Has Web 2.0 Matured?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on April 24th, 2008 11:21 AMNot long ago, Web 2.0 was a thing that social media people gave advice on, developers and designers laughed at and the majority of people had no idea what the heck was going on. At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, there has been a bunch of buzz about nothing. Tom Foremski calls it “Web Two-Point Yawn.”
The “tools of Web 2.0″ have become ubiquitous for the most part and those that get it, get it. Dan Farber sums it up when he describes Tim O’Reilly’s keynote last night:
We are entering the world of ambient computing, he proclaimed, as everything is wired into the Internet. “We are in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 is all around us,” O’Reilly said. He got nods from the crowd of the converted, who were busy Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, and SMSing, practicing continuous partial attention.
Most of us have heard the schpiel before and now we are active participants in the social web. While there is innovation taking place every day, we are now more connected then we have ever been and it’s difficult to see how more connected we could become without literally being attached to everybody we know at the hip.
The people who are now adopting to the new technologies appear to be enterprise companies and soon enough we will be on to the next big wave, whatever that may be. We can imagine our lives as if a character in a science fiction novel but ultimately I believe we are close to maximizing the utility of social technologies.
New tools will pop up daily that help transform the way we connect but an industry has now been created and it’s time to get to work on making these tools work for businesses. That’s where the money is to be made. We have now been living with these social tools for years now and are great at socializing via the web.
As Steve Perlman implies in his interview with Charles Cooper of CNET News.com, it’s time for real innovation. He claims, “Most of what you see here will be obsolete in three or four years.” I guess Twitter and others better start working on generating revenue then!
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For me, the next four years will be the most interesting. As a half-gen of grad students, VP's, 30-somethings start maturing in the workplaces, the "digital divide" for Web 2.0 will be between those who browse and review (BabyBoomers) and those that engage (everyone else younger).
It's like I tell hospitals and Healthcare admin grad students: right now babyboomer doctors are retro-fitting their activity to include blogs, etc., with or without hospital consent. What happens when the med school students of today become doctors in just a few short years? New media won't just be inescapable, it will be inevitable. That's just one small industry example, but it will be interesting to watch the maturing of 2.0's audiences.
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