Two Roads Diverged - The Web 3.0 Conflict
May 18th, 2008
Despite its cliche, the question of “what is the next version of the web” provokes as intense a debate as you’ll find within digital circles. Web 3.0 definitions vary wildly with any number of partisan descriptions coming from very smart, yet fundamentally biased people.
These descriptions are all forward thinking, yet intrinsically flawed. They neglect that versioning, or defining the next version of the web, isn’t just about software or hardware. It’s about culture.
Engineers like Tim Berners-Lee speak of Web 3.0 as the Semantic Web. A universal medium for data, information, and knowledge between a variety of applications such as your computer, refrigerator and your car.
Netco CEOs such as Google’s Eric Schmidt and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang have described Web 3.0 in terms of advancements in software architecture that will allow for a more social web, facilitating communication between people.
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix is more pragmatic. He says Web 3.0 is the jump to bigger pipes which will allow for increased bandwidth and thus the full-video web (and more downloads for his movie rental service)
From a media and entertainment perspective Web 3.0 is already here. It arrived on July 19th, 2005. That’s when MySpace was bought by News Corp for $580 million. Since then, the Big Media acquisitions, of which I include Google’s purchase of Youtube, are too numerous to list here (check out this list limited to 2007), but the sea-change they triggered has led to a fundamental shift in the culture of the web; the way it’s developed and the way it’s consumed.
From where I sit, Web 3.0 is the Corporate Web.
The Corporate Web has brought conflict. The profit-driven culture, spurred by top-down, financial pressure, conflicts with the web’s under-developed business models which have evolved from a consumer base that felt entitled to experience the online world as free. From file sharing to instant messaging, watching videos to pirating movies, an entire generation has come of age amidst a culture of the gift economy.
The Corporate Web has also brought possibility.
Consider this: of the three online categories with the greatest potential for financial upside (read scalability), Search, Social Networking and Video, only the former has been monetized effectively. The latter two, having failed to sustain businesses as transactional or subscription models, have defaulted to the traditional media model of building audiences and selling eyeballs. Advertising.
The unresisting acceptance that the web is best monetized as an ad-supported platform helps explains why traditional media companies have made uncountable website acquisitions, especially in the social network and video categories. Aggregating eyeballs and selling advertising is traditional media’s bread and butter. They’ve been making a killing selling it since Bulova Watch paid $9 to NBC to air a 20 second spot before a Dodgers baseball broadcast in 1941.
With these acquisitions by publicly traded companies comes an obligation to maximize shareholder value. Which leads to a hierarchy of control from the top-down, which in turn forces the entrepreneurial culture upon which the web was built, to compromise creativity under demand to show financial contribution.
For me, Web 3.0 represents a shift in the tone of the web from open to closed, from applications that are, borrowing from one of my superheroes Jonathan Zittrain, “generative” to “tethered,” from amateur to professional, from gift economy to profit economy.
It’s an incredulous shift that has bred a new school of skeptics. If I had a nickel for every digital thought-leader who shook their head in resignation and mumbled “it’s early days…” as if economic nirvana was only a matter of waiting out the clock.
It’s a incitant shift, one which has stirred a cocktail of disparate voices and a fresh wave of enlightening (if not entertaining) literature including Zittrain’s above mentioned book (btw, the image above is from his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it), Sarah Lacy’s Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good and Tapscott and William’s Wikinomics, to name a few.
Mostly, it’s an enigmatic shift that leaves me asking more questions that I can find answers to. What are the avenues for innovation in the Corporate Web? How do we find order in the successful models of community innovation such as Wikipedia? Can we bottle those creative solutions to replicate them when needed? Where is the healthy balance between code and profit, art and business, innovation and corporation?
Tags: eric schmidt, google, jerry yang, jonathan zittrain, mark cuban, myspace, news corp, reed hastings, sarah lacy, the corporate web, the future of the web and how to stop it, web 3.0, wikinomics, wikipedia, Yahoo
Posted by: jake Posted in Advertising, Business, Gift Culture, Reputation, TechnologyYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Totally agree with you: versioning (nice word) isn’t about technology, it’s about culture. I’d like to add that it’s also about economics. There wouldn’t have been a Web 2.0 if Web 1.0 hadn’t crashed in flames, forcing a reassessment of business models and practices.
So I don’t believe we should declare the arrival of a new numerical designation until there’s been a pronounced end to Web 2.0. (Otherwise, there will be a Web 4.0, 5.0, etc. every time some self-aggrandizing entrepreneur coughs up a new “paradigm.”)
