Why Is It Still Web 2.0? - Alexia Tsotsis
Tsotsis attends Web 2.0 Summit and wonders why we haven’t started to adopt the term Web 3.0, which she associates with Reid Hoffman’s big data ideas.
Well, for one reason, six dozen other attempts to define Web 3.0 have sputtered and died like the attempt by Jason Calacanis to say that what he was up to at Mohalo was Web 3.0 or the many efforts to say that the semantic web is Web 3.0.
The reality is this:
I personally feel that Web 2.0 has a long way to play before we can advocate jumping onto some new wave. Have we seen the full culmination of the social revolution going on? No, and I think it will be awhile before we do.
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.
Whatever the cool kids call what they are doing when they shift the metaphor away from what we are doing now won’t be Web 3.0. The ones that invent the next thing won’t count back. They won’t even remember Web 1.0.
Next giant step: social operating systems, which will lead to social networks — and communication through them — becoming the central purpose of the web, not just a bunch of unintegrated applications.
Jason Calacanis: "Blogging Is Dead" & Why "Stupid People Shouldn't Write"
A few sound bites from Jason Calacanis delivered at yesterday’s RRW 2WAY Summit — I did not attend.
Dan Rowinski via
“Blogging is largely dead.”
“There are a lot of stupid people out there … and stupid people shouldn’t write.”
“There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people.”
[…]
Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the “Age of Expertise.”
Ok, Calacanis made his fortune building up a blog network — Weblogs, Inc. — and selling it to AOL, which has now also acquired Techcrunch and Huffington Post: a huge seething mass of blogs. Meanwhile Tumblr and Wordpress both have respectable growth rates.
But Calacanis thinks it’s dead. Maybe that because he’s running a content farm called Mahalo, and Google’s Panda — an effort to decrease the page rank of crappy, mass-generated content — has cut its traffic in half.
Maybe Calacanis justifies building Mahalo based on his premise that people are stupid anyway, so what the heck? But the combination of the ugliness of Mahalo and this painful, chip on the shoulder elitism is not good.
Jason — Please shut down Mahalo (or sell it off) and dedicate your considerable talents to something worthwhile. Launch was good, but yet another launchpad event? Can’t you find something more interesting?
And that Web 3.0 meme is totally tired. Doesn’t expertise always matter?
Here’s something Jason said about Web 3.0 over three years ago, and my response:
Stowe Boyd, Jason Calacanis On Web 3.0
I really don’t get the Web 3.0 meme, which I have seen introduced at least a dozen times by all sorts of people. Some have been advancing the term as a synonym for the semantic web, but others have put forward other definitions, usually as part of some ultimately fruitless marketing ploy to define a market niche and place their shiny new product smack in the middle of it.
That’s what Jason Calacanis appears to be doing.
I formerly read Jason’s blog avidly, but since he launched Mahalo he has become a monomaniac. Everything revolves around his new shiny product. And now, it seems, the future of the web does, as well:
Jason Calacanis, Web 3.0, the official definition.Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.
Ahem… like the individuals that are building the Mahalo index, that sits above the existing web?
I personally feel that Web 2.0 has a long way to play before we can advocate jumping onto some new wave. Have we seen the full culmination of the social revolution going on? No, and I think it will be awhile before we do.
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.
At least Jason’s natterings three years ago led me to start waving my hands at what has turned out to be the rise of liquid media, as typified by Apple’s iOS 5. I just wish Jason would jump aboard and build something shiny.
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.
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!
Still Not Integrated Enough
Jeffrey Zeldman again proves that you can judge a man’s wisdom by the degree to which he agrees with you. Therefore, I think he is very smart indeed.
Jeffrey goes on to discuss some of the nuts-and-bolts headaches of working with Ajax — hard to make the wireframes — but the overall sardonic, but still positive tone, makes it really worth the read. And of course, another supporter of the term.[from A List Apart: Articles: Web 3.0 by Jeffrey Zeldman]
[…] ours is a medium in which, more often than not, big teams have slowly and expensively labored to produce overly complex web applications whose usability was near nil on behalf of clients with at best vague goals. The realization that small, self-directed teams powered by Pareto’s Principle can quickly create sleeker stuff that works better is not merely bracing but dynamic. As 100 garage bands sprang from every Velvet Underground record sold, so the realization that one small team can make good prompts 100 others to try.
The best and most famous of these new web products (i.e. the two I just mentioned [Flickr and Basecamp]) foster community and collaboration, offering new or improved modes of personal and business interaction. By virtue of their virtues, they own their categories, which is good for the creators, because they get paid. It is also good for our industry, because the prospect of wealth inspires smart developers who once passively took orders to start thinking about usability and design, and to try to solve problems in a niche they can own. In so doing, some of them may create jobs and wealth. And even where the payday is smaller, these developers can raise the design and usability bar. This is good for everyone. If consumers can choose better applications that cost less or are free, then the web works better, and clients are more likely to request good (usable, well-designed) work instead of the usual schlock.
