Web 3.0

About a year ago, I met up with Teresa Wu (of My Mom is a Fob and My Dad is a Fob fame). It was our first “Tweetup”, a word used by social media types to refer to meet-up’s between people who had only previously been friends over Twitter. It was a very geeky conversation (and what else would you expect from people who referred to their first face-to-face meeting as a Tweetup?), and at one point the conversation turned to discuss our respective visions of “Web 3.0”, which we loosely defined as what would come after the current also-loosely-defined “Web 2.0” wave of today’s social media websites.

On some level, trying to describe “Web 3.0” is as meaningless as applying the “Web 2.0” label to websites like Twitter and Facebook. It’s not an official title, and there are no set rules or standards on what makes something “Web 2.0”. But, the fact that there are certain shared characteristics between popular websites today versus their counterparts from only a few years ago gives the “Web 2.0” moniker some credible intellectual weight; and the fact that there will be significant investment in a new generation of web companies lends special commercial weight as to why we need to come up with a good conception of “Web 2.0” and a good vision for what comes after (Web 3.0).

So, I thought I would get on my soapbox here and list out three drivers which I believe will define what “Web 3.0” will look like, and I’d love to hear if anyone else has any thoughts.

1. A flight to quality as users start struggling with ways to organize and process all the information the “Web 2.0” revolution provided.
2. The development of new web technologies/applications which can utilize the full power of the billions of internet-connected devices that will come online by 2015.
3. Browser improvement will continue and enable new and more compelling web applications.

I. Quality over quantity

In my mind, the most striking change in the Web has been the evolution of its primary role. Whereas “Web 1.0” was oriented around providing information to users, generally speaking, “Web 2.0” has been centered around user empowerment, both in terms of content creation (blogs, Youtube) and information sharing (social networks). Now, you no longer have to be the editor of the New York Times to have a voice – you can edit a Wikipedia page or upload a YouTube video or post up your thoughts on a blog. Similarly, you no longer have to be at the right cocktail parties to have a powerful network, you can find like-minded individuals over Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook.

The result of this has been a massive explosion of the amount of information and content available for people and companies to use. While I believe this has generally been a good thing, its led to a situation where more and more users are being overwhelmed with information. As with the evolution of most markets, the first stage of the Web was simply about getting more – more information, more connections, more users, and more speed. This is all well and good when most companies/users are starving for information and connections, but as the demand for pure quantity dries up, the attention will eventually focus on quality.

While there will always be people trying to set up the next Facebook or the next Twitter (and a small percentage of them will be successful), I strongly believe the smart money will be on the folks who can take the flood of information now available and milk that into something more useful, whether it be for targeting ads or simply with helping people who feel they are “drinking from a fire hose”. There’s a reason Google and Facebook invest so much in resources to build ads which are targeted at the user’s specific interests and needs. And, I feel that the next wave of Web startups will be more than simply tacking on “social” and “online” to an existing application. It will require developing applications that can actually process the wide array of information into manageable and useful chunks.

II. Mo’ devices, mo’ money

A big difference between how the internet was used 10 years ago and how it is used today is the rise in the number of devices which can access the internet. This has been led by the rise of new smartphones, gaming consoles, and set-top-boxes. Even cameras have been released with the ability to access the internet (as evidenced by Sony’s Cybershot G3). While those of us in the US think of the internet as mainly a computer-driven phenomena, in much of the developing world and in places like Japan and Korea, computer access to the internet pales in comparison to access through mobile phones.

The result? Many of these interfaces to the internet are still somewhat clumsy, as they were built to mimic PC type access on a device which is definitely not the PC. While work by folks at Apple and at Google (with the iPhone and Android browsers) and at shops like Opera (with Opera Mini) and Skyfire have smoothed some of the rougher edges, there is only so far you can go with mimicking a computer experience on a device that lacks the memory/processing power limitations and screen size of a larger PC.

This isn’t to say that I think the web browsing experience on an iPhone or some other smartphone is bad – I actually am incredibly impressed by how well the PC browsing experience transferred to the mobile phone and believe that web developers should not be forced to make completely separate web pages for separate devices. But, I do believe that the real potential of these new internet-ready devices lies in what makes those individual devices unique. Instead of more attempts to copy the desktop browsing experience, I’d like to see more websites use the iPhone’s GPS to give location-specific content, or use the accelerometer to control a web game. I want to see social networking sites use a gaming console’s owner’s latest scores or screenshots. I want to see cameras use the web to overlay the latest Flickr comments on the pictures you’ve taken or to do augmented reality. I want to see set-top boxes seamlessly mix television content with information from the web. To me, the true potential of having 15 billion internet-connected devices is not 15 billion PC-like devices, but 15 billion devices each with its own features and capabilities.

