What this Web 2.0 is all about…
posted by Nathan Zeldes on February 02, 2007
What is Web 2.0 (for lack of a much-needed better name) all about? Most people around us have no idea; some may know that it’s “all that Blogs and Wikis stuff”, which is true but misses the point: the main thing about Web 2.0 is a usage model, a set of personal experiences, focused on a liberating, exuberant social interaction that can happen with a speed and ease of use unheard of before.
Here are two examples, micro-experiences that happened to me this past week, and that may help convey, in a small way, the wonder of it all.
Experience 1. I participated in a conference of the Israel Knowledge Managers’ forum yesterday. Yigal Chamish, founder and mover of the forum, was using his tiny digital camera to snap stills and videos of the attendees in action; he’d go to his notebook every now and then and, using its wireless link, would upload the stills to Flickr and the videos to YouTube. When I saw this (he was sitting in a seat right in front of me) I used my Blackberry to find Yigal’s photostream on Flickr, downloaded a photo of myself in my seat (taken minutes earlier), and emailed it to my wife back at home, so she’d see where I was.
To summarize: Yigal was taking photos, and sending them to a server on a far continent; I was pulling them back and sending them to another city; all wirelessly, all nearly in real time, all without needing to exchange links, URLs, or anything. He was putting us on Flickr; that knowledge sufficed. And this trans-oceanic action was as easy as using a USB drive within the same room.
Experience 2. After returning from my trip to Redmond, I was talking on the phone to my daughter in Europe. I told her how icy the roads were in Seattle, and mentioned a clip I’d seen on YouTube of the SUV driver in Portland, OR, who was careening and bumping into cars like a hockey puck! I tried to describe the scene, but two sentences into that my daughter says “Wow! He’s really driving like crazy!” “How do you know?” “Why, I’m watching it!”
So, again: a guy in Portland shot a video and uploaded it; I mentioned it in Israel, and in a minute she’s watching it on another continent. Here, too, no need to exchange pointers; it was an SUV, it was on YouTube, that was enough to locate it in a minute. Wouldn’t have been easier if we were in the same room.
The point: one key attribute of Web 2.0 is that it allows remote people, not just to share “rich content”, but to share the experience of watching it together, of discussing it; to share what they’re seeing, what’s happening around them, with others all over the planet, practically in real time. It’s a new modality of togetherness, enabled by technology, but driven by people using it.
And now, the test: Find the SUV. Find the pictures of our KM forum. If it takes you more than 3 minutes to get them on your screen, you’d better consider doing something about your state of knowledge; you don’t want to be left behind!
Comments (6)
tagged: flickr, social computing, Web 2.0, YouTube
Comments
Feb 03 | MacGyver said:
Hehe, awsome. When you start to think about it, it’s amazing how easy it has become to access and share a lot of information very quickly. The examples you describe also show how small the world really has become. Anyone on this planet can reach a gigantic amount of people with minimal effort. Interesting indeed.
Feb 06 | Herve Kabla said:
Got it!
SUV driver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt9Tv40gmdc
Forum pictures: http://www.flickr.com/groups/14422437@N00/
The key point here is that all thoise data are remarquably indexed by Google, and a simple text search on Google provides the answer almost immediately.
So, I’m more impressed by Google and text based indexing, than Web 2.0, aren’t you?
Feb 06 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Right on for the video, Herve… the flickr link is still not to the photos.
Arguably if there was no Web 2.0 there would be nothing for Google to index in this space… but whether you use Google (bless it!) or Flickr or whatever, the fact is that Web 2.0 netizens can and do share and find stuff “almost immediately”. The finding part has been around for a while, but the uploading and the mindset is more recent. Powerful stuff!
Feb 16 | Ted E. said:
Wow! Taking photos, posting them and then viewing them all in almost real time. Incredible. And your daughter did search on YouTube while you talked to her on the phone? Fantastic. Never knew one could do that. It’s posts like this —in 2007 - that Intel’s stock continues to tank; your company is just know figuring this out.
Feb 17 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Well, Ted, YOU know one can do that, and I know one can do that, and many people - including many at Intel and at other companies - know it too. But countless others, including many in the industry, don’t know it at all, or have only a vague awareness that fails to penetrate to the underlying significance. So perhaps I’m writing for the latter; or perhaps for the former, to share a way to explain it to their coworkers that I found effective; or perhaps I’m just blogging something that I found interesting (which is what blogging is really all about, isn’t it?)
Apr 17 | susan eustis said:
Web 2.0 appears to be positioned to drive further growth of the Internet because of the flexible systems capability.