Context is the new king
The first dot com bust aligns almost perfectly with the generally accepted inflection point between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Economic forces killed tired business models in favor of new and better ones. Well, here we are again. Economic forces are threatening to kill off many 2.0 businesses in favor of tech that improves productivity, not the ones working on luring eyeballs. Expect consumer innovation to slow as the available money shifts from the hands of advertisers to Enterprises hungry for productivity innovation.
Evidence that the party is coming to a close:
- Yahoo! merger
- Kleiner-Perkins announcing they won’t invest in 2.0 any longer
- Failed economy pushing for tech that will maximize productivity
The rise of meta data and the birth of context
Web 1.0 connected people to content. Web 2.0 connected people to each other. Web 3.0 will push contextualized content to people. Some are calling it the semantic web. It has to do with distribution like RSS, SaaS, and APIs. Application architecture is overtaking the idea of a “page” as the basic building block of the web.
The economic impact of this is the loss in inventory as pages disappear in favor of applications, dashboards, and aggregators. The coming wave of Web 2.0 failures is due to their dependence on ad supported business models. Ad revenue models only makes sense if you can get people to spend time on your site. Unfortunately for 2.0 companies, decreased ad spending by businesses hurt by the economic downturn will accelerate the distribution of 3.0 technology. So now comes service based business models. Subscription models replace desktop EULAs and they are billed from API usage, SaaS subscription dues, and so forth.
What the world needs now is context
The logical next question is what services do people need? We don’t need help creating content. We don’t need help connecting with other people. In a word, we need help with context. More specifically, we need help with the following:
- Data portability and system interoperability
- Information overload
- Identity and reputation management
- Help spotting and acting on emergent value that comes from the network effect
The last bullet is a really hot space for innovation. Just today, Gil Yehuda wrote on the new ZD Net Forrester blog:
“Although Web 2.0 tools present information, their use becomes increasingly more interesting when we look at the network of people who generate and care about the information.”
Man, ain’t that the truth! The more people interact in a networked fashion, the more meta data that is available to help automate contextualization and spot emerging trends. We need that intelligence piped to users so they can quickly, and easily take action on it—preferably from a mobile device and with automated management. And, since we can’t remove people from the picture, we need etiquette built in. Someone is going to make a killing from an etiquette engine with a good API.
Services that provide and aid in the management of social intelligence will be of strong value to the Enterprises, which is who has the money to pay for said innovation. The tech developed during this period will eventually trickle down to SMBs and the rest of the market much in the same way mainframe tech from 20 years ago, like virtualization, is doing today.
Comments
I looked at social mention again today, and it occurred to me that the “data portability” thing really is job 1. i used to think of it from the consumer perspective (”can i move my friend list out of xyz?”) but now it’s really about the perspective of other services (”can i have access to the data in xyz so that my service is much better?”)
not that the consumer perspective isn’t important, but youknowwhati’msayin?
Also: I’d love to know wtf an “etiquette engine” is and an example use
great post justin! seriously, this is wonderful and it truly shows that you are on the cutting edge of this shit.
the only thing that makes me sad is that web 3.0 is being driven by the ability to generate dollars where as 1.0 + 2.0 seemed much more about the human discovery of info and each other.
i miss the excitement of sites like stickdeath.com + mulletsgalore.com. now it all has to do with productivity and $$$$$$$4
It’s true man. Playtime is giving way to money at the moment. I have another draft post started about just this subject! Basically it’s exploring if our current need for radical transparency and open source is because we’re naive about this brave new world. I wonder if we’ll look just as innocent in our beliefs as the hippes did with their peace movement.
I don’t think the future is bleak though. People didn’t think we’d see another boom after the first dot com bust, but we did. I think they’ll be another phase of innovation that is funded by VCs. It just might be a few years out. Feels like this will be the cyclical growth of the Internet for decades to come.
Ethan, an etiquette engine would be a library of rules designed to process standardized and passively generated status updates. It would be based on expediting polite interaction between people.
Hey, I just came across this and wanted to thank you for quoting my blog. BTW I just published a report http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,46894,00.html One of my conclusions: Social networks will become the focal point for Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Why? Because social networks provide context to content. Whereas information management traditionally focused on the information itself, employees will seek to connect with the people who created and care about the information they care about too.
Thanks, Gil. I’ll see if Voce has a copy of that report.
I just started a draft post about this. I’m going to finish it and post the link in the comments here.
‘Games’ — used in the improvisational sense of the word — can be a powerful engine for creating context across networks. See Facebook’s ‘Mass Animation’ app for an example of a game that generates the kind of context you describe in the post, Taylor. The context that gives meaning to data.
When we communicate with other human beings, we do so on what I call the Cosmetic, Emotional and Meta levels. (The Greeks called them Logos, Pathos and Ethos). The opportunity resides in elevating the two levels, Emotional and Meta, that get scarcer as networks expand.
Information flowing across networks is mostly what I call ‘cosmetic.’ That is, all about surfaces. Raw data. Connecting dots. The ability to contextualize this data is, as you and most of the commentors agree, where the moola is. More important than context related to space and time (’Can I get data I want where and when I want it?’) is context related to emotion and metaphor. (What does the data mean to me personally? What does it represent in the larger world of my belief system?)
Games are the engine that can unlock these two levels in highly productive and profitable ways.
oops, i followed Justin’s thread from Taylor Davidson’s site (and the palette stayed the same!)…apologies Justin! You are the thought-starter here!
I agree with you. Context is the new king in the internet. Content without the right context will be useless. And now in the internet’s world, context moves rapidly. So, we need to adapt the content with the newest context.
yup…great post justin…you are right that context is the new king