III. Browser power

While the Facebooks and Twitters of the world get (and deserve) a lot of credit for driving the Web 2.0 wave of innovation, a lot of that credit actually belongs to the web standards/browser development pioneers who made these innovations possible. Web applications ranging from office staples like Gmail and Google Docs would have been impossible without new browser technologies like AJAX and more powerful Javascript engines like Chrome’s V8, Webkit’s JavascriptCore, and Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey. Applications like YouTube and Picnik and Photoshop.com depend greatly on Adobe’s Flash product working well with browsers, and so, in many ways, it is web browser technology that is the limiting factor in the development of new web applications.

Is it any wonder, then, that Google, who views web applications as a big piece of its quest for web domination, created a free browser (Chrome) and two web-capable operating systems (ChromeOS and Android), and is investigating ways for web applications to access the full processing power of the computer (Native Client)? The result of Google’s pushes as well as the internet ecosystem’s efforts has been a steady improvement in web browser capability and a strong push on the new HTML5 standard.

So, what does this all mean for the shape of “Web 3.0”? It means that, over the next few years, we are going to see web applications dramatically improve in quality and functionality, making them more and more credible as disruptive innovations to the software industry. While it would be a mistake to interpret this trend, as some zealots do, as a sign that “web applications will replace all desktop software”, it does mean that we should expect to see a dramatic boost in the number and types of web applications, as well as the number of users.

Conclusion

I’ll admit – I kind of cheated. Instead of giving a single coherent vision of what the next wave of Web innovation will look like, I hedged my bets by outlining where I see major technology trends will take the industry. But, in the same way that “Web 2.0” wasn’t a monolithic entity (Facebook, WordPress, and Gmail have some commonalities, but you’d be hard pressed to say they’re just different variants of the same thing), I don’t think “Web 3.0” will be either. Or, maybe all the innovations will be mobile-phone-specific, context-sensitive, super powerful web applications…

(Image credit) (Image credit – PhD comics) (Image credit – mobile phone) (Image credit – Browser wars)

Too Many Cooks

Every company that is successful eventually runs into a problem which my favorite business-comic strip Dilbert pokes fun at in the two latest strips:

(from Nov 20)

(from Nov 21)

Think about it. How many large companies do you know of where there isn’t a massive layer of mysterious “vice presidents” (or some other equally meaningless-sounding title of doubtful seniority)?

This isn’t to say that all these positions are filled with useless people, or that distinctions like “senior vice president” and “executive vice president” and “associate director” aren’t important, but this proliferation of senior-sounding titles is indicative of companies facing a “mid-life crisis”, where the promise of massive growth and exciting future job prospects are no longer certain enough in order for a company to retain all of its talent.

As a result, companies are forced to create these new levels of management to keep their good people, either because there are not enough positions of seniority for these people to be promoted into or because they are being drawn by other companies/competitors who have already made the jump into “vice president land”.
This practice, in and of itself, is not in and of itself a bad thing. After all, why shouldn’t a successful company make a minor concession like this to retain talent? But, the problems emerge when:

• These new positions add new layers of bureaucracy that muddy up what used to be a very clear decision-making process and make the company less agile
• These new positions create “organizational bloat” — where costly and inefficient “manager” positions are created which don’t actually manage anyone or which manage departments/groups of little value
• These new positions allow senior managers to play politics with promotions and/or lower promotion hurdles, lowering the talent/efficiency of the company overall

While there is no easy way to tackle all of these issues (and, in my mind, the fact that companies feel they have to create these new “vice president” positions feels like a cheap cop-out to me), it is something for all general managers/consultants to be aware of as many companies suffer from the dilemma of keeping a company lean and efficient and yet retaining the talent/size that they need to grow.

(Image credits – Dilbert)

Look ma, no battery!

While Moore’s Law may make it harder to be a tech company, it’s steady march makes it great to be an energy-conscious consumer, as one of its effects is to drive down power consumption in generation after generation of product. Take the example of smartphones like Apple’s iPhone or Motorola’s new Droid: Moore’s Law has made it possible to take computing power that used to need a large battery or power source (like in a laptop or a desktop) and put it in a mobile device that has a tiny rechargeable battery!

Some folks at NEC and Soundpower took advantage of this in a very cool way (HT: TechOn via Anthony). By combining NEC’s specialty in extremely low-power chips with Soundpower’s expertise at creating vibration-based power generators, the two companies were able to produce a battery-less remote control powered only by users pressing the buttons!

