After reading Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations, as well as reviewing the book, I've been considering a lot of things. Mix in a dash of Andy Oram's The Behavior Gap: Three Persistent Problems for Internet Technologies and my reaction. Squeeze some more efficiency for users in. Add an economy for users of Social Networks. Remember the Cluetrain Manifesto, and that 'markets are discussions'.

It seems to me that a large portion of what will be Web 3.0 will stand a lot of what caused success in Web 2.0 on it's head - inverting it so that the users gain some dominance. After all, without users, Web 2.0 would not exist - and while it is all well and good to make money while providing a service - the question is how much the users will tolerate. Just as there was a tipping point for success, there may well be a tipping point for failure. Alienate your community and you alienate your business base - keep your community happy and it will stay consistent and grow.

One of the problems with Web 2.0 has been, and continues to be, that it is focused on how very few people or legal entities make money providing services to many people. At some point, the majority of people who are interested in such things may well figure out that Web 2.0 is only about them as much as they allow themselves to be. Somewhere along the line, people may figure out that they are financial pink bunnies to the remote controlled social network - that they are only benefiting casually while others literally cash in on what the masses do. It is no different from traditional business in a sense; in this way social networking businesses are not too different from McDonalds. Lots of people eat at McDonalds (ask any dietician), but few people work there. Even fewer people gain the ability to improve their own positions through working at McDonalds.

It is a little reminiscent of Levitt & Dubner's observation in Freakonomics about crack dealers in the 1980s averaging $3.30 an hour.

When Amazon.com found Second Life, I was there and followed it's progress vicariously, and at some times directly. It was a genuinely good idea whose time has yet to arrive; the Second Life interface does not support the same level of maturity that has made the Amazon.com website a success. While I was interested in exploring the architectures involved, my main thrust was quite simple: I review books, and if someone finds my review useful and purchases the book - I get a commission. This is not a very grand job; the pay is nothing to start a Swiss Bank account with and it requires time and effort to write a good book review. For one, you have to read the book. Secondly, you have to think about the book. Last, but not least, you have to rate the book in a thoughtful way.

This is not a complaint; I enjoy doing book reviews - I get paid, however little, to read books. Some publishers send me books at no charge to do this, so I even get books at no cost a lot of the time - something that I find as appealing as Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones. This may explain why I am still single. I prefer to think that I haven't bumped into someone who is willing to put up with me.

When I order books, I typically do so through Amazon.com. It works for me for most books that I wish to get, not to mention other things - though I must note that they are unwilling to ship Nutter Butters to me here in Trinidad and Tobago. Go figure.

On September 30th, 2005, Tim O'Reilly published his piece, 'What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software'. The crowd went wild - so wild, in fact, that many people didn't even bother to read the article, instead listening to other perspectives on what Tim O'Reilly wrote. In a period of great tumult across the Internet, the definition of Web 2.0 was as various as the people who wrote or spoke of it. In a way, the article suffered at the hands of Web 2.0 itself - and great confusion ran rampant on the Internet. It became a marketing buzzword. It was found in all manner of brochures.

But few, if any, truly understood what Web 2.0 was - and what Web 2.0 is. I've wrestled with the topic myself, since it is at times transparent and at others as clear as mud. Web 2.0 isn't something that is limited to a technology, as I first believed - linking it to AJAX, which was being touted as a Web 2.0 technology. To me, the whole thing from a technology perspective was not a big deal. Technologies come and go; after a quarter of a century of paying rapt attention to technology I read the words of the prophets (profits?) with a jaded detachment.

The business model was what was interesting. The business model is what is interesting. This is what Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations is about. With a note from John Battelle, Founder of Federate Media, on the front cover - also the author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (which I was impressed with), the book gained a level of trust from me. Whether it lived up to that or not was something that would be determined. I plunged into it with vigor.

The Fourth Dimension. Time. Everyone on the Internet who is taken with virtual worlds speaks of the 3D web, and yet what is known as the 2D web is in fact 3D. The 2D web, more visibly with Web 2.0 related technologies, incorporates time - a component necessary for meaningful discussion. A discussion makes no sense if it is scrambled just as a packet of data makes no sense if it cannot be reconstructed properly where it arrives - and to arrive in a way that this can happen, a sequence is necessary. That sequence is based on parts arriving before other parts: in a relative sense, this demonstrates that time is a component.

