhere we go; how fast we move; what time we wake. Various mobile applications are beginning to record these data.

And then there is the human genome.  We only learned how to sequence this a decade ago at a cost of billions of dollars. The price of sequencing an individual’s genome is dropping at a double exponential rate, from millions to about $10,000 per sequence in 2011. More than one million individuals are projected to be sequenced in 2013.  It won’t be long before genome sequencing costs $100—or is free—with services that you purchase (as with cell phones).

Now imagine the possibilities that could derive from access to an integration of these data collections: being able to match your DNA to another’s and to learn what diseases the other person has had and how effective different medications were in curing them; learning the other person’s abilities, allergies, likes, and dislikes; who knows, maybe being able to find a DNA soul mate. We are entering an era of crowd-sourced, data-driven, participatory, genomic-based medicine. (If you’re interested, Dr. Daniel Kraft, a physician–scientist who chairs the Medicine track for Singularity University, is hosting a program called FutureMed, next month, which brings together clinicians, AI experts, bioinformaticists, medical-device and pharma executives, entrepreneurs, and investors to discuss these technologies.)

You may think that the U.S. leads in information collection. But the most ambitious project in the world is happening in India. Its government is gathering demographic data, fingerprints, and iris scans from of all its 1.2 billion residents. This will lead to the creation of the largest, most complex identity database in the world. I’ll cover this subject in a future piece.

It’s not all wine and roses.  There are major privacy and security implications such as those I discussed in this piece. Forget about the “powers that be”: merely the information that Google is gathering today would make Big Brother envious. After all, Google is able to read our e-mails even before we do; it knows who our friends are and what they tell us in confidence; it maintains our diaries and our calendars; it can even guess what we are thinking by watching our surfing habits. Imagine what happens once Google has access to our DNA information.

Regardless of the risks and security implications, the technology will advance, however.

Winnowed down, Wadhwa is gee-whizzing about increasingly large collections of data, but that’s what we have been doing for 10 years in the social web, already. You can’t boggle my mind by telling me we are going to be moving into an era of unprecedented growth in data. Yawn. What else is new?

This is what Tim O’Reilly said about Web 2.0, you may recall, starting back in 2007. But Web 2.0 turned out to be about social (if something as grand and squishy as Web 2.0 can be said to be ‘about’ something), and there is no neat boundary between yesterday and tomorrow.

I agree at an abstract level that the confluence of a small number of explosive innovations are coming together to create a new information are, but it is not an explosion of ‘data’ per se that is fundamental.

What is, then? We’ll see a rapid shift in computing experience, from ‘computers’ to tablets (touch and gestural innovations), a new day in user experience based on the fall of the desktop metaphor and the rise of apps, a change from disconnected computing to ubiquitous mobility and connectivity, and another cycle of social: this time social will become interoperable and built into the operating platforms that everything is built on, so Facebook, Twitter, and other social silos will have to  ‘desilo’ is they are to remain relevant.

And, yes, this will entail all sorts of new data for the data gnomes to toil on, but the new information age will be based on what normal people experience, not algorithms predicting our every move or massive supercomputers making supply chains more efficient.

Google, what's your social story? - Boris Mann's Blog

This cuts to the heart of the Facebook/Google competition in social:

Boris Mann

I feel like I have a good idea about Facebook’s story for social. I know they’ll keep changing, and it doesn’t matter whether I agree with their story or not, I feel like there is a consistent story.

With Google, there’s no story. Is it identity? I’m still struggling to integrate multiple accounts. Is it search? Well, +1 is back on search results, but only after nuking SearchWiki. Is it places? They’re doing a lot with local, but I don’t actively use Latitude or really any of their services yet other than to kick the tires.

Google, what’s your social story?

Why I Like Google’s Reorg and Why It’s Only a Start - Om Malik

Om Malik takes a look at Larry Page’s reorg at Google and says, ok, that’s fine, but it’s not enough:

He [Page] needs to hire people who challenge Google’s conventional, metrics-driven approach to the world. In other words, Page needs a senior vice president of happiness.

Now this SVP is not a real person, because what I’m arguing for is an ideology and an approach to building the next generation of Google products that focus on “finding” us stuff we want. As I wrote earlier, “they need to think so differently that they need to hire people who are very unlike them,” and what they need are “creatives — the ones who don’t necessarily have computer science degrees.”

As a very creative person with a CS degree, I agree in part with Om. Page needs to do much, much more to shake up the culture of Google, which has been so amazingly social-blind over the past five years.

I know that Om is suggesting the ‘SVP of happiness’ as a thought experiment, a sort of straw man argument, but I think the subtext is right. Page needs to change the culture at Google, and fast.

My bet would be on a social skunkworks, but i have no reason to believe Page is working on that.