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Take it backRolf Skyberg’s Web 2.0: Why We Got Here and What’s Next
Rolf Skyberg’s presentation at the Web 2.0 conference titled Web 2.0: Why we got here and what’s next is extremely interesting, quite funny and really well done.
While it’s a tad long, it’s definitely worth a look.
And oh, my friend Rebecca, who sent me the link, insisted that I also mention that she would totally be interested in dating doing him based on just that one presentation. So, Rolf, if you ever get single, you know you have a fan.
Milorad Said,
November 5, 2007 @ 8:25 pm
I’ll check it out properly a bit later. I just wanted to jump in and say that I enjoy the term web2.0 about as much as glass of cold vomit.
Karthik Narayanaswami Said,
November 6, 2007 @ 3:07 pm
Milorad,
I couldn’t agree with you more on the whole Web 2.0 hype thing.
But the presentation isn’t necessarily about the hype surrounding that term — rather, it’s an explanation of what in particular resulted in social networks and the other technologies that gave rise to social networking on the web.
It’s different and quite insightful, IMHO.
Milorad Said,
November 8, 2007 @ 1:39 pm
I think I enjoy pointless filler as much as the next guy, but apparently not as much as this guy.
477 slides, a lot of which consist of only one word, a 99-slide American history lesson which could have been 5 slides if he could trust that his audience had a clue, and the marked differentiation between an ‘era’ and a ‘time’ which I doubt anyone can really understand, all make for a very interesting presentation, to say the least.
I meant to come back to this much earlier, and I’m sorry I didn’t. I waited until I was in the mood to learn something, and therefore felt pretty let down by the experience.
I never fail to learn something though, and in this case I learned how to pad out a very short point into a mildly entertaining bed-time story.
I’m let down by the fact that while many points mirror my own view, he’s still firmly jumped on the vaporware wagon by giving the term ‘web 2.0′ any merit whatsoever.
It quite simply doesn’t exist, the terminology should be erased from the lexicon of the intelligent commenter.
He even seems to have resigned himself to it being ‘new technology’ (136ish), which it plainly isn’t. Warning against something, while then asserting yourself as being knowledgeable about it is a great tactic – except for the fact that it’s impossible to be knowledgeable about a supremely vague concept invented by a guy who was looking for a term to put on a set of divergent notions.
O’Riley has a lot to answer for. I’m quite sick of having to chase his web2.0 ghost around.
There’s nothing any more social about the web today than it was ten years ago. People’s tendency to embrace “web 1.0″ if you can stomach calling it that, is all that’s making it seem more social today than it was back then. In fact, it’s a much bigger village today, and hence much less meaninful in its social nature.
The internet was arguably far more social when it was customary to chat to people for a few minutes before you could get them to send you the file you wanted. Of course this was even before “web 0.0″ as this guy calls it.
All this bullshit terminology and the fact that people are taking it seriously and trying to sell it really drives me up the bloody wall. (can you tell? lol)
His marketing progression of “safety, prosperity, then socialising” has everything to do with the cost of delivery. As he rightly points out, this is a priority thing.
As X becomes cheaper, it becomes mainstream, but it’s only really worth actively pursuing for safety reasons while it’s still expensive and/or hard to manufacture. So really, if we’re to follow that logic, “web 2.0″ is the advent of the Bullshit Web™.
That doesn’t make it important for you and your business, that just means that yesterday’s business technology has finally become accessible enough to warrant using for no good reason whatsoever.
That’s what web2.0 really is. It has no business implications to you if your core business is anything other than bullshit itself.
This is not for companies that make things, or provide services — in other words, 99.9% of the corporate world can ignore this completely, and not suffer because they never stood to gain anything from it.
All the overwhelming chatter seems to be about, is the potential of integrating disparate social networks into one big space. While ideal, its counter productive to the already entrenched players, which is why myspace and facebook don’t have a unified sign-on.
So the more of this shit that pops up as a result of the web2.0 hype frenzy, the more fragmented the socialisation becomes, and the less web2.0 it feels. Soon instead of hanging out at myspace, you’re now duplicating content at 50 other social sites just to have a reasonable shot at the same thing you were doing yesterday.
Not only that, but you’re stuffing everything you do with technorati tags, del.icio.us, digg, and countless other links in the hope of eventually rising above the noise all this crap is actually generating. Do a google search today and you get 12 instances of exactly the same text excepted on 26 sites, and linking back to the same web server which ultimately generates a 404.
“web 2.0″ is a shitstorm, not something to be welcomed. This shouldn’t be a game of he who covers the planet in his irrelevant crap wins. We should be embracing technologies which make it easer to find multiple points of view on one topic, instead of multiple links to the same text.
As I mentioned earlier, the socialisation of the web is its devolution, so it shouldn’t get an increase in version number. The real next version of the web will involve a system that makes it useful again.
A system allowing us to ignore all the social noise, and find the bloody information once again.
Milorad Said,
November 8, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
Sorry, Karthik, I only realised the length of my rant upon posting, this probably should have gone on my own blog.
Forgive me.
Karthik Narayanaswami Said,
November 10, 2007 @ 6:40 pm
Milorad,
Don’t worry, I do agree with most of your sentiments.
I just thought that his presentation was different and interesting in a unique kind of way.
The thing is, making any new technology social has its own set of advantages, because we gradually stop doing things for the sake of technology and start doing them for the sake of people. On the other hand, it also stops true development and favors the “crowd” mentality on what is the next “in” thing.
Sadly, this guy does not seem to follow that particular rule; but he was right about the origin of the technology.
My two cents, etc.
Karthik Narayanaswami Said,
November 10, 2007 @ 6:40 pm
Indeed. But I think that the beautiful thing about the web is that the two can co-exist.