There’s an interesting Economist story about the Chinese phenomenon of ‘team buying’. It is an activity whereby a group of people interested in buying, say, electronics meets up at a specified time, goes to a shop and uses the volume of the mob to negotiate a good deal. You know, in the non-violent way.
The reminded me of an earlier musing about the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon. It’s pretty clear that the exciting thing about the new development is the increasing role of the user community in providing content. After all, last.fm is just a database with smart cross-lookups. What makes it revolutionary is the fact that users fill the database with huge volumes of information.
Volume is important. Web 2.0 works because it views the bulk of data, and the unmanageability thereof, as an asset. Tagging might have come about because people are too lazy to use taxonomy and semantic metadata, or because the sheer amount of information made it unrealistic for complicated metadata to be added. The free-form nature of tags means that you’re not guaranteed to find everything relevant to your search. But if there’s enough to choose from, it does not actually matter if you can’t find everything. You just need to find enough.
When you buy a newspaper, you pay for the physical item and the information, but also for the service. This service is that of the newspaper deciding what’s important and preselecting a number of news items that form a mix of topics characteristic for that paper. Similarly, any time you buy something, you also pay the retailer for a service. This is the service of acquiring a set of products, making them available to you in small quantities, and making you aware of them. The retailer’s markup is his price for providing the service.
The "post-information society" changes the status quo. The responsibility of selecting and analysing information is already moving from newspaper editors to a mixture of bloggers, Wikinews-like services, and technology such as RSS feeds. In the same way, team buying makes the traditional retailer redundant. By organising themselves and by using their numbers as an asset, buying teams no longer need to pay to the retailer for finding buyers for his products.
This is what all services in the "post-information society" have in common. It’s the users of the services that provide the meat. But because of that, the number of people using the service must reach some critical mass before the service can be usable. This is in contrast with how the Web used go be. Before, you could run a special interest website for a small group of people. Suddenly, social applications require a larger userbase before they can be useful. Examples exist even in the old Web: eBay works because it’s so huge. There’s always someone who is selling whatever you happen to need.
It remains to be seen how the size requirement affects the range of applications available. Is the future of the Web in a few huge companies?
Everyone must have a view on Web 2.0. This is mine.
There’s an interesting Economist story about the Chinese phenomenon of ‘team buying’. It is an activity whereby a group of people interested in buying, say, electronics meets up at a specified time, goes to a shop and uses the volume of the mob to negotiate a good deal. You know, in the non-violent way.
The reminded me of an earlier musing about the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon. It’s pretty clear that the exciting thing about the new development is the increasing role of the user community in providing content. After all, last.fm is just a database with smart cross-lookups. What makes it revolutionary is the fact that users fill the database with huge volumes of information.
Volume is important. Web 2.0 works because it views the bulk of data, and the unmanageability thereof, as an asset. Tagging might have come about because people are too lazy to use taxonomy and semantic metadata, or because the sheer amount of information made it unrealistic for complicated metadata to be added. The free-form nature of tags means that you’re not guaranteed to find everything relevant to your search. But if there’s enough to choose from, it does not actually matter if you can’t find everything. You just need to find enough.
When you buy a newspaper, you pay for the physical item and the information, but also for the service. This service is that of the newspaper deciding what’s important and preselecting a number of news items that form a mix of topics characteristic for that paper. Similarly, any time you buy something, you also pay the retailer for a service. This is the service of acquiring a set of products, making them available to you in small quantities, and making you aware of them. The retailer’s markup is his price for providing the service.
The "post-information society" changes the status quo. The responsibility of selecting and analysing information is already moving from newspaper editors to a mixture of bloggers, Wikinews-like services, and technology such as RSS feeds. In the same way, team buying makes the traditional retailer redundant. By organising themselves and by using their numbers as an asset, buying teams no longer need to pay to the retailer for finding buyers for his products.
This is what all services in the "post-information society" have in common. It’s the users of the services that provide the meat. But because of that, the number of people using the service must reach some critical mass before the service can be usable. This is in contrast with how the Web used go be. Before, you could run a special interest website for a small group of people. Suddenly, social applications require a larger userbase before they can be useful. Examples exist even in the old Web: eBay works because it’s so huge. There’s always someone who is selling whatever you happen to need.
It remains to be seen how the size requirement affects the range of applications available. Is the future of the Web in a few huge companies?