What the REAL “Web 2.0″ will look like… when it happens

24 September 2006 | Internet, Media | Comments

I can’t be the only one to balk at calling the current wave of media innovation Web 2.0, can I? I’ve gone on the record previously saying that we are, at best, somewhere around Web 1.02. Yes, social media is a game changer for big media, and yes we’re living in an astonishing new world of media creation by individuals with no eye to profit (much more on that in future posts). On the flip-side, eBay has made successful businesspeople out of individuals who might have otherwise never had the opportunity to do more than work at the local 7/11. As a friend noted recently over lunch, my current profession didn’t even exist when I started graduate school in English Lit back in 1990.

But in spite of all that, we’re still just at the beginning of the web revolution.

Here’s why.

The vast majority of internet users are still using the internet in their homes on a desktop or laptop computer. Although what we access has changed, and although the barriers to entry for blogs and websites have all but disappeared, the WAY we access the internet is pretty much the same. Furthermore, the vast majority of websites are not reliably or intelligently tethered to the real world. For most of us, our relationship to the internet is essentially the relationship the Pevensie kids have to the land of Narnia. The internet is a separate realm, not space but cyberspace, floating in an amoeba-like mass near real space, but not a part of the land where we live our lives.

The Year 4 data (2005) from the Center for the Digital Future noted that one of the biggest impacts of the spread of broadband internet access in the home had nothing to do with speed: as more people got wireless home networks they dragged their laptops out from the back room into the kitchen and the living room, making access to the internet just inches away rather than across the house or in the basement. That made the internet the information resource of first resort, which was a major shift.

The geographical move of the laptop into the center of the house (the kitchen) informs my thinking about when we’ll hit the next phase.

We’ll hit Web 2.0 when we infuse large chunks of the internet with geography.

Here are six things that will help us to do this:

1. Widescale municipal or cheap (much cheaper than it is now) commercial wi-fi will make internet access chronic and ubiquitous… even on airplanes… and free or cheap. If you’ve ever worked in an environment that has a wi-fi network and then had to leave it, you already know what this is all about.
2. Pipes will get bigger and connections faster. Learn everything you can about Verizon’s FIOS and AT&T’s Project Lightspeed and the bandwidth that will make your current DSL look like a 400 baud modem.
3. GPS chips, already embedded into every phone manufactured for use in the U.S. this year, will make it easy (on, I hope, an opt-in basis) for the internet to know where you are whenever and wherever you are. For years now, we’ve heard about your fridge emailing you to pick up milk on the way home. That’s just the start.
4. RFID (radio frequency identification) chips about the size of a grain of rice will let the internet know where things are at all times… from the purple tie that matches the socks you just put on your feet (the internet will tell you that — somehow — it found its way to the rag pile in the laundry room) to the new car in just the color and configuration you want that is sitting in in the dealership two towns over. (This is similar to what the International Telecommunications Union calls “the internet of things.”)
5. Ever smaller internet devices will look like sleek versions of the wristwatches in Dick Tracy and will make my beloved Treo 700p look like an anvil.
6. Desktop/Laptop computers will get more powerful but become less relevant to everyday activities. This is no Neverland fantasy: Google and Microsoft are both making huge investments in online web applications (word processing, spreadsheets, et cetera) and AOL just announced that it is giving away five gigabytes of free storage to anybody who wants it via Xdrive. Regardless of many people’s worries about information security, the let-it-all-hang-out ethos of the MySpace/Facebook generation shows that many young people are less worried about their stuff being online than the older folks. We’ll still need desktop/laptops for some things (working with large digital files, gaming, truly secure financial activities) but not for email, casual browsing, VOIP and the like.

Web 2.0 will happen when you no longer have to go to an appliance to get to the internet.