In the past two weeks (or so) I've done interviews with PROFIT Magazine, Canadian Business and VISA's Small Business Resource website. Topic? Broadly speaking, Web 2.0 or elements of it and what the heck it's all about. That's right. It's November 2006, and leading Canadian publications (or more specifically, their Editors) are just now starting to ask "Soooo, what's this Web 2.0 thing?" To which some might say "Where've you been the past 4 years?" But, if you believe this stat from Zoomerang reported by BusinessWeek that 79% of marketers have never even heard the term Web 2.0, you'd be getting closer to the truth.
All of the "is Web 2.0 over and done with?" chattering is simply completely right. If the Regular Folk are now tweaking to it, Web 2.0 as The Next Big Thing simply has to be close to having run it's course, and the bleeding edgers had better get on with figuring out the NEXT Next Big Thing. For the rest of us? Well, let's get ready for the party to...start.
What, you say? But Stuie, you just said it's over. Yup. As New Shiny Orb, it is close to done. But, as Real Thing it might be just starting. And zowie that could be big.
I mean, c'mon, remember when people used to talk about "e-commerce" as a special thing? I used to chuckle then - it's not like people ever called having a call centre "phone commerce" or a store "brick commerce" - it was just new and the leading edgers got there first. Eventually, most people understood that these were all just part of "commerce" and got over it. Bank machines, DVD players, mobile phones, digital cameras. Categories mature and eventually go mass. And maybe we are seeing the start of that happening here, too. If so, that means that the real innovation (and at scale, maybe, too) and real money are still ahead of us.
Web 2.0 won't be a New Shiny Orb indefinitely, just like nothing ever is. Elements of it will just become part of how stuff is done. Big companies and governments will start to use parts of it (like mashups, web services, blogs and wikis), folks who never joined the computer club will find themselves using elements of it without realizing (like adding a comment, reading a user generated review or sharing a photo), and yet another wave of technological change will have washed over us.
Future users will likely never know that there ever was something called Web 2.0, but their lives will be better for it anyway. And that's just fine, I think. It's not like it's anything new.
