The Web: One, Two, and Three Dot Ooooh!

by Chris Sullivan

With every new technology, we see a honeymoon phase followed by the reality check. Think back to the dot-com boom of the late nineties and the subsequent bust when everyone was building a web presence and a web business because, well, it was the web. Web 1.0. The information web. Machines talking to people. We were madly in love with it. These new businesses had to be valuable because they were on the web. Some were; many weren’t. It was tautological. Web = Web Presence = Web Business. But where was the value? Once reality set in, we saw the difference: Amazon.com flourished; Pets.com flopped.

Now we’re seeing a similar trend in Web 2.0. The collaborative web. People talking to people. Social media is the big buzz, and we’re told that we have to be involved in order to survive. Get your company on Twitter, and start tweeting to your customers. Create a presence on Facebook and build a ‘fan’ base. Put your company profile on LinkedIn. Use tools that allow you to post to all three simultaneously because you can’t miss out on this important development. Get with the new media or you’ll perish. Setup a company wiki, crowd source your product, get everyone on IM.

To be sure, there is much to be gained through social media, both in the business realm and for us personally. To find it, I always ask where’s the value? Are you really connecting with your customers and employees in a meaningful way when you tweet a couple of sentences about some new announcement? Are you building a lasting relationship there? Is your Facebook page just FYI, or are you using it as an effective tool with some larger game in mind? This honeymoon will soon end, and we’ll all realize that being social is not nearly as important as being meaningfully social.

And already the next trend is starting to catch on–Web 3.0. The real-time web. Machines talking to machines. Our screens are starting to pop constantly with new information and ideas as web services feed live data to all sorts of interconnected pages and APIs. We are becoming our own news desk, pouring over raw information and trying to get a sense of events as they unfold. I recently used Google’s live Twitter results feed to monitor a local election, and I found out the winners well before any news service announced them. We’re seeing less mitigation, less analysis, more action, more reaction. Businesses certainly have already taken advantage of web services in order to gain the real-time edge. And on the social side, TweetDeck does a great job of aggregating live updates and posts—so much so that it feels overwhelming at times. Most of us already have some sort of an internet connection with us at all times, and now mobile broadband is arriving to the masses who can’t afford an iPhone.

I have to say, I’ve been ogling Google’s Nexus One ‘Web Phone,’ I can’t wait to use an iPad, the Windows and Android tablets are on their way, and the preview videos of Microsoft’s Courier leave me drooling. I’m already dreaming about the honeymoon.