Where is Web 2.0?
Posted on November 25, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
From about mid-2006 to mid- 2007 I threw myself into Web 2.0 activity, getting to know the zone, mugging up on books like The Long Tail and taking the opportunity to meet pioneering bloggers like Shel Israel.
There’s no doubt that Shel and Chris Anderson have had a seminal impact on the business community and recently I got to meet Ted Shelton who is forging a new path with the Conversation Group. Ted and I worked together on wripe, an automated newspaper built from his personalbee software just prior to Ted joining technorati. It was great to see face-to-face Ted’s conviction that social media will change business.
The fundamentals of web 2.0 are personal rather than technological which is what makes it so interesting. All those years of staring at powerpoint slides and obsessing over the disciplines of the desktop have given way to boundless interaction. People rather than the machine have become important again - all very important.
Still I can’t help noticing that some of the bloggers I was in contact with during that year have been blogging less frequently, as have I. In my case that means I have reduced my time commitment to web 2.0.
I started thinking about that after a couple of companies asked me for my advice on what Web 2.0 means to them. What it means to me is I’ve explored a few new social technologies - the blogs of course and facebook, linked-in, ryze for gawd’s sake too and found my enthusiasm for all of them flagging sooner than I’d expected.
That’s not to say I’d rate any as unimportant but there are other things going on that are equally important and which will shape the outcome of web 2.0. I’m thinking of the rapidly deteriorating environment and the fact that three companies have now asked my advice on how they might use web 2.0 to address that problem.
And recently in a meeting in the City of London with the credit crunch revving up, a couple of private equity folks telling me the prevailing investment mood had shifted decisively from the USA to China, coming just days after I’d interviewed Robert Lai at the Cyber Recreation District (CRD). CRD see virtual worlds as the way to get Chinese people into direct trade with non-Chinese and want 150 million Chinese people out there in virtual worlds by 2010. Want to get a project off the ground in the City - it has to involve the China economy.
There’s also the sense from many leading consumer product companines that business has to change quickly and fundamentally. Jo Green who works in the design function at Philips told me recently the product company is dead. Product design is dead. All is service.
And then there is the strange way that design has become such a powerful weapon - design and style. Look a the latest BMW showroom in Munich. I wrote recently about the growing influence of BMWs designs in wider areas of industry and what lies behind that. Sadly the article lies behind the Irish Times’ subscription wall.
My sense is that Web 2.0 is a radical departure for the software and computing industries and its real power will be tested when it finds application in these areas - environmental, trade with Asia, restructuring corporate heirarchies, developing a wider critical community around the phenomenon of extended privilege in society. That’s not to say it isn’t finding applications related to these but I think its impact and the money behind it will grow when it starts solving critical business problems instead of doing what it currently does - creates business critical problems, for example in marketing, advertising and B2C communications.
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