Finally, The Internet As Intended.

Newsweek’s cover story, The New Wisdom of the Web offers a general overview the web 2.0 concepts through a series of human interest’y profiles of flickr, mySpace and a few other poster-child web 2.0 companies. Nothing new or terribly insightful, but here’s my takeaways: 

I’ve been posting about the API’s importance to getting the most out of your information distribution:

The most effective sites on the Living Web have porous boundaries and are happy to act in concert with other sites, even competing ones.

There are a few paragraphs on Flickr not being just an enthusiast community of photo sharers, but "good business too":

[Flickr users are] generating content, millions of users organizing that content for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing," says Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz. "That’s a neat trick. If we could do that same thing with Yahoo, and take our half-billion user base and achieve the same kind of effect, we knew we were on to something."

Well, sure, they are. But how many sites or services can do this - how many can create the critical mass required to build value in the service? Probably quite a few, but as competition for user participation increases, it will become harder and harder for startups to rely on the "new wisdom of the web" as their business proposition. Unless they head the advice of You Mon Tsang of boxxet and build intelligence into your services use of participation that immediately amplifies its value. If that makes zero sense to you, read about bionic systems

As the title of my blog suggests, I don’t see much very new in the "new wisdom" that everyone is now tauting as revolutionary. It’s simply an understanding of how to leverage the network effect that has always been baked right into the web. Newsweek continues to push a misconception that somehow all of this is now possible because of some mysterious "improvement" of the Web:

This rebooting owes everything to the enhanced power and pervasiveness of the Web, which has finally matured to the point where it can fulfill some of the outlandish promises that we heard in the ’90s.

The pervasiveness has increased, for sure, but the power of the web, fundamentally, hasn’t changed. Service providers are just now starting to really bake the power of the network into their services. I know, I know, bandwidth boom, wireless access, yadda yadda. But the real fact is that the successes now being realized by embracing the Cluetrain concepts (which I still think are the real definers of Web 2.0 thinking) are helped abit by faster download speeds and a bit more ubiquity in access, but those things simply help the services - they haven’t made this "new wisdom" possible, and web 2.0 does not, as Newseek suggests "owe everything" to this mysterious new "power".

Another scary fact that does not get mention in the article is that web 2.0 success is actually threatening the very network that has made the explosion possible. How? Doc Searls elegantly lays it out for you in his long piece on Saving the Net.

Technorati Tags: web20