In the beginning there was the Web. No one knew it was 1.0, everyone thought it was a one off. Then the late 90s came along and the dotcom crash put people off all things web. Investors stayed away from the web and put their money in other areas. Something had to be done. Something as dramatic as increasing the versioning number, pushing the javascript to new levels of asynchronicity and boasting on your blog about it all.
Now seriously...
There have been some interesting changes in the shiny new Web2.0. We had an explosion of social, community websites. Some of them selling for billions of dollars. Like most of you, I wish I was the entrepreneur behind one of them.
People got all excited about it. They call it a new revolution in the way people interact online. But ultimately, there's nothing revolutionary there. My prediction is there will be out of fashion soon as the novelty will wear off. Same way newsgroups went out of fashion.
Blog of mouth
The blog had a more serious impact however, both for businesses, customers and personal experiences. Suddenly the individual had a voice and a choice. The Content2.0 suddenly became much more personal.
The reason blogs have become so important is that they represent real persons, real experiences. They represent a more personal and intimate way of connecting, be it at a personal level or at a business-to-customer level.
They (in theory) are unbiased and not marketing & PR exercises as the old news and PR releases were.
This is a very important change.
Some companies want to ride the blogosphere, but don't understand these simple rules about blogs and blogging. They still use the old formula with the new tools. They use the old boring company news and PR releases but they deliver them on what they call a blog now. They miss the point entirely.
The point about blogs is openness, real information, direct and honest communication with your customers.
Unfortunately, as many more companies will try to reach customers without changing, I see more and more blogs with hidden agendas springing up. These simply don't work. People trust the information in the blog, and not the concept per se. Simply calling it a blog won’t work.
No doubt blogs will be abused in the same way email was abused, as a channel to get to customers fast.
The sign of great times
Google is a great company, one that caught people's imagination. It has started small and with a very pragmatic approach. Forget all the details, let's do what people want: search. And they did that better than anyone else. It soon became very profitable and for a good reason. It is a flexible company that listens to what customers want.
People point to Google as being the champion of the whole Web2.0 philosophy. It is profitable they point out, not like the dotcom companies of the late 90s. And this is the main argument for a 2.0 versioning of the whole Web. Companies are now profitable and their business models are more pragmatic and profitable.
But if we had a closer look, we would soon realize that Google is not profitable for its cool 2.0 gadgets. It is profitable for the same old thing that it did in the past and it continues to do well: Search. The search engine is their main business, everything else is unprofitable and sustained by the Search.
If we look again at Web2.0 companies and take the social networking websites. Some of them were sold for billions. Are they profitable? Are they profitable2.0? The same old business models apply. If they choose to display ads, they are profitable. Otherwise, they're not. So nothing changed there, still old Web1.0.
AJAX is the king.
AJAX is a nice little trick. I have played with it and liked it. It changes the boring old web user experience into something richer and something that can compete with the desktop experience. That has been a real revelation to many people and suddenly there was a rush for people to develop with AJAX, praise AJAX and see nothing else but AJAX from now on.
As every new technology rush, there are always people that think that one new technology is the universal panacea for all their problems. No surprise people start announcing the death of the desktop, while the web is the new king.
I think it's very premature to start with such ideas. From a pure technological point of view, AJAX is an awful technology. It's slow, it doesn't scale, it's limited. The major benefit is that it works in the limited world of a browser's sandbox. It is cross-platform and cross-browser.
This is what people want. The market leaders have sniffed the trend and they're driving that way. Microsoft is coming up with the new .NET 3.0 framework which will allow developers to create applications that run both on desktop and in the browser, same code (well, with some security limitations of course). While this offers a wonderful view for the future, it is a Microsoft dream and it runs on Microsoft OSes only. Well, we wouldn’t expect anything less from Microsoft, right?
I must admit, Microsoft is onto something here. Unfortunately, they want to keep it to themselves, they want to keep it as a competitive advantage. If they shared it with the world and truly commit to open standards that work cross platform, that would be the real dawn of what you could truly call Web2.0. That would also spell the beginning of the end for Microsoft's current business model. So they won't go there.
Conclusion
While Web2.0 can be the beginning of great things to come for the Web, we shouldn't jump ahead of ourselves and fall into the same mistakes as in Web1.0. Ultimately, profitability, pragmatism and following customers' needs is the same old 1.0 recipe for success. One technology or the other is just the means to get there.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 3:46:43 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
