It is hard to imagine that five years ago, neither YouTube, Facebook nor Twitter existed. But even then, as sites like Google, Amazon, Wikipedia and craigslist flourished, the characteristics common to successful second-generation Web businesses were becoming apparent: Their value was facilitated by software and created collectively by and for a community of connected users. These sites leveraged the Web not simply as a means to publish static documents but for the first time as a platform--which was significant in its generative properties as the personal computer was for desktop applications. The new sites also sparked a revolution in business, culture, society and, most recently, government.
Web 2.0, the name we gave this phenomenon in 2004 when we named our new conference, turns five on Oct. 5 (the anniversary of the first Web 2.0 Summit). In our ongoing quest to understand where technology is taking us, the milestone serves as an opportunity not so much to look back but to examine the landscape ahead. Whereas the advent of Web 2.0 marked a profound shift in the meaning of the Web, this next phase is less a new direction than an exploration of what becomes possible when the building blocks of Web 2.0 (such as participation, collective intelligence and so on) increase by orders of magnitude.
We call this step Web Squared.
It is not simply the popularity of Web 2.0 offerings that accounts for this increase, though the hockey stick growth of platforms like Twitter and Facebook is certainly dramatic. There's also a qualitative change happening as the Web becomes more closely integrated with the real world via sensor-based smart phone applications. Web Squared is another way of saying "Web meets World."
The first generation of Web 2.0 applications harnessed the collective intelligence of users typing on keyboards. Whether it was links and clicks (Google), articles and edits of shared knowledge (Wikipedia) or votes (Digg), the application was driven by explicit human actions. Five years in, collective intelligence applications are increasingly driven by cascades of sensor data being thrown off by devices, often without explicit human intervention. Today’s smartphones contain microphones and cameras, as well as motion, proximity, location, and direction sensors. They have their own eyes, ears, and sense of touch. Revolutionary new applications connect those senses to cloud databases and programs running on massive server farms.
The scale, nature and speed of the data change what we mean by collective intelligence. Consider the obvious use case: internet-connected GPS applications that have built-in feedback loops, reporting your speed and using it to estimate your arrival time based on its knowledge of traffic ahead of you.
Where the Web Squared world gets really interesting, though, is when applications use all the senses of a device, coordinating them much like the human brain coordinates our senses, to draw conclusions that would be difficult with one sense alone. The Google Mobile Application for the iPhone detects the movement of the phone to your ear, and automatically goes into speech recognition mode. It uses its microphone to listen to your voice and decodes what you say by referencing not only its speech recognition algorithms but what it expects to hear you say based on the most frequent search terms in Google's search database. The phone also makes good use of GPS or cell-tower triangulation to detect its location. A search for "pizza," for example, returns the result you most likely want: the name, location and contact information for the three nearest pizza restaurants.
In this sense, the Web Squared era is an era of augmented reality, arriving (like the sensor revolution) stealthily, in more pedestrian clothes than we expected. Our devices can tell us what we're seeing (like the Wikitude travel guide application for Android which uses the camera, location data, compass and image recognition to tell you what monument you're looking at), what we're not seeing (like Darkslide, which shows you photos of what's near you), what we're hearing (CDDB, the database that recognizes music tracks by the sequence of track lengths on a CD), and what we're not hearing (looking up recent Tweets near you is like incredibly powerful eavesdropping). Our devices can also tell us what our friends think of what we're seeing: the folks at GraffitiGeo, which combines restaurant reviews with social gameplay, are working on an iphone app that will allow users to point the phone's camera at a venue and see an overlay of relevant comments about it from other users. That means our world will have "information shadows." Augmented reality amounts to information shadows made visible.
There are implications far beyond uber-convenient restaurant reviews. As sensors become ubiquitous, they will create new business opportunities and transform existing businesses. We are already seeing new classes of applications for health and fitness, from NikePlus, Phillips DirectLife and Fitbit on the consumer end of the spectrum to real-time outpatient monitoring.
Surprises abound. The "smart grid" will use sensors to manage energy distribution, but it will also reveal new data for marketers. (Researchers combing smart meter data discovered that every device in the home has a unique energy signature, making it possible to determine the make and model of each major appliance in the home.) Face recognition won't just help us catalog our photos or create a surveillance society, it will help us measure the effectiveness of video advertising or warn us when we're nodding off at the wheel.
The other factor driving huge volumes of new data is the rise of "real time," as in real-time information. Most easily seen in the always-on ambient information flow of Twitter, or when watching your progress on a GPS map, the real implications of real time are in applications with an automated decision loop: financial market applications, search advertising (where Google holds a separate ad-price auction on every search, 7 billion or 8 billion times a day), or at companies like Wal-Mart, whose integrated supply chain kicks off a reorder from the manufacturer and resupply from the store, only seconds after an item is purchased.
In such applications, intelligent algorithms matter: Google's PageRank algorithm famously sees every link to a Web site as a vote. Similarly WalMart understands that every purchase is a vote. Each of these companies outperforms its competition by understanding and building real-time decision loops. Web Squared companies are infused with IT. Nicholas Carr was wrong: IT does matter.
Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. He can also be found as @timoreilly on Twitter and is the co-author of The Twitter Book .
Jennifer Pahlka is founder of Code for America, a new nonprofit that recruits Web 2.0 developers to build applications for city governments. She is also the general manager of the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events at TechWeb, co-chairing the Web 2.0 Expo since its inception.
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