Web 2.0: the future of the Internet?

MAC129 MED102

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Overview

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Web 1.0 Web 2.0 Web 3.0 The dot-com bubble

The Dot-Coms

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1995-2000 Stock market growth of technology and

internet-related fields Speculative profits Venture capital (VC) funding

Growth

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Scale up Raise brand awareness Monetise later

‘Get big fast’

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+ Network effect - Plenty competition

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CNN report on ‘the new economy’

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Bubble burst

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March 2000 saw NASDAQ fall dramatically

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Web 2.0 – definitional problems

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Tim O’Reilly Tech commentator Publisher Re-ignite tech investments

Web 2.0 – definitional problems

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Darcy DiNucci (1999) “The Web we know now, which loads into a browser

window in essentially static screenfulls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfulls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] maybe even your microwave oven.”

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2004 Dale Dougherty Dot-com collapse as a water-shed

moment

‘Web as platform’

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John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly "customers are building your business for

you” User generated content (UGC)

‘Web as platform’

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‘Netscape framed "the web as platform" in terms of the old software paradigm: their flagship product was the web browser, a desktop application, and their strategy was to use their dominance in the browser market to establish a market for high-priced server products. … O’Reilly, 2005

‘Web as platform’

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‘… Control over standards for displaying content and applications in the browser would, in theory, give Netscape the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. Much like the "horseless carriage" framed the automobile as an extension of the familiar, Netscape promoted a "webtop" to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.’ O’Reilly, 2005

Sound familiar?

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‘Web as platform’

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‘The perpetual beta’ Always a work-in-progress

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Web 1.0 Web 2.0

Double-click Google AdSense

Ofoto Flickr

Akamai BitTorrent

Mp3.com Napster

Britannica Online Wikipedia

Personal websites Blogging

Evite Upcoming.org and EVDB

Domain name speculation Search engine optimization

Page views Cost per click

Screen scraping Web services

Publishing Participation

Content management systems

Wikis

Directories (taxonomy) Tagging (“folksonomy”)

Stickiness SyndicationSource: O ’Reilly, 2005

‘Web as platform’

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‘The perpetual beta’ ‘live’ ‘living’ ‘social’ web ‘attitude’

Marketing buzzword?

3 broad definitional camps

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1. Collaboration (Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc)

2. Software and language (Asynchronous Javascript and XML)

3. User generated content

Web 1.0?

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Primarily an informational retrieval source Link existing data Direct communication tool

Connecting computers (Web 1.0) Connecting people (Web 2.0)

Web 1.0 – READ web? Web 2.0 – READ/WRITE web?

Web 2.0 again

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O ’Reilly: it’s “really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data.” Tweney, 2007

Data organisation

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Folksonomies (aka tagging) RSS feeds Blogging (creative conversations) Wikis (knowledge sharing through

collaboration) Social networking (data relevance to you)

Detractors

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee “Web 1.0 was all about connecting

people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this 'Web 2.0,' it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0.”

Detractors

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Andrew Keen ‘We – those of us who want to know more

about the world, those of us who are the consumers of mainstream culture – are being seduced by the empty promise of ‘democratized’ media. For the real consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information. One chilling reality in this brave new digital epoch is the blurring, obfuscation, and even disappearance of truth’ (2008: 16)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGG1QKG6AjQ

More superficiality? Is Google making us stupid?

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Web 2.0

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Narcissism Shallowness Puts the ‘me’ in

‘media’ Undermines

professional media

Summary

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Web 2.0 is one of the most frequently used terms in internet circles today yet is one of the most poorly defined ideas

New business model based on aggregating user content?

What’s next for the web? Web 3.0? Innovation? More of the same? Big players becoming ‘black holes’?

Sources Nate Anderson, 2006, ‘Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0: “nobody even know what it mean

s”’, http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2006/09/7650.ars Darcy DiNucci, 1999, ‘Fragmented Future’, Print, Vol 53, No 4., 32.

http://www.citeulike.org/user/marclijour/article/5765397 Tim O’Reilly, 2005, ‘What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the

Next Generation of Software’, http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html Carlota Perez, 2002, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of

Bubbles and Golden Ages, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Robert Spector, 2000, amazon.com: Get Big Fast, New York: Harper Business Dylan Tweney, ‘Tim O’Reilly: Web 2.0 is about controlling data’, April 2007,

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/timoreilly_0413

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Questions

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Some have suggested that web 2.0 is profoundly democratising in that its tools give people the space to participate in culture in ways never before experienced. Is this a good or bad thing? Examples?

Nicholas Carr has suggested that web 2.0 puts the means of production (ie YouTube, Wordpress, etc) into the hands of the masses but withholds the ownership of their content meaning free labour and content for companies, calling this ‘digital sharecropping’ To what extent is social media an exploitative process in

which users participate in an attention economy rather than a cash economy?

Further Questions Some critics (eg Eli Parser) have suggested that

data collection by websites is creating a personalised experience for users, where we now live in a ‘filter bubble’ Are we in danger of missing out or losing our serendipity

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Some scholars (eg Sherry Turkle) have argued technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world. Is web 2.0 having a negative impact on our lives?

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Images

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GDS Infographics, 2010, ‘The Year the Dot-Com Bubble Burst’, Flickr

Davemc500hats, 2005, ‘Web 2.0 conference, )ct 2005 018’, Flickr