Opinion

Web 2.0 - re-hash or revolution?

Rob Bamforth By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca
Published: 2nd November 2007
Copyright Quocirca © 2007
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It's a broad term, mostly overused and has spawned such a multitude of 2.0's in every other genre of technology and business concepts that we have to hope that some are ironic or sarcastic. But do the changes most Web 2.0 concepts encompass really justify such an increment—isn't this really only Web 1.1?

We could argue about what it all means, but overall it describes a more interactive and ‘democratic' internet where anyone can easily create anything to share with anyone else. Those with something to get off their chest can blog, those who want to let others know what they're doing just now can twitter (twitter.com), and everyone can add their interpretation to a definition on a wiki. We can go further, sharing experiences, images and videos with everyone, or just our ‘friends' via social networking sites.

Enthusiasts will say that with more input from a wider set of contributors, the content produced is more timely, ‘real' or accurate. There is no doubt there is now more digitised data, with some structure we could also say it is useful information, but has it evolved into ‘wisdom' from the crowd? Often it is difficult to tell fact from opinion.

Web 1.0 is often derided as organisations simply putting brochures or existing content online, but much of this content would have come from the rigorous publication and editing processes they were familiar with in the ‘old times’. These processes may have had some inefficiency, bottlenecks and limitations, but structure and organised workflow can be useful and there is no reason to assume that the noise of the crowd is the only game in town. Far from it, frequently the contributions of the ‘crowd’ are simply the hubris of a vocal minority.

For a second generation, Web 2.0 also seems a little slow with significant latency inherent in the processes. Content is uploaded and then contacts, friends or colleagues have to be notified or have to be sufficiently adept to be using a syndication service. Much of the ensuing collaboration is serial, with blog threads and social forums looking like the newsgroups of the 1990s and bulletin boards of an earlier generation. Hardly immediate or interactive, and there's always a risk that errors made at the start will propagate, and corrections made later on either get lost in the noise or can obviate the meaning of comments made before the correction.

Wikis and social networking sites give an element of more parallel interactivity, but since most of the interaction is delivered via regular looking web pages—great for familiarity—this ties those contributing to a PC screen and a desk or laptop. Evenings in front of the PC might be a fun social experience for some, but many find it limiting and look to get further digital social contact during the working day. As you would expect, this doesn't go down too well with many employers.

Content is hailed a king, but given the potential for anyone to produce anything in any digital media, whatever their artistic ability or quality, how will it be possible to sort wheat from chaff? Proponents of 2.0 would say this is self regulating with feedback, endorsements and recommendations. Given the simplicity of artificially generating comment, validity is hard to gauge, so we may end up finding it even harder to sort healthy wheat from diseased with an overload of SPAMback, SPAMdorsements and SPAMendations. There are also content police—companies with a deliberate policy of searching for negative comments and getting them removed—and those who take a step further and Web 2.0 becomes Marketing Propaganda 2.0.

Finding real value in the content and services may not matter in the early days of growth where success is measured by numbers of names in the address book, but as eBay has found with Skype, this value is ephemeral, and commercialisation requires the offer of services that customers will value, use and ultimately pay for.

So what will justify a 2.0 (or will it perhaps in reality become Web 3.0)?

We need a return to focus, bringing in context, relevance, and personalisation. That means reaching the individual with content, services and contacts of value at that moment in time and in a specific location. It's the chance to plait the long tail of content into specific strands of relevance, and condense the social networks of ‘friends’ into the segmented social groups, clubs and teams we all really belong to, with direct access from the communications gadgets in the palms of our hands. It does mean exerting some control over the process, so that it generates valid, accurate and timely results that have value to the individual.

Off the desktop and into the pocket, Web 2.0 should be user-centric and mobile, not simply user generated—that's only one step on the way.

Reader Comments

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5th November 2007: 'Dale Vile' said:

Hey - I feel for you Rob - that's where I was 6 months ago. It's all happening very fast though and I have had to come to terms with a different view of the world as propagated by my kids and people like our man David Tebbutt, who has studied this whole area extensively. David, for example, has been helping us to harness a lot of this stuff for business advantage, which is definately there. And on the mobile front, he has stunned us with discovering FaceBook on the BlackBerry.

So, while I agree with a lot of your analysis (apart from the bit about about newsgroups - there is nothing so efficient in modern Web 2.0 for group discussions), we all have to figure out how to harness and work with what is essentially unstoppable.

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6th November 2007: 'Rob B' said:

Take your point Dale, but unstoppable is not my worry, I don't think it's gone far enough and the current '2.0' bandwagon needs a bit more oil on the wheels and some air in the tyres.

At the moment it often gives the impression of still running on solid wagon wheels.

I'd like to look 6 months in the future rather than 6 in the past, but my worry is that if too many of you are thinking it's good enough as it is, it's going to take us a lot longer to get where we really need to go - time to move forwards!

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6th November 2007: 'Dale Vile' said:

Intrigued by the ‘too many of you’ statement, and wonder which inferior collective I am assumed to be a part of. No offence taken :-)

Anyway, I see where you are coming from and agree with the general point about maturity in this whole space. Right now, for example, the user experience is crap on a lot of (indeed most of) these things. When David got us using Facebook, my first impression was how appallingly unintuitive and quirky it was - any professional enterprise designer would be fired for coming up with something so poor in terms of user interface and navigation. And as for public service Wikis (as an author rather than a reader) the experience is painfully clunky and really quite restrictive when you are used to desktop office tools. These are just examples of the ‘good enough’ and ‘perpetual beta’ mindset that often lies behind many public facing online services. Your point about PC/browser centricity is also well taken.

Perhaps the biggest maturity related issue we have discussed internally is the way public services in particular are managed and secured. We, like you, use a commercial hosted service for MS Exchange, SharePoint, etc, but data is properly managed, security arrangements are understood, SLAs are in place, and the entity accountable for the service is unambiguously identified, with terms and obligations written into a formal contract. We haven’t really got to the bottom of Facebook, Socialtext, etc, in relation to these things, so for the time being, are not using them for critical or sensitive stuff.

The point is though that despite all these limitations, what many are calling Web 2.0 is becoming pervasive and is bleeding into the work environment (we’ll be publishing some stats on this soon). Sure, lots of stuff of needs tightening up, rich internet applications have yet to come into their own, and there will be shakeouts as things move forward, but I am personally reluctant to advise people to wait for everything to become perfect before they acknowledge that the trend towards social computing exists and that they should really be starting to figure out how to handle it at some point.

Certainly vendors like IBM, Microsoft and BEA are doing their bit to help their enterprise customers understand the impact social media on the organisation, so perhaps one piece of advice would be to engage your incumbent suppliers, many of whom are looking to deliver enterprise class alternatives to the public stuff. They can certainly help with guidance on the culture, policy, security, governance and other process and risk related parts of the equation.

I wasn’t sure after reading your piece what your own advice to organisations was, and I would be interested in your opinion on this.

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