Web 2.0: what’s next ?
“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”
Considering the number of comments and most of all very interesting private emails I received from a number of readers (to them: THANK YOU), apparently there’s a real case for posting about Web 2.0 here. In the ever-going process of sucking up information from you guys to complete my working paper, 
here’s the next step: trying to identify the major trends affecting Web 2.0.
First of all, let’s recall my definition of Web 2.0: Web 2.0 = user-generated content+social networking features (sorry Jeremy, I disagree about your definition).
OK, so now, here’s the big question what’s next ?
Let us explore just a few possibilities.
1) Mobility. Although one might consider this only as a non-disruptive, incremental innovation, it seems clear to me that social networks, including the most advanced ones, who can understand well the needs of the PDA/smartphone/handhelds devices market will gain a significant advantage. Geolocalized services might prove more than useful for most Web 2.0 companies. Imagine a social network able to track automatically people (OK, it may sounds like Big Brother): this means that you might eventually find a friend in no time who happens to be hanging around next door. Of course telcos operators could eventually provide themselves such a solution, but hey: who wants to be dealing with 36 different social networks ? I believe the most successful social networks will eventually end up as “social life webcenters” - sites you just visit every single day of your life to get in touch with the world. The best candidates for these are networks you are actually using most of the time - ie websites you essentially access through a PC, be it a laptop. By the way: I believe Google Maps services for the iPhone and other smartphones, as well as m-facebook.com are the forerunners of such an evolution.
2) Mashups. Right, so definitely most readers actually understand better these strange things than myself. What I understand personnally is 1) basically mashups consists in APIs or Web Services provided by various sites, and aggregated in brand new website 2) more fundamentally, this implies a growing modularity of Internet sites, favored by XML and Javascript technologies (or else one must explain to me why these nasty little bits of HTML codes you just copied-paste from various websites to implement, say, a traffic counter on your 1990’s website cannot be dubbed as mashups !). It seems like the dream that Apple failed to concretize with OpenDoc, ie shifting the focus from application to “document” and designing specific workplaces on the go (thanks to various modules), proves to be more useful in the Web sphere. So far so good. But…What next ? Can a website really consist in a collection of bits of websites ? And what about IP issues ? Whereas mashups can wisely complete the user generated content trend (FlickR feeds on a blog, for instance) I am not that sure that they will deal a new hand for the Web 2.0 economics.
3) Market dynamics. This is more serious. I expect most social networks to gain more and more functionalities and enrich permanently their mission statement. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook and MySpace actually tried to compete, in the end, with eBay, Match.com, Monster.com, Youtube etc…
This particular point deserves an explanation. Becauses uses are so different, many specific websites have gathered a huge user base, and occasionnally a very nice traffic. Meetic has million of users, so has eBay (a true Web 2.0 company Matthias 
), so has LinkedIn, etc… The finality of such companies are not the same, but wait a minute…couldn’t it be the same users (mostly) for all these services ? I think this is likely. So instead of subscribing to a social network, maintaining an active eBay account, searching for job on monsters,etc… why not try to MERGE IT ALL and provide a unique service, where a unique login can make you access to all the different activities: dating, netwotrking, buying&selling, providing UGC, commenting news, etc…
I definitely believe that the company which will eventually design a simple way to introduce smart privacy settings, while keeping a simple switch for a user from a service to another, could actually end up as the big winner. I have no clue yet if this will be done by a merger, a series of partnerships (OK, so Facebook develops a marketplace on its own, fine…but the experience will be just so bad for people trying to sell rare/peculiar objects) or adding new functionalities to existing sites. But I may be thrilled by such a result.
I had a similar discussion with my friends a few days ago on this very topic. I think the main reason for not having one login for everything is the incredible security risk involved. Indentity theft is a problem now, imagine if all you needed was one ID and password to get everything on someone.
Comment by Brian Cesarotti — May 22, 2007 @ 8:57 am
When talking abotu Web 2.0, do not forget to mention the importance of “segregation of data and presentation”.
That’s what XML is all about - transportability of data as pure data rather than wrapped-data like it traditionally used to be.
