Friday 11 July 2008

Web 3.0. It's all about you.

So back to this Web 3.0 story.

The first generation of the web was all around e-commerce and making your inventories available for sale on the web.. winners: ebay, amazon. All this worked really well because no one except for the companies themselves could modify the content of their sites... so company centric, controlled content were at the core of of Web 1.0

The second generation of the web (The Community Strikes Back) saw the rise of the uncontrolled content generation. Blogs allowed the masses to instantly comment, share, communicate, exchange, express, basically participate in the web content, no longer under the corporate control of the few businesses in charge. Everyone could become a critic as well! Imagine those companies having spent millions on fine tuning their product messaging, and here comes the average student from his dormitory slashing through the product in no more time than it would take to mix your gin&tonic... ahhh... So the Web 2.0 is all about the community and the uncontrolled generation of content

Well here comes the web 3.0, leveraging the 1.0 marketplace, the 2.0 community and focusing on the last bit that wasn't addressed properly so far, you, me, the individual itself.

Today's challenge resides in making use of the amazing amount of unstructured content. And the best way to make use of it is to make it relevant to every single person... And one person trust as much his close friends (in the real world) as well as his digital friends (the communities) as well as the professional critics (cf web 1.0 companies)

So Web 3.0 is all about you, your tastes and what you like.

Who do you think will control the future, the companies with large amount of content or the ones able to recommend the right content to the right person, even if the content they own isn't as large? I bet on the last one.

Hello World!

The easiness of starting a new blog (this one took me 21 sec!) is one of the single most important factor in the pace at which the personalized recommendation industry has been growing. Indeed today everyone can be a critic. Well that's nothing new from the past, you could be a critic to your friends, recommending or not to go see a movie. But the main difference today is that you can broadcast your experience to a far wider audience.

This has started to generate quite a bit of problems with the professional critic industry. Like the music industry, they started rebuffing the underground movement, claiming that because they didn't have any proper credentials, Mr Lambda critics weren't as good as theirs. Well why would they? after all, the professionals have been witting them for years and years, know their market sector inside out, know the trends and fashions, places to be and the one to abandons. They even know what we, the un-professionals, are supposed to like. Hence their professional critics are tuned to a very specific ecosystem of readers, market sector, geolocation etc.

But unfortunatly for the professional, I personally care as much for the professional critic as for my friend's recommendation, if not more for the latter. The trust factor! Why would I trust more someone I don't really know as opposed to someone that I know, that I probably had many smashing parties with, seen fantastic movies and tried the best restaurants in town... according to my taste at least.

Well all this to introduce a topic that I've been interested about quite a bit recently, which is the personalized recommendation market, something fascinating, which is the essence of the web 3.0...

I'll come back to it in my following post.

Cheers.

Manu