It makes me wonder where else this type of extremely low-power circuitry and simple energy generation setup could be useful: sensor networks? watches? LEDs? personal-area-networks?

And at the end of the day, that’s one of the things that makes the technology industry so interesting (and challenging to understand). Every new device could enable/develop a whole new set of applications and uses.

(Image credit)

Happy birthday Firefox!

While most people will (and should) think of today as the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall (who can forget Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall“?), if you go back a mere five years (rather than 20), today was another fateful day for the Internet: the formal birthday of my favorite browser: Firefox.

Before that day, it was a time of great woe in the “interwebz”, as it was a world where Microsoft’s standards uncompliant browser had completely trounced Netscape’s attempts to penetrate the market, leaving web developers everywhere the horrible task of designing their websites for Microsoft’s backwards browser. But out of the disaster that was Netscape’s original business model of attempting to make money off of packaged browser software sales emerged a new take on how the browser could be done. Instead of trying to sell copies of the browser (and lose in the war for user share because Microsoft’s was free), the Netscape browser was turned over to an open source effort run by Mozilla. The Mozilla suite itself never quite took off, as it was perceived to be “bloatware” that tried to satisfy everyone but succeeded at satisfying no one (this user included), but it spawned an effort to create a browser code-named Phoenix (symbolizing the rise of the Netscape codebase from death, I suppose?).

Flash forward a little bit and Phoenix is renamed Firebird (which was around the time I started using the product — ironically because I was wondering if Mozilla had gone the way of the dodo) and then re-christened Firefox before finally making its public (non-preview release) debut as Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004.

So, 5 years later, looking back – what do we see?

The most obvious change in the internet space was Firefox’s key role in re-igniting the browser wars. Microsoft’s browser development, which had almost all but ignored W3C-standards compliance and aggressive feature development, has been greatly accelerated (Internet Explorer 7 is a quantum leap above the disaster that is Internet Explorer 6, and Internet Explorer 8 is even a tall leap above Internet Explorer 7), and even Microsoft’s tone with the standards bodies and web developer community has taken on a new level of humility. The availability of a popular, alternative browser with a different user interface, new features, and real extensibility shattered the ability of Microsoft to ignore its browser development and dictate its own standards on the web space, and was probably a major galvanizing force in the adoption of newer web technologies (i.e. CSS, AJAX, etc) as the market share of open source/standards-compliant browsers increased.

While much harder to gauge, its also hard to deny the role of Firefox in raising awareness about open source as an alternative software paradigm and increasing desire of software users for software extensibility (i.e. extensions/plugins), or even in the development of new projects like Google’s Chrome browser (which is being built by many of the same engineers who had once worked on Firefox).

Happy birthday, Firefox!

For more information: Lifehacker has a great overview of Firefox’s history. And, of course, Mozilla released a celebratory video:

(Image credit – I Has a Hot Dog)

Goodbye Mr. Dorf

I was saddened to discover, upon checking my favorite RSS reader that Sheldon Dorf, founder of the San Diego Comic Con which I have grown fond of passed away today (Yahoo News link).

SAN DIEGO – Sheldon Dorf, who founded the world famous Comic-Con International comic book convention, has died. He was 76.

A longtime friend, Greg Koudoulian, says the Ocean Beach resident died at a San Diego hospital on Tuesday from kidney failure. He had diabetes and had been hospitalized for about a year.
Dorf, a freelance artist and comic strip letterer, founded Comic-Con in San Diego in 1970 after moving from Detroit.

Today, the convention draws 125,000 fans a year and is a major gathering for comic book fans, artists, writers and movie stars.

Koudoulian says Dorf was friends with comic greats such as Marvel artist Jack Kirby and “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz. He says Dorf was also instrumental in helping budding artists find audiences.

Farewell, Mr. Dorf. Hopefully you enjoy yourself in the great comic book convention in the sky…

Abacus 2.0

I’ve blogged before about the power of Wolfram Alpha, Mathematica creator Wolfram Research’s powerful online “knowledge engine” which is capable of, among other things, balancing chemical equations, looking up star charts, doing math, and even looking up medical information.

But it’s good to know that, despite the sophisticated computational engine which underlies it, Wolfram Alpha hasn’t forgotten its “ancestor” the abacus, a tool used by many cultures before the dawn of the electronics age.

Like a respectful child, Wolfram Alpha pays respects to its ancestors with a feature which allows you to see how any number would be represented in abacus form. Case in point, I entered the search string “abacus 24” into the Wolfram Alpha engine (because I turned 24 last week) and got:

Abacus 2.0?

(Image credit – abacus)(results from Wolfram Alpha engine)