The greatest achievement of web 2.0
As everyone is touting the emergence of web 3.0, I figured it was worth discussing what is, in my not-so-humble opinion, the greatest achievement of web 2.0. It is, simply, getting the user to work for free. You see it everywhere you look. Some call it "user-generated content" while others say it is "the audience as media."
I explored this idea a month ago in "I guess social bookmarking is just beyond me." It still boggles my mind to see people putting so much time and effort into supporting huge sites like Digg and Reddit without getting anything in return, other than a warm feeling from knowing that they have contributed to "a community effort" (or that they are somehow "famous").
It goes beyond that, however, when you think about how sites like Flickr and YouTube have tons of users paying to submit content. I can explain how it works if you are not privy to all the details: sites like these thrive on having a large collection of great content (in this case, pictures or videos) that will attract more visitors. Part of the business model is allowing users to pay for "pro" or "director" accounts so that they can submit more content, which in turn means an even larger collection of (possibly higher quality) content. In short, people pay you to work. Where else can one pull off that kind of business model?
The best thing about it all is that sites where the content is owner-generated (like, say, my little blog right here) can never hope to compete with these "web 2.0" sites. No matter how hard I work on this blog in writing "articles" or giving things away, I can never hope to attract the amount of attention that big community-driven sites like Digg or YouTube receive. One might ask why I bother working so hard around here instead of finding an easy way to get users to work for me, but I wouldn't have an answer.
I should mention that this "achievement" isn't necessarily new to web 2.0. Before all this talk of "tagging" and "mashups," we had message boards and chat rooms that employed the same model for success. The only difference this time around is that instead of the user-generated content being simply conversations, we now have links, news, pictures and videos too. The user-generated model was staring at us all along; it just took a second time around to notice it.
So here's the part where I talk about what "web 3.0" might do to build on this and achieve even more success, in anticipation that I might be criticizing it around here pretty soon (and talking about 2.0 like it was sooo last week). The current "audience as media" generation of websites allows users to share their content, but what is missing still is ways in which users can create content. Sure, I can put my videos on blip.tv, but the process of creating them is still something I do offline, and there aren't many places that allow me to create videos in an innovative way. As we move closer to making "the web as application" a reality, we see the possibility of not just user-generated content, but user-generated art. I think zefrank would be the pioneer in this; his interactive "toys" allows users to create content with the help of tools; content they wouldn't be able to make on their own (see the scribbler and the sequencer for some examples). Obviously sites like these would require a lot more creativity and courage from their creators who are looking to make "the next big thing," but if one can do it right, the result could be very rewarding.
Shhh… don't tell anyone the new business model or people won't contribute any more, or what's worse, they'll want a part of the earnings, and you and I both know that's a no-go.
Well actually, I was thinking I would predict the new model first so then I could ride the coattails of my own success and become the official top web 3.0 consultant.
Exactly - what's new! It all is about social interaction. Sharing ideas, knowledge, opinions with other humans. That is the whole drive. Individual freedom in a digital utopia.
The idea is simple - pay for content and in return cheap advertising revenue. What is more better than to read the opinion of the consumer about product X.
Commercials often idealize and generalise the consumer since the commercial is written from the company's view. User-generated content is better since the consumer can easier digest the message from another consumer. Web 2.0
pay for content culture is e-commerce and e-marketing (just another try).
Oh yeah, I'll take honest users over sleazy marketers any day. That's why I hate it when people "pretend" to be users, like those reviews on Amazon.com that pretend to be real people with honest opinions, but you can just tell that they are written by affiliates who are just trying to generate positive buzz. It's more dishonest than marketing usually is!
Very interesting insights. But the soul of Web 2.0 is providing the property of sociality onto the web. This is a big achievement in the history of web evolution. I think at this time many people still have not caught it yet. But if you retreat yourself 100 miles away and watch the web from far far away and through a historic point of view rather than a technical or business point of view, you will see the real beauty of the Web 2.0.
By the way, glad to know you are a christian.
May GOD bless you.
I think web 1.0 did a decent job of bringing sociality to the web; web 2.0 just made it more open, more dynamic, and more media-rich. But yes, many people have not caught it yet, and some never will; as long as the Internet is a "computers" thing, we'll just have to accept that people who don't like computers are always going to be left out!
Dear Christian, I think you just mixed two very close thoughts. Web 1.0 brings sociality to web users, but not the web itself. Web pages in their 1.0 style are basically isolated self-descriptions. The web itself thus is not a social web.
Web 2.0, however, brings a new philosohpy into the web design. We want the web itself to become social. That is, web pages are automatically interrelated to each other because of their common interest specified by human users. Hence, when you visit one web page, from which you can find the other web pages discussing the similar things. These links are not constructed by web masters who build web pages. Instead, these links are dynamically constructed by user activities on the web. This is a complete new philosophy that is not in Web 1.0. And this is why Web 2.0 is addressed as a social web. And this is what I mean the property of sociality to the web (instead of to the web users).
Oh, I see what you are saying! Very very true, these new "social technologies" make the web much more interconnected than it ever was before. Thanks for sharing that, you are absolutely right.
I you would read this book entitled "Turner, Fred From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism" you will see that social networking has its roots in a far more away past you ever imagined: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/188350.ctl -> a must read