I finished John Battelle’s The Search a couple of days ago and I must say that as good as it is I come out a little bit different on the future of the web:
If you’ve been paying attention to the web it seems that Web 2.0 is, like most sequels, just a way to push us onto the third chapter. The technologies emerging in Web 2.0 are all (almost all) geared towards two goals - getting users to publish content or finding user generated content and aggregating it. But that content is fragmented - you might have 1000 bookmarks on del.icio.us, a blog on blogger, 10 reviews on Lopico, 50 diggs, maybe a calendar, and some productivity tools. On the other side you’ll have email, and a news reader - and those are pretty much the only ways that we have information delivered to us without visiting websites. The next obvious step is to bring all of these into one place - and this is where Edgeio actually makes sense. As I see it the homepage of the future will actually be 5 or 6 pages combining both your private and public information. But the key is all of your data will remain in one place. A future homepage will likely consist of:
- An RSS reader on one tab
- all of your web conversations (email, blog comments, chats, etc.)
- your blog
- calendar and productivity tools
- bookmarks (maybe), and
- a personal page last (something like a resume - or a page about your business).
Instead of setting out to find content, the content will come to you - and instead of going out to other sites to spread your thoughts, you’ll publish to them through your blog - or other means. The data you push will be aggregated back to you, and to others searching for the subject of your data. But searching won’t be like it is today, you’ll search for something, and rather than get a list of pages to visit, you’ll get strictly the data presented in the format of your choosing - visiting the site will merely be an option.This is a big leap from where we are now, and it may never become a reality, but looking at the technologies that are becoming ever more prevalent it certainly seems possible. The question then becomes if this does happen what happens to the business of the web? What brands survive?
Most likely two types of brands will survive 1) those that can create the portals to harness all of your information - Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. and 2) the nano brands. Nano brands - things such as yourself, or a local business. These will be the pushers of content, intermediaries will no longer be necessary; a small publisher and an aggregator is all that we’ll need. You’ll be able to generate revenue either from pushing ads in your RSS feeds, or selling things through your blog (ala Edgeio). You might not look at the web as a place to make money, maybe you look at as an advertising tool. A local business with a blog would likely look at it this way. Local business blogs can and will be used as promotional tools - the business publishes a promotion (and tags it appropriately), an aggregator finds it, and it’s presented to the right people.
Before this happens however, there are a number of intermediary steps that need to take place (Lopromo is one of those steps). Maybe we’ll never see this web - but I’m guessing that we will.
Anyway, Battelle’s book is great and I should have read it sooner. If you haven’t read it, buy it or let me know and you can borrow my copy.