“Web 2.0″, it’s a buzzword that’s been around for quite a while now and if you ask ten different people what it represents you’re likely to get ten different answers.
I’ve been working on the back end of a social project for local Pittsburgher’s recently and it forced me to really look deeply into the whole idea of social networking, content sharing, social graphing and so on. From this I think I’ve formed a clearer image for myself of just what Web 2.0 represents…at-least to me.
In my mind Web 2.0 is all about sharing. I’ve come to that conclusion after examining all of the various platforms and applications which get labeled as Web 2.0 and what they each mean or offer to the end user.
Sites like MySpace or Facebook are about sharing yourself with others. Either established friends or networking with new folks, you’re sharing a little bit of you on these social sites.
Sites like YouTube are for sharing your video media, sites like Flickr are for sharing your graphic media.
Sites like Houndbite are for sharing your audio, everything from prank voice messages to teleconferences.
Digg and the like are for sharing views on current events. StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and similar are for sharing your bookmarks and favorite web sites.
Then there’s blogs for sharing your knowledge, opinions or news. Micro blogs like Twitter for sharing your moments. Sites like Scribd for sharing your documents, and on and on…
Web 2.0 is all about sharing.
And all of these sites are really good at what they do. They make it super easy for anybody to share across them.
Not very long ago if you wanted to share your video with friends you had to go register a domain name somewhere, then purchase a hosting account. Learn how to create a HTML web page and learn how to embed and stream video through it. The process of putting a video online was costly and involved a lot of work.
Today, even if you don’t have an account with YouTube you can create one and have your video online for the world to see in minutes, absolutely free.
If you want to publish a picture to the web, you can take it with your cell phone, send it as an Image message and have it online in under a minute, absolutely free.
These services are great at what each of them does, and make sharing through them more than easy, they often make it kind of fun.
So, if Web 2.0 is all about sharing, and these Web 2.0 services are so good at what they do, why is it so complicated for me to share what I want with my friends?
Let me illustrate what I mean: let’s say I’m at an event and snap a picture with my phone, then upload it to Flickr. To tell my friends to go see it I then send out an SMS Text message to those in my phone’s address book, and a Tweet to Twitter for those who stay connected to me online only. Each of those 2 messages has to have a link in them telling my friends to go open a page on Flickr to see my picture.
Let’s sum that up, I had to upload to Flickr and send 2 messages out across 2 separate services, so that’s 3 steps I had to take.
My friends received either a text message or saw my Tweet via 1 service, then had to go to another service to view the picture. That’s an additional step they had to take.
A total of 4 steps just to share a single stinking picture!
I know, none of this is hard nor really time consuming and it may seem petty of me to complain about it, but if Web 2.0 is really about sharing then shouldn’t the process be as seamless as possible?
Where’s the one service that ties it all together?
I want to see something like this tied into OpenID, where you have a single identity online which you have absolute control over and manage (you can have multiple OpenID’s and I’m in favor of that, but the minimum is one). Unlike previous attempts at single login systems, OpenID really does leave the end user in complete control of their own information, no other person or company owns it but you, so I like that a lot and that’s one of the main reasons why I’d want to see this all tied into OpenID.
Nobody would own or control your information but you, and your OpenID page is your online presence where you could pull your shares from all of those services together and say “this is me online”.
I’m thinking of the ultimate personal Mash-up here. Where my friends and associates would always know to just visit www.Scott’s OpenID URL.nut to stay on top of my life and happenings, and I could do the same with theirs.
No more joining another network, filling out my background and interests then inputting all my friends again, blah blah blah hassles.
Eventually I believe all of the Web 2.0 sites will adopt the OpenID standard anyway. All of the big guns are behind it now so it’s really just a matter of time.
And already the technology exists for sharing our media and friend networking between services with RSS and FOAF, so why can’t it all be tied together? And why not do so with our OpenID’s? It could be done in a simple manner that wouldn’t add to or degrade the OpenID standards in any way.
Since OpenID’s are free and providers are going to compete with one another for user’s accounts based on offerings, this is where I see one of them being able to really jump ahead of the pack.
Hypothetically, if Verisign (or any provider) could offer to serve up a personal Mash-up of RSS and FOAF files from all of the Web 2.0 sites you belong to on your identity page I’d stop using my personal OpenID URL and join them in a second.
I also think this would be the best way to push these closed services which currently aren’t allowing their members to export or share their own information outside of the service (look out MS and FB) into being more open and social.
If social community “A” allows RSS syndication of friend lists and daily blogs to a personal identity page, but communities “B” and “C” don’t I bet you’ll see a speedy and mass shift of active members moving over to community “A”.
Right now we’re sharing a lot of ourselves online, but everything is scattered around and compartmentalized in an unordered and schitzo frantic manner that causes us to jump through unnecessary hoops at every turn.
There’s got to be an easier and better way to handle our online shares, and I’ve just laid out my thoughts. “We have the technology. We can build him faster… stronger…”
What do you think?
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I just stopped by your blog and thought I would say hello. I like your site design. Looking forward to reading more down the road.
Robert Michel
Hi, thanks for your insightful blogpost. Lately I too have thinking about User Generated Content (UGC) and have come to the conclusion that there has been an explosion of UGC content because of the proliferation of web2.0 social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and so on.
I am very sure a lot of people like us have accounts on all those sites and would wish to have some way in which we can either share out content or network across these
networks.
However, each of these sites would certainly not want their members to share their networks with other sites, otherwise people can just migrate their communities very very quickly across multiple sites. This therefore impedes the effort to make networks accessible transparently across each other.
Having said that, we are now only beginning to see sites
that unify our digital life stream, e.g. FriendFeed
(http://friendfeed.com/) and SecondBrain. Hope more of these are started soon, I’m getting crazy replicating my networks across LinkedIn and Facebook and Flickr. Blah.
Anyway, here’s my favourite list of Web2.0 sites:
http://www.squidoo.com/reallycoolwebsites
Chris, that’s sort of my point though. Why should we be answering the same silly questions about where we went to school, where we work, where we live and who our friends and online contacts are on site after site when all of this information about us is already out there?
I don’t care about services wanting to protect their own interests by preventing easy information sharing, because ultimately if a social community isn’t being very sociable for me where’s the benefit in belonging to it?
What I’m suggesting wouldn’t really hinder services at all, and in fact might ultimately benefit the most open ones. Having all of your information available on some sort of super personal Mash-up page wouldn’t mean you don’t still upload content to YouTube or Flickr. Of course you would, but it would make the ability to share your content more seamless and easy.
To me, services which embraced that openness would ultimately be rewarded by increased participation levels rather than hurt by seeing less visitors.
Thanks for your comments and nice Lens, that’s one of the cooler looking ones I’ve seen at Squidoo.
Great post. I would like to add that with all the sharing that is going on in web 2.0, collective intelligence and collaboration can be achieved and thats the driving reason why organisations and the community is so interested in having a piece of this.
I could not agree more to your article!I many of the Web 2.0 apps I am what you call an early adopter!
At Tradertom.net we are forming an Open Social Wealth Creation Community… We are in Beta.
I have been trading since 1996 and The Markets at the moment are not for the faint of heart!