XML is self-definable, self-extensible, and is THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect, in my opinion, of Web 2.0 along with AJAX and cross-platform compatibliity.
The reason why Mashups are different from the old-school javascript code you toss in is that “Mashups” consist of aggregated data, which is possible by the movement to segregate the XML Data from the form. Data from other blogs/websites can be gathered WITHOUT going to that website directly due to XML.
RSS, Aggregation, Mashups, Dynamic Advertisements (the ones with current prices/stores on it!), blogs, online shopping, APIs, websites appearing on both computers and handhelds despite different parsing methods
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AKA
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“Segregation of Data and Presentation”
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AKA
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WEB 2 POINT OH!!!
Comment by Jeff Kee — May 22, 2007 @ 9:55 am
Thanks Jeff. I now understand what’s new with the “mashup” concept.
I you add XHTML, RSS, AJAX, and now mashups, we now see that XML has been the real force driving the Web industry these recent years.
Comment by Steve Danino — May 22, 2007 @ 10:16 am
Hi Steve,
If you speak about a single ID which would work for all services (I think it is what you are talking about), it will be done really soon. However, if you speak about a “killer application”, I mean a website offering every Web 2.0 services (marketplace, classifieds, social network, professional network), it would be a dream as I would not have to bother my friends with lots of invites to join all my networks, but it is not possible in terms of marketing simply because the value of those networks for advertisers is based on the fact that these networks are targeted (rock culture for myspace, rap culture for skyblog for ex), which justifies their business model based on advertising.
Comment by Fidji SIMO — May 22, 2007 @ 12:26 pm
Just a comment to confirm that when Steve says that he offers lunch to everyone eager to help him with his working paper, it is TRUE! Thank you Steve and good luck!
Comment by Fidji SIMO — May 22, 2007 @ 2:16 pm
Hi Steve,
I think the main success of web 2.0 companies was to involve readers to content creation. On this point, I agree with Jeremy’s first definition: “Web 2.0 companies are companies smart enough to make users do the job”. Consequently, I would not be surprised that the next step would be to pay them for doing the job.
I guess I will develop this idea very soon on my blog, or another one …
Comment by selleml — May 22, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
I agree with you Leo: Ciao! has already started to reward users leaving relevant comments on products (social shopping), and the future model will at least be a revenue share with users. Youtube is already starting (here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/27/AR2007012701233.html)
Comment by Fidji SIMO — May 22, 2007 @ 6:33 pm
Steve, a service I already mentioned briefly in a previous post, Jaiku, already does that mobility thing. It takes information from the mobile network cell you’re connected to and informs who your contacts are near you, among other things.
Universal ID is already here, you might remember Microsoft Passport initative from many years ago. Now Yahoo! has their own authentication service, Google could probably do that in an instant if they saw an opportunity, then there are smaller players like TypeKey etc. Then there’s the open framework, OpenID (I think all WordPress users have automatically an OpenID).
I don’t believe it’s an ID issue. I agree with many comments above that it’s a business decision.
Comment by Kari Silvennoinen — May 23, 2007 @ 7:41 am
@Kari: For this mobile-social-networking, actually my own brother tried to launch something similar a few years ago. The service was named Mobeep, and unfortunately the software part of it was never finalized.
For Universal ID, actually I am not sure this is the major issue, although I could surely bet that Google will develop something nice. No, actually, I am just wondering why so many websites are competing for stealing the traffic of others, while they could very well cooperate and easily redirect their users for specific users on partners’ sites.
If ever Facebook’s marketplace develops, it could be a serious threat for eBay right ? This suggests a partnersip between eBay and a competitor of Facebook, and so on…
Comment by Steve Danino — May 23, 2007 @ 10:12 am
As I told you yesterday Steve, Facebook marketplace is only a classifieds marketplace for the moment, which means that Facebook has not acquired any credibility in the online transaction yet (requires a lot of trust&safety which implies huge costs), so eBay is protected for the time being. However, eBay starts doing distributed e-commerce with the new widgets “ebay To Go” and should consider developping a white label activity.
Comment by Fidji SIMO — May 23, 2007 @ 4:38 pm