In about ten years, we will be able to look back and judge the impact on the human race of technology innovations like ecommerce and social technologies. I am intrigued to compare them only because they are labeled Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 so it begs making a prediction as to which one will really have the dominate impact. Interestingly, there are very few people making believable predictions as to what Web 3.0 might be and maybe that is because we have not really digested Web 2.0 and social tech just yet. On with the comparison…
I recall clearly back in the late 90’s when ecommerce blossomed and we got a good glimpse into the many ways that selling goods and services over the Web could change the game. Mega sites like eBay and Amazon were young then, but it was clear that there were dynamics at play that we had never seen before. People from all over the world could find a supplier in a few seconds of searching, and place an order. Marketplaces like eBay and Craiglist flourished by providing an ability for users to self administrate their own sales and purchases. Any product supplier could offer access to their catalog to anyone right in their homes so that purchases could be made from the living room, and goods would be shipped in quickly. In short, consumers had a new way to shop, purchase, and interact with suppliers and they liked it. In a very short time, billions of dollars in transactions shifted to different suppliers, and a new sales medium.
The impact of this economic evolution was that consumers were given options that made life a little easier in some cases, and might save them money in others. In addition, they could find goods and services that might have been harder to track down pre 1995. Suppliers found a new way to reach markets that had evaded them in the past, and some traditional companies found a sales channel that drove strong ancillary revenue gains. We even got brand new companies that came into being that without Web 1.0, would have not existed, for example, Zappos. So money shifted between organizations, and consumer’s lives got a bit easier and more productive. I am not sure the ecommerce in and of itself actually created new revenues. Maybe people can find new things to spend money on through the Web, but they probably would have spent that money anyway on something – so little new revenue was really formed.
Web 2.0 began to blossom around 2007 and now is being leveraged by a large percentage of general Web users, B2C and B2B organizations. The terminology of Social media/networking/technology replaced the descriptor Web 2.0 over the last 12 months and in some ways, this is a shame because when we use the word social to describe this collection of new technologies, people get the impression that we are still referring to finding all your high school friends online. If you follow my writings, you know I specialize in enterprise technology so I only care about how organizations put social tools to work. In order to measure the value of social tech, I have to take into consideration the personal and the business usage of these tools. On that front, the impact is vast and deep. While ecommerce has reordered some of the players in the economy, and have given us a few new dynamics as to how commerce gets done, social tech is reordering society in general.
Consider this… What is the impact of people connecting to thousands of “friends” instead of just a couple of hundred. How do all of these new contacts influence each other? What does it mean that a large amount of couples are meeting each other online? How is citizen journalism and real time news changing what we know about the world? How is changing things that we are all building online reputations – whether we like it or not, and anyone will be able to search on our name and find our what many other people think about us? How is crowdsourcing going to change the economics globally for getting knowledge and creative work done? What does it mean that social tools give us the ability to build massive rivers of information into our minds so that we can add knowledge at astounding rates when compared with years past?
Add up the answers to these questions and it becomes quite clear that social technologies will have a much more far reaching impact on us than will ecommerce. In fact, I would say on the scale of ten to one if I had to guess. Part of the reason I have written this all down is because I like to memorialize predictions so that I can look back in ten years and see if I am a genius, or a blow hard. I would be curious to see what you think about my opinions expressed here. And, what is your take on Web 3.0? What do you think it will be and will it be even more influential on the human race than Web 2.0? Is that possible?