Now this is a very interesting and sober article on Web 2.0. It also highlights how immature this business really is (even though it does make the case that it is really quite old for being this immature).
I find it especially interesting to see that the Facebook staff consists of no less than 600 people! What on earth are 600 people doing every day? And at what cost! Unbelievable.
Some things in life are just taken for granted and are rarely questioned. Privacy is one of those things. It’s implicitly agreed upon by everybody that privacy is a good thing, and that maintaining personal integrity is one of the major challenges of web 2.0. I would like to question this.
Let’s go back to the early stages of the development of our species for a minute. The development of collaborative behavior is one of the major advancements in the history of humanity, without which we couldn’t have achieved anything but satisfying our most basic needs. And in order to collaborate, we need some form of rules and norms, at least when the advantages of collaboration are balanced unevenly between individuals over time. We’ve created institutions for maintaining these rules, but more importantly, we have a distributed control system where morals and norms are enforced by our peers. In fact, the punishments and rewards administred by our peers are so important to us that they could be viewed as an important part of the genome of the collective intelligence that makes up our culture and our civilization.
So, while this distributed control system is beneficial for the community as a whole, it also puts pressure on the individual. And individuals don’t like pressure. At least not instinctevly and in the short term.
Enter social media.
What social media did is that it opened up the flood gates of peer control. Suddenly we could follow each other much closer than before, seeing photos, updates, status reports and blog posts. We could administer peer punishments and rewards much more effectively than ever before and across previsously unthinkable boundaries.
This poses questions:
(1) Will the breakdown of privacy raise moral, improve individual behavior and ultimately make the world a better place?
(2) Why are people so reluctant to compromise their privacy?
I believe that the answer to (1) is likely to be yes. It makes sense rationally, and there are also psychological experiments performed that support this thesis.
The answer to (2) is more complex and is a combination of laziness and fear. A more publicly available life puts pressure on you to raise your moral standards and generally behave better. Lazy people are not attracted by this proposition. There is also a notion that public knowledge of your activities puts you at risk of being exposed to crime of different sorts, from stalking to burglaries (when your Twitter feed gives away that your home is empty for example). To some degree this could be a valid fear.
But if the answer to (1) is yes, then we owe it to ourselves to make sure the problems of (2) are solved. It is not a matter of protecting our privacy, but of protecting our right to be safe in public.
Some things are just so basic. So obvious. And yet, we sometimes seem to forget about them. In the world of advertising we are often up to our ears in cool designers, focus groups, and media choices that we forget the most basic aspect – human psychology. What makes us do what we do? I read a lot. Books on a wide pallette of subjects ranging from technology, through fiction, philosophy, and psychology. And I see the same patterns repeating themselves. No matter if the book talks about history, persuation, self improvement, pick-up artists, or eastern philosophy, they all come down to the human mind and the incentives that motivates the human mind to make decisions and act. The rest is branding. With the right mix of incentives, you can achieve reach and action, and ultimately an ascending bottom line. And that’s the business we are in. Our job is to negotiate a fruitful relationship between the brand and the co-producing consumer (the prosumer). And in that sense we are more like marriage counselers than anything else. Come to think of it, my pitch is not that different from that of Tony Robbins. I dress better though.
Not to long ago my favorite agency Zeus Jones put up a good post on the design clichés of web 2.0. Now that we’re on the topic, I thought I should bring it up.
The slide below from Zeus Jones says it all. Or to quote Adrian, “Of course you wouldn’t knowingly give up all of this privacy to anyone other than a spouse…or perhaps a pet? Or maybe you’d whisper it to the wind?”.
I went for a walk yesterday in the spring sun of Södermalm with Carl Waldecrantz from Superstrikers. We discussed Web 3.0 and the dangers of that concept. Everyone wants to claim it. I’ve heard it several times now. F&B for one mentioned it for their new site which has been “coming soon” now for longer than it takes to age a Bordeaux. First of all, one of the principals of web 2.0 is to get a beta out quick and work on it as you go, using user feedback to aid development. If F&B 3.0 would really be 3.0, are we then leaving the perpetual beta methodology to return to the days of “under construction”? Hardly.
The term Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly during a conference in 2004. In the initial brainstorm during the conference the following was formulated to get a sense of what Web 2.0 really meant:
Web 1.0 –> Web 2.0 DoubleClick –> Google AdSense Ofoto –> Flickr Akamai –> BitTorrent mp3.com –> Napster Britannica Online –> Wikipedia personal websites –> blogging evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB domain name speculation –> search engine optimization page views –> cost per click screen scraping –> web services publishing –> participation content management systems –> wikis directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (“folksonomy”) stickiness –> syndication
I have yet to see such a list being presented on what Web 3.0 is going to be. And that such a list would be dictated by an ad agency is preposterous. I will elaborate on why in a minute.
F&B are not alone in trying to claim the 3.0 flag. Fredrik Heghammar of Perfect Fools said in a December 2007 jury quote in Resumé that “Farfar beat F&B to the punch for the first 3.0 solution. They’ve set an example” (in my free translation from Swedish). But that solution for Björn Borg, which can be seen here, is not 3.0. It’s not even 2.0. It’s a great 1.0 website, and in that context they really have set an example for good Flash work.
BUT, and this is important, there is nothing wrong with what Farfar did in that solution. It’s probably what the client wanted. It’s possibly what the public was ready for. It’s reasonably useful unlike the award winning IKEA’s Drömkök, (very, very 1.0) which i find pretty to look at but utterly useless, slow, and irritating if you actually want to buy a kitchen (trust me, I’m trying to buy a kitchen right now, and IKEA’s site almost made me throw my Macbook AIR into orbit). What I’m saying here is that Farfar did a great job for Björn Borg. But it’s not 3.0. It shouldn’t be. Web 3.0, whatever it is, will grow from entrepreneurial start ups. The next wikipedia, the next Flickr, the next Twitter. It will be exposed to great risk during it’s adolescence. Many projects will crash and burn. This is not something that ad agencies should expose their clients to. It would be irresponsible. Ad agencies have a mass market for the most part. Not a market of early adopters. Web 2.0 should be coming of age though, and most agencies are still doing 1.0. So go out on a limb and make some fast, mashable, sociable, sharable, collaborative stuff for some clients before you start jabbering on about 3.0.
Until then, let me start up a discussion on 3.0 by making a first couple of distinctions like the ones above:
Web 2.0 ––> Web 3.0 User generated content ––> User generated content bundling Sharing songs ––> Sharing playlists Favorite bloggers ––> Favorite editors/syndicators Feedreaders ––> Sensemaking apps
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