From the Elitism of Web 1.0 to the Bubble 2.0

Web 2.0 is associated with two different meanings: a collection of participatory and collaborative technologies and an organizational model for social networks. Both ideas are complimentary, giving rise to new opportunities in communication, activism and business.

Also, web 2.0 could be understood as a meme designed for the marketing of a new generation of Internet businesses, born as an evolution of the bubble occurring at the end of the last century. But what is web 2.0?, do we actually need a definition?, or, at least, some conceptual map to navigate the new scenario?. Tim O’Reilly gave a thoughtful definition that has been almost universally accepted some time ago, but after that the value of the term has been greatly devaluated by the overuse and hype of the “2.0”. In this sense, the success of the web 2.0 defined by opposition to the previous web could be one of its weakness.

A recent article in Web 2.0 Journal (The Post-Modern Rhetoric of High Technology) uses the above “negative” idea of the web 2.0 to propose some hypotheses about its near future evolution:

Web 2.0, Search 2.0, Life 2.0, World 2.0. The metaphor of software versions to describe technological and social phenomena once upon a time was clever. But as with all clever sayings, it became overused and is now cliché. The draw toward terms like “Web 2.0” is of course that it makes a strong implication that what it represents is a “next generation” of something good enough to have gotten a second run. The trouble with such monikers, though, is their post-modern tendency to merely be “what came after.”

However, this world 2.0 was born in that way, with a strong postmodern style, as a reply to the enlighted and illustrated world 1.0:

Enlightenment thinking was clear and organized. There were disagreements amongst the thinkers of the Era, but the Era itself was definable. Post-modernism cannot be defined except by saying what it is not. It is not modern; it is what came after the Enlightenment. “Web 2.0” suffers from the same malaise.

The Post-modernisation of web 2.0 has positive and negative consequences. Positive as a reply to the illustrated modernity of the web 1.0 closed to users (“The power-structures that defined Web 1.0 were a destination-driven experience, one created not by users, but for users, and with little input or insight from them at all”). But, this reaction to the established powers includes certain risks if the original ideas attain no maturity or its strenghts disappear along the evolution:

The Post-Modern Internet, Web 2.0, and its leaders have a responsibility to mature in their power, however. Web 2.0 can take two distinct directions, and it is perhaps the rhetoric of it all that will define the path. Web 2.0 can be the French Revolution of Technology or it can be the American Revolution of Technology.

Joseph Schumpeter’s winds of creative destruction are blowing especially hard in the Internet technology world today, with remarkable improvements to our daily lives. But these winds can blow too hard too often, and an even older economic law, the Law of Diminishing Returns, begins to take over. Our wild-eyed radical phase must ultimately give way to some replacement. We cannot permanently be the rebels. At some point, people will get “2.0 fatigue.” That point may be upon us as it is. People eventually want stability. The problem with successful rebellions is that rebels rarely know how to govern or else they take up the mantle of those against whom they rebelled, and like Orwell’s pigs in Animal Farm, they begin to sleep in the old rulers’ beds.

Ultimately, therefore, the success of Web 2.0 depends less on what it accomplishes in the present and more on what groundwork it lays for the future. Indeed, it is rather ironic that the final metric for Web 2.0 is what comes after it. The early 20th century British essayist G.K. Chesterton once observed “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”Web 2.0 companies would do well to take his advice to heart.

In this sense, the real danger is to forget the open and collaborative style and to build a web pseudo-2.0 trying to constrain or “channel” the creative capabilities of users. Why these scenarios could become real?

In one way, the established actors, political institutions or large corporations, declare continuously their preoccupation by the “excess of freedom” offered by the ecosystem of tools 2.0. However, some business models (usually promoted by the protagonists of the old Internet reborn from their previous failures) find only one way to monetise their investments: restricting the abilities 2.0. In opposition, others work clearly for an open business model, showing that web 2.0 could promote creativity, innovation and business profitability.

Lawrence Lessig, in The Ethics of Web 2.0: YouTube vs. Flickr, Revver, Eyespot, blip.tv, and even Google, defines two “levels” or models of web 2.0 that could represent the embryo of two alternative ways of understanding the future as I commented above:

So there’s an important distinction developing among “user generated content” sites — the distinction between sites that permit “true sharing” and those that permit only what I’ll call “fake sharing.”

