People are the only thing that Web 2.0 is trying to sell.
[+] Web 2.0 is not about either media or content publishing business
Many Web 2.0 operators have wishful thinking about what the Web 2.0 spirit stands for. For early players starting as Blog service providers, they are still stuck with the Web 1.0 mindset. As to the new entrants to the market, they may be too obsessed with the idea of user generated content.
First of all, Web 2.0 is not media, yet many Blog service providers are doing "content publishing" business. Traditional news websites have editors do publishing; Blog service providers leave the work of content generation to bloggers.
Take Blogchina, one of the earliest Blogs in China. It has been stick to the pattern of inviting columnists to generate content for users for all these years. The website stills see content as the core of its business, which is nothing different from Web 1.0.
Isn't Web 2.0 the so-called grassroots media that should encourage users to participate in content generation? How can it be irrelevant to content? My point is, in Web 1.0, content is for browsing, while in Web 2.0, content is a tool for building relations.
In other words, in Web 1.0 era, the product is information. Whether for a news website or search engine, everything is centered on "how to cope with information explosion." Whereas in Web 2.0, the product is "relations" and the question is "how to cope with weak relations" and "how to deal with relations explosion."
To put it simpler, what Web 2.0 is trying to sell is people. In Web 1.0 era, we need content experts to help us run our websites; in Web 2.0, we need sociologists to enlighten us on how people interact in the virtual society.
[+] Anyone has the desire "to be recognized"
In 1999, the Internet company, I worked for hired a guy majoring in library science to handle search engine classification and an editor (who used to work in the press) to take care of content channels. At that time, Internet companies needed such specialists to process information, which was the main concern then.
In Web 2.0 era, the ultimate purpose of website service is centered on "how to represent an individual." Speaking of individual human beings, we cannot but talk about their needs. In his theory of "Hierarchy of Needs," Maslow, a famous psychologist, contended that people have five layers of needs: physiological need, the need for safety, for love/belonging, for esteem, and for self-actualization, from the lowest to the highest in the hierarchy. The first two can be seen as basic needs (for survival) and the last two are social needs.
If we apply this idea to the Internet world, we'll find that services such as Blogs or even online photo albums are to satisfy basic needs only. That is, Blogging and uploading photos are more like some kind of announcements saying, "Hey, I'm here," rather than "individual publishing."
Web users need a place on the Net to announce her existence, a place of her own, and a peaceful haven of her soul. This is a place where she can save her everything, every record she has produced including photo albums, diaries, and messages, everything that proves her existence to the world.
Here comes the problem. Most bloggers are lonely bloggers with very few visitors to their Blogs. They keep sending out messages, "hey, I am here," but rarely get attention. They just linger on and on in solitude.
[+] The next stage of Web 2.0: building and managing relations
Many Blog service providers have noticed such problem and moved on to the next stage - social needs. All of us wish to be recognized and accepted. How operators should guide their users to know each other? Users need a cue to start a talk, and all the content can be the cue to start the talk.
In the US, there is service like MyBlogLog to allow bloggers to see who have visited their Blogs. In China, Blog service providers have turned such service into a basic function so that every bloggers can know who their visitors are.
By consciously guiding people to establish relations, Blogs have gone beyond the extent of individual media. Bloggers may go visit their visitors' Blogs, and by this way the bonds between users start to build. Good Blog service providers should try every way to allow such bond to form.
Some Blog service providers push good Blog articles to the homepages through referencing by other users or editors. Such doing is nothing different from content publishing in Web 1.0 and can create only at most 5% famous bloggers.
It is the responsibility of Blog service providers to "give everyone the chance to be noticed naturally," which is the secret why Mixi in Japan and 51.com in China can come to where they are today. They have realized that Blogs have little to do with content publishing since long ago. Blogs are the basic layer, on top of which social networking takes place.
What Sina Blog (blog.sina.com) does is create few famous stars by taking advantage of bandwagon effects. But at the end of the day, only very few become stars, and most bloggers remain unnoticed. Stars are tools to generate content and traffic, so such websites are not Web 2.0; they are Web 1.0 content websites.
[+] "Pure sharing" never exists
It may be a bit abstract to apply Maslow's theory, but it does provide a good framework to review different types of Web 2.0 websites and gauge their potential. Simply put, the hierarchical layers of needs must be satisfied according to their order. Shortcuts are not allowed or it will lead to bottlenecks.
There are a lot of Web 2.0 websites designed to build a mechanism for users to "share." The content to share include bookmarks, news, events, gourmets' comments and shopping discount, etc. Yet there are only few people come out to share.
It might not occur to these operators before that sharing does not happen naturally. People tend to think of themselves prior to others. So, website operators must first seek to fulfill users' basic needs to sustain themselves, and think about the issue of sharing later.
Take the function of social bookmark (like del.icio.us in the US) for example. It has to be a tool for organizing information first, then for sharing information with others, and lastly, for guiding people to interact.
Online bookmarks are not about enabling everyone to dig a URL so it can be the headline on the homepage, but a tool for building connections among people. Bookmarks, along with the tags, collected by users attached are very much "description about themselves." The point is not about what the content is, but who they are as represented via the content.
It would be less difficult for users to build relations once the description about these "people" is available. Web 2.0 website operators can create more opportunities for people with similar or different attributes to get to know each other by making use of Tags and the method of Data Mining. Therefore, as we can see, social bookmarks are yet to enter the next phase.
[+] Next-phase issue for search engine
The business methods mentioned above are to cope with the problem of "weak relations." However, another problem - "relations explosion" - also deserves our attention. When you join more Web 2.0 websites, the management of the relation chain will also become more difficult.
I once said that in Web 2.0, the interpersonal communication cost would decline. Yet as more Web 2.0 websites introduce the idea of relation chain, the cost to find out a certain type of people or even a certain person has become very high.
For example, if you want to find someone in the U.S., you may need to go to social networking websites like MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, and thousands of other Web 2.0 websites. Even finding a certain type of people, such as enthusiasts about the Chinese Ming dynasty, can be difficult.
The ability to search among relation chains is the challenge the next-generation search engine should address. The issue in Web 1.0 is the high cost to get precise information in a time of information explosion, which has been successfully resolved by search engine. And now, relations explosion is the next issue to be settled.
2007/05/20 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )
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