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Yesterday on the flight back from Birmingham (UK) to Amsterdam (NL) I read the worst discription of Web 2.0 that I have ever seen.
I normally try to avoid articles in newspapers about Web 2.0, as I haven’t seen a good one yet. However this time it was in the Financiele Dagblad (kind of Financial Times of the Netherlands), so I thought it might be worthwhile, as influential Dutch corporate executives might read the same.
Bad move. Bad article, not just because I don’t agree with the people being quoted (happens a lot), but primarily because we don’t help anything move forward when we talk in technologies of things we understand today.
Let me give an example: I would bet more people know more accurately what “Warp 9″ means that what “Web 2.0″ means. Face it, we all know that when Captain Kirk fires it up to Warp 9 that he’s going to outrun the bad-guys, unless of coure he warps into a black hole or asteroid field.
But what is Web 2.0? Well, it’s 1.0+this+that+…
That’s not what the way we should be describing it. There’s nothing less exciting that the old version+1. I want (we all want) the TOTALLY NEW VERSION (without of course the instability of v.1.0).
So how should we be describing it then? Well, shoot for the stars and through in a phaser gun, replicator or two. How about this for a start:
“Web X.0 will find us, not have us go looking for it. Information will find people, people will not go looking for information, with the same ease that a Jedi knight ‘knows’ things.
Imagine the i-Phone finding you before the Hype. It just sidles up to you, knock $400 out of your pocket (knowing you would buy it in any case, and becomes yours. The day after - Steve Jobs launches it to very much poo-hah.
I’m not talking about intelligent agents parsing your wishes and going out to look for a match somewhere on the internet - that’s just Web 1.0+1, more automation, systems, mashups etc.
We’re talking intelligent information. Information that finds you without you having to go look for it or register any previous interest.
When we look for people to do new things with frequently we think “oh, she’s the kind of person who would like to do that”, without even realising we’re doing it without putting labels on people or people in boxes. We just ‘know’ that person would like it. Without knowing how or why we make that decision.
So let’s bottle a bit of that, and make information more like us. In doing so, web Whatever-dot-oh will sort itself out without our intervention.”
Pauwl Lunow
