Original Post 09.18.2008
I’ve been researching Web 2.0 news and different company implementations to try to gain some knoweldge around what are the successful things that different groups are rolling out for the community and user bases. DEMOFall 08 conference got over and WEB 2.0 expo NY is going on this week so there has been lots of discussion on Web 2.0 as of late.
The article features the way not to implement your Web 2.0 features and functionalities. WSJ Wall street Journal releases a redesign and great Web 2.0 features but only to those users that are paying money for the online services. What a way to limit you community building and cross selling ability.
Less is more is the overarching idea in this article. The idea of creating scaled back features instead of non useful bloated features is right on the mark and I like the strategy around rolling out a few key features and letting the community drive the build out of addititional features.
Social computing magazine article
This article digs into the strategy behind some Web 2.0 concepts and offeres some insight on what key aspects to think about when building the plan to move from 1,0 to 2.0.
Info week is covering Web 2.0 expo information this week and has an article summarizing im Oriely’s keynote speech. First, how Web meets World and secondly how to create more value than you’re capturing. “You better be working on something that can really make a difference.”
Another article posted a while back has a different take on where we are in social web…
According to Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMOFall 08 conference, we’ve already moved past Web 2.0. We’re wrapping up the third generation of the Web. And we’re moving on to the fourth. That’s when social networking and Web 2.0 (which is actually Web 3.0, she says — confused yet?) gets to work.
The generations of the Web went like this, Shipley said: The first generation, more than a decade ago, was just flat Web pages, displaying information.
The second generation added the ability to do transactions, especially buying and selling. That was the dot-com boom.
The third generation is the one usually called Web 2.0, and it includes blogs, wikis, Facebook, and other social-networking sites. It’s the social Web, the era of user-generated content. “Power shifted from site owners to site users,” Shipley said.
The problem with the social Web: It didn’t generate a lot of wealth. “There really aren’t a lot of Web 2.0 millionaires,” Shipley said. By comparison, the dot-com Web generated a great deal of wealth.
Moreover, many social Web sites just aren’t useful, Shipley said. Or, they haven’t demonstrated their usefulness just yet.
That last was an aha! moment for me. She’s right. Sure, there are exceptions: Wikipedia is a great source for research (so long as you take into account its inherent unreliability). Blogs are great sources of information, insight, and entertainment — like Wikipedia, they’re often unreliable, but when you’ve identified reliable blogs, they’re extremely useful.
On the other hand, Facebook and Twitter, to name two examples, are entertaining and fun — but what are they for? I enjoy both services, but I can’t really point to anything I’ve done with them that I couldn’t have done — often more efficiently — with some other tool. They’re fun.
That points to the next generation of the Internet, which Shipley calls the “distributed Web.” The Web is getting out of our PCs, off our desktops, and into mobile devices. And the social Web is being put to work, for business collaboration, to achieve personal goals, and to create market value.
And, as the social Web becomes useful, more people will use it. Right now, it has tens of millions of users — pretty big, but dwarfed by the billions who use the flat Internet. As the social Web gets more useful, it will be used by hundreds of millions of people, Shipley said.