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.