A “true sharing” site doesn’t try to exercise ultimate control over the content it serves. It permits, in other words, content to move as users choose.

A “fake sharing” site, by contrast, gives you tools to make seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.

In this sense, YouTube is a fake sharing site, while Flickr, (parts of) Google, blip.tv, Revver and EyeSpot are true sharing sites.

Lessig notes that YouTube is not designed to improve user creativity because constraints the capacity to reuse and remix contents to create new products (although this possibility is not impeded because of different hacks as TubeSock for Macs or the Firefox extension developed by Javi Moya). I would like not to enter in the YouTube (and Google) debate, but Tim O’Reilly replies to Lessig proposing that YouTube is an incremental step in the right way for the development of tools for video sharing. Any way, independently of the YouTube case, Lessig promotes a Web 2.0 following the original definition of Tim O’Reilly as opposed to the fake sharing technological and social model:

This difference, I suggest, in business models should be a focus of those keen to push the values of Web 2.0. Though Tim O’Reilly’s canonical statement of those values implies this freedom is necessary, it doesn’t really expressly say so. The freedom to access the content seems, in my view, related to the Web 2.0 principle that “the service automatically gets better the more people use it.” Or at least the right to access it if the author chooses (another Web 2.0 principle: Some Rights Reserved) seems essential for this ethic to make sense. As O’Reilly puts it, “Design for ‘hackability’ and ‘remixability’” — precisely what hoarding content doesn’t do.

Joi Ito, on the shoulders of the post of Lessig, continues the reflection (in the best “style 2.0”), Is YouTube “Web 2.0″?, positioning the web 2.0 in its “historical context”. Web 2.0 would be the accomplishment of the dreams of many of those involved in the development of web 1.0:

… the recent success and surge in innovation on the Web is due to a semi-new set of principles. Part of the principles are a return to fundamental principles. The innovation on the Web and the Internet is driven by what David Weinberger has called “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” – a network created by small groups working together around open standards. It is and was a community of people and projects trying to connect to each other.

Why, when these dreams have failed before, do they they start to become realities right now?: many of the technological barriers disappeared recently or they are disappearing now:

My own view is that after Bubble 1.0 collapsed many of the unemployed or the recently happily “exited” entrepreneurs and developers started building tools in the spirit of Web 1.0 – in communities of people collaborating around open standards. The big difference was that many of the dreams we had during the Web 1.0 era were now more feasible with broadband, wireless, higher penetration, stabilization of various standards, faster computers and some lesson learning from the bubble.

In the Internet 1.0 social innovation and the entrepreneurship to build new business models were in front of the actual technological advances (but behind many technological promises) and for this reason most of the projects became something different, more similar to the traditional analogical world (i.e., the large portals). In any case, irrational exuberance from these years (that could return now) was the adequate scenario to arrive where we are sitting now, showing that innovation routes are far from linear from long time ago, if they were linear in any occasion. So, following the vision of Joi Ito, web 2.0 would be, technologically, an incremental innovation that would finish the job started in a previous phase of Internet development. However, socially, it would be a revolutionary innovation allowing to operationalise organizativenetwork models based on users that were previously only utopias or marketing promises.

But, both Lessig and Ito warn about the potential appearance of a bubble 2.0 based in the web 2.0 and the closure (at least in part) of some of the uses that the new technologies allow (as happens with YouTube). Confronting this possibility the own nature of the genuine web 2.0 is its main strength given that, as Joi Ito propose, closed models would be competitively weak (and for this reason they would become a bubble) because users and business will learn to value the advantages that a open model provides:

Although we can’t really expect users to initially understand the distinction, I think in the long run, users will understand that stand-alone or closed services do not allow them the freedoms that are becoming exceedingly more common in the Web 2.0 area. I do hope that the rush to Bubble 2.0 doesn’t allow companies to trample over the core principles of the Web in their drive for more ARPU (Average Revenue per User). I think it is important to keep our eyes on the ball and not lose our focus on what is driving the innovation and the increasingly rich user experience.

The key challenge of the proponents of the open paradigms, as Open Business, is to demonstrate the competitive advantages of the collaborative model, in the core of the web 2.0, both from the point of view of knowledge creation and business management.

[A previous version of this post was published in Spanish here].