What might the end of Web 2.0 look like? How about the crash of the giant social networking communities that have come to typify it, including MySpace, Facebook, even YouTube? Based on the premise that “size matters,” these sites have grown at all costs, throwing open their servers to all comers. The result has been an actual loss of community as users increasingly find themselves surrounded by complete strangers with whom they have nothing in common. (Just visit any Facebook “Group” and try to discern any constructive discourse amidst the spam.) If you don’t believe these sites could end, remember when AOL was a “community” and “you’ve got mail” was a cultural catch-phrase?
With their openness, the giant social networking sites have also invited in spammers, scammers and user-generated content so bad that it wouldn’t dignify a public restroom wall. And despite the massive user-bases (as large as some countries), these sites are too diverse and the content too risky for most advertisers. The result, as you mentioned, is anemic revenue that hasn’t lived up to the size of the user bases.
Web 3.0 will be niche-driven: as you say, “Web 3.0 represents a shift in the tone of the web from open to closed.” We will see more virtual walled communities where like minded individuals cluster. (Ironically, AOL is one of the first to head in this direction by turning toward a niche-site strategy.) The technologies that emerge during 3.0 will not be to support the world as a whole, but only the specific needs of each segmented community. And isn’t that the long-touted great promise of the Web: the end of the tyranny of mass production, replaced with customized products and services? The VC’s might not get all hot and bothered by this niche trend, but advertisers will appreciate these well-defined and policed communities.
Indeed, if another decade passes without pronounced improvements in operational ROI online, we will likely see many of the larger corporations treating the Web as a utility as opposed to an opportunity. They’ll use it, but they’ll leave it up to the little guys and niche communities to develop (as is the case with Wikipedia), since there’s much more money to be made in producing the next movie based on a comic book.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
@ Freddy, the irony is that we may not see a pronounced end to 2.0. Unless there’s some sort of “digital Pearl Harbor” i.e. a massive security breach, large scale identity deletion or financial network collapse. If we’re talking about what the end of the web as we know would look like, I’d bet that the end will be a whimper rather than a bang. Remember Y2K? Didn’t happen like the conspiracy theorists may have hoped, but the prospect of widespread viral malware certainly hasn’t left the building. JZ
May 19th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
You’re absolutely right. Note that I foresee the end of these sites as not being cataclysmic per se (as in Y2K) but more of a gradual atrophy (as in AOL or Friendster), with members steadily drifting away. Consider what’s currently happening to the major broadcast networks and print newspapers. They’re not going out with a bang — they’re just steadily bleeding to death. It won’t be malware that kills these mega-sites, but consumer ambivalence and apathy. I can just hear the words now: “You’re a member of Facebook? God, that’s so 2008…”
May 19th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
@ Freddy - death by a million paper cuts. Or, as Douglas Warshaw puts it on his blog, by a google’s worth of cuts!
http://thewarshawcurve.typepad.com/
May 20th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Okay, I’ve got to chime in on one key point here: “Web 3.0 represents a shift in the tone of the web from open to closed.”
This would indeed create and entirely new “version” of the web, and I have a hard time imagining how we’d even be able to call it by the same name. It seems like you’re hinting at the eventual convergence of television and the web, where content would be far more “push” than “pull.” The problem I see is that the pull characteristic is what makes the web what we know and love. As soon as we have the oligopoly controlling content creation on the web, you’ve essentially destroyed it as a unique distribution platform. At that point it’s just interactive digital cable, and you only get a select amount of channels that actually matter - all of which are owned by six companies.
The corporatization of the web is definitely coming, but it doesn’t have to fall in line with how corporations work today. The entertainment industry operated as an oligopoly for nearly 50 years before it was broken up, and we’re seeing a similar philosophy reemerging today. It took us 50 years to understand and take steps to correct the harms of it, and far less than that to revert back. Why wait another 50 years to realize that we’ve been going about it all wrong?
I do agree that we can’t just wait out the clock. As comfortable as it would be to wait for the studios to decide how the next distribution model will work, my guess is we won’t be all that happy with the result. At the same time, it’s foolish to assume that we’ll incite some revolution and witness the downfall of the entertainment oligopoly. We have to think of our Web 1.0/2.0 models in line with Gramsci and the constant struggle between dominant and subdominant. We do radical things now, and they are eventually calmed down and incorporated into the dominant culture (i.e. entertainment conglomerates). So with that in mind, how can we shape our radical actions to affect the hegemonic process in a way that leads to a more beneficial outcome? Why start already the thinking about how to give in?