The 3D web isn't the future. The 4D web is. While it could be argued that time is accounted for implicitly in the phrases '2D web' and '3D web', such phrases downgrade the importance of time. Not to worry, I won't be the Richard Stallman of time, reminding everyone to say 3D instead of 2D or 4D instead of 3D - but I must point this out because it seems a lot of people simply do not factor time in. Well, anyone's time but their own.

The present social networking sites do not factor in brevity - instead, they seem to encourage quite the opposite because of their business models. The more time you spend on, for example, Facebook, the more time people in your network will spend on the network. That's the crux of it below the bottom line of the number of advertisment impressions and click-throughs. It isn't about making your time management better - it is about making your time management worse. Arguably, there are benefits to be derived from sites such as Facebook - but those benefits are of varying values to different users. Some people might stay there all day. Others may spend less than an hour a day on Facebook.

When Andy Oram posted 'The Behavior Gap: Three Persistent Problems for Internet Technologies', he touched on a few things that I haven't been able to get out of my head through my fingers for some time, and I'm glad that he did write it since it gave me a little more focus on what is a very complicated issue¹. It seems to me that, while approximately 80% of the world has to get online in any meaningful way, we 20% (as of 2008) have hit a glass ceiling.

We 20% have learned that technology can help us. Some of us have even figured out that technology can hinder us, though this requires surviving the geekteens - a technology maturity level that can strike at any point in someone's life. More technology doesn't necessarily mean better, as most mature geeks know and as Steve Talbott wrote of in 'Devices of the Soul'.

We have limitations, and we can take a few different approaches. We have the pessimist way (overly critical), the optimist way (buy my Web 2.0 Shag Rug) and the realist way. I fall into the latter category.

Andy's article points at three major problems:

• We don't know how to handle many-to-many connections.
• We don't know what will happen next in time.
• It's hard to split tasks between systems.

Many Too Many & It's hard to split tasks between systems

Andy writes:

...But the YouTube phenomenon and Web 2.0 assume a many-to-many model. We just don't have efficient techniques for to handling that model, particularly for streaming media. It requires ad-hoc channels that can be erected quickly between people who don't have a pre-existing relationship. Packet switching has taken us amazingly far toward solutions, but current user activity is showing up its limitations.

It's worth noting that many-to-many models are hard for other computer technologies to handle, too. Relational databases offer one-to-many and one-to-one relationships, but have to cobble them together to fake a many-to-many relationship.

The many-to-many model doesn't scale in social terms either. It can be applied metaphorically to real life, where we're used to one-to-many relationships (with centralized government and business institutions) as well as one-to-one relationships. We build up many-to-many relationships in our schools, churches, and neighborhoods, but we don't really treat them as such because we rarely try to manage all the complex interrelationships in these institutions...

I completely agree, and will try to add some value here: Our tools reflect ourselves and technology is no different. In many-to-many relationships, our tools reflect our constraints in being human: We humans do not handle many-to-many very well. We have a tendency to create a focal point or bridge and allow things to filter through that way because we only have so many brain cells to work on a problem at any given time. While some may have more or less ability to handle problems at any given time, we have to cater for the majority. The majority would be something statisticians and economists would happily call the center of the curve. The average, mundane human being who simply wants to make the best use of technology in their own context, be it staying in touch with friends or using the Internet as a looking glass for everything that they want to know.

It seems like O'Reilly Media has gotten more serious about electronic books. As someone who is at the wrong end of large postage stamps, this seems like a pretty big deal to me. Via email, I got this press release:

...With enthusiasm growing for e-reading and with more and more people purchasing books for e-readers, O'Reilly Media, a pioneering technology publisher and trendsetter, announced two new ebook publishing initiatives. This innovative venture brings popular new electronic formats, increased portability, and up-to-the-minute options for reading and enjoying O'Reilly books.

So what's new?

First, starting today, an initial selection of 30 popular O'Reilly titles now come bundled in three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) and are available through oreilly.com--O'Reilly Media's online sales portal. This means when customers buy these ebooks from oreilly.com, they'll have instant access to all three file formats for one affordable price. This also gives consumers the option of purchasing an ebook directly from O'Reilly to read on a Kindle as well as most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Blackberries, and Sony Readers.