A Requiem for Web 2.0

Anil Dash on what we have lost in the stampede into large, corporate walled garden social networks (abridged and time-structured by us):

Five Years Ago you had:

- Most social photos uploaded to Flickr, where they could be tagged by humans or even by apps and services, using machine tags. Images were easily discoverable on the public web using simple RSS feeds. And the photos people uploaded could easily be licensed under permissive licenses like those provided by Creative Commons, allowing remixing and reuse in all manner of creative ways by artists, businesses, and individuals.

- If you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren't subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself.

- In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company's site. This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.

A Decade or so ago you had:

- Technorati let you search most of the social web in real-time (though the search tended to be awful slow in presenting results), with tags that worked as hashtags do on Twitter today. You could find the sites that had linked to your content with a simple search, and find out who was talking about a topic regardless of what tools or platforms they were using to publish their thoughts.

- You could, in theory, write software to examine the source code of a few hundred thousand weblogs, and create a database of the links between these weblogs. If your software was clever enough, it could refresh its information every few hours, adding new links to the database nearly in real time. This is, in fact, exactly what Dave Sifry has created with his amazing Technorati. At this writing, Technorati is watching over 375,000 weblogs, and has tracked over 38 million links. If you haven’t played with Technorati, you’re missing out.

- You could allow people to post links on your site, or to show a list of links which were driving inbound traffic to your site. Because Google hadn't yet broadly introduced AdWords and AdSense, links weren't about generating revenue, they were just a tool for expression or editorializing. The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.

- In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a company, even if you documented the protocol and encouraged others to clone the service, you'd be described as introducing a tracking system worthy of the PATRIOT act. There was such distrust of consistent authentication services that even Microsoft had to give up on their attempts to create such a sign-in. Though their user experience was not as simple as today's ubiquitous ability to sign in with Facebook or Twitter, the TypeKey service introduced then had much more restrictive terms of service about sharing data. And almost every system which provided identity to users allowed for pseudonyms, respecting the need that people have to not always use their legal names.

- If you made a service that let users create or share content, the expectation was that they could easily download a full-fidelity copy of their data, or import that data into other competitive services, with no restrictions. Vendors spent years working on interoperability around data exchange purely for the benefit of their users, despite theoretically lowering the barrier to entry for competitors.

- When people wanted to support publishing tools that epitomized all of these traits, they'd crowd-fund the costs of the servers and technology needed to support them, even though things cost a lot more in that era before cloud computing and cheap bandwidth. Their peers in the technology world, though ostensibly competitors, would even contribute to those efforts.

Dash believes there are 2 great fallacies with the current Walled Garden approach:

The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks

.
His worry is that a whole generation of web users are growing up with no other mental model than walled garden content farming, and this needs to be remedied:

The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the people creating the next generation of social applications to learn a little bit of history, to know your shit, whether that's about Twitter's business model or Google's social features or anything else. We have to know what's been tried and failed, what good ideas were simply ahead of their time, and what opportunities have been lost in the current generation of dominant social networks.

If only - after 5 years of highlighting these issues, I am convinced that you can fool most of the people most of the time, and that there is truly a sucker born every minute. One of the other commentators on this post, Giles Bowkett, made this chilling point:

I'm sorry to say that my take on this is more fatalistic; in my opinion, many of the functions of the venture capital system actively thwart the production of good software, but perform marvelously if you view them as a bridge for transferring the population of an aristocracy from positions which control the social and economic systems of the past to positions which control the social and economic systems of the future.

I'm not as negative on this as Bowkett, in my experience these models work until they don't, and all the fooled sheep wake up, jump over the wall and go someplace else. Being older still than the Web generation, I have seen more than one cycle of the game, and they always seem to run in a 4 part sequence

- massive experimentation (Web 2.0 in the 'noughties)
- locked in vertical stovepipes (You are Here)
- open standards emergence (Within 5 years, I reckon)
- commoditised de facto or de jure standard layer bedding into the infrastructure (A decade hence).

We are now in the "locked in vertical stovepipes" phase, (we are in the same phase with smartphones) but it is usually a necessary phase as it builds the first integrated, end to end services. Yes, they don't have all the anarchic freedom of the earlier phase but they are easier to operate, by more people, and so attract the mass market. To illustrate, there were multiple PC operating systems once, multiple "OSP's" (AOL, CompuServe et al), multiple mobile smart phone OS's - then they were stovepiped - but it all opens up and/or commoditises eventually. That is, so long as you can stop vested interests locking things up into cartels (cf ITU and Internet, as we speak). Anti Trust regulation is also a key tool here.