Web 5.0: Face Time

We are still mostly Web 1.0. And Web 2.0 has been the in thing. I imagined a Web 3.0: A Web 3.0 Manifesto. Web 3.0 is when the web becomes a utility. How often do you get excited about electricity? I have left Web 4.0 to mean things I can't imagine, let alone deliver. And I am thinking Web 5.0 is going to be face time.

Already social networking is all the rage online. The web is about people. But the technology is still largely clumsy. It will get better. But what if it keeps getting better and better until it is at its absolutely best and there is little room for improvement. At that point you realize that all along what you had really been looking for was face time. Even screen time was about face time.

That face time is what Web 5.0 will be about. And I am talking about face time as technology, almost. As in there will be a scientific approach to it. Assault is illegal right now. Racist comments will be put in the same category as assault in a Web 5.0 world.

In a Web 5.0 world, we will have achieved levels of mental and emotional health that we have achieved today in terms of physical health, in terms of what we know. We will have found a cure for depression and suicide the way we have found cures for polio. Happiness can be imagined as something always-on, like always-on broadband, because sources of unhappiness can be so precisely pinpointed.

It is ridiculous to me to watch people really really struggle with some of their painful past experiences. All they have to do is to relive it, be able to articulate it, and the pain goes away, the puss comes out, and the wound is soon gone.



That Web 5.0 imagination has implications for business practices in a Web 2.0, Web 3.0 world. It is possible to try and create Web 5.0 style group dynamics in a corporation of today. Such a corporation can be invented. That corporation would be 100% meritocratic, and it would be the workplace of the post-ISMs individual. That corporation would think in terms of pure work that is delightful to those who participate in it.

Levels of that Web 5.0 style face time can be achieved in loving relationships today. That perhaps has always been possible.

A Web 3.0 Manifesto
DL21C Events: High Class Acts

In The News

Yahoo's Next Search: A New CEO? BusinessWeek Panama's patina has officially worn off. .....attributed the decline to the phaseout of Microsoft's search ad business and rising costs of driving traffic to Yahoo sites. ..... "The writing is on the wall," wrote Jackson Securities analyst Brian Bolan, speculating that CFO Decker could soon take the helm. "Another quarter with a bottom-line miss will be the last one for Semel." ...... Yahoo expected double-digit improvements in the amount of money it generates per search by the second half of the year. .... Google garnered more than 64% of searches in March. It had slightly more than 58% of searches for the same month last year. ... Yahoo's search share dipped slightly from 22.3% in March, 2006, to 21.3% this year...... Google's brand name and constant innovations in search have proven difficult for competitors to overcome. ...... Yang boasted that Yahoo was the Internet's largest display advertising network
Sprint: Say Bon Voyage to Vonage Vonage, now locked in a patent dispute with Verizon ..... Sprint, which also alleges patent infringement by Vonage. ...... its customer base of 2.2 million is expected to shrink at a rate of more than 27% a year ...... Sprint Nextel has been trying to transform itself into a wireless-only company. ...... In 2006, Sprint spun off its local calling business into a company now called Embarq (EQ). Today, 85% of Sprint sales come from wireless services....... in 2010, 44 million Americans will use Web-calling services, up from 10.3 million last year.
The Marshal of MySpace
BlackBerry service being restored
Google: The Ad Dominator? Google already controls about two-thirds of the roughly $7.7 billion expected to be spent on online search advertising this year ..... the $3.75 billion market for online display advertising—the multimedia ads found in a fixed spot on a Web page ....... "FOG"—"Fear of Google."
Executives Remain Wary of Web 2.0 Instead, they're putting their resources behind technologies that enable automation and networking ..... Web services, including software that enables systems to communicate with each other ...... Collective intelligence, which attempts to tap the wisdom of crowds to make decisions ..... Peer-to-peer networking, a technique for efficiently sharing music, video, or text files ..... social networking .. MySpace and Facebook .... RSS .... podcasts .... wikis ..... blogs .... mash-ups ..... in a knowledge economy where companies remain hierarchical in structure, knowledge is power ..... people with heavy knowledge tend to keep that for themselves ...... companies serious about embracing these collaborative technologies will need to find a new incentive system for employees. ...... Baby boomers, who still make up the majority of the workforce, are used to picking up the phone.
iPhone: Harder to Build than Apple Thought The cell phone "contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device"
Toshiba's Flashy New Look at Chips The plunge in global chip prices over the past year is enough to make any semiconductor executive nervous. .... He's betting that laptop PC makers will shift to a hybrid of hard disk drives and flash memory. .... consumers are likely to snap up the next-generation HD-DVD recorders and players, further fueling chip demand. ..... The demand for nuclear reactors in China, India, and even the U.S. seems real and lasting....... hoping for a resurgence in demand later this year, due to Apple's iPhone.......
The High-Tech Home of Tomorrow "There is no doubt that the way we live will be different in the future," Gates said at the time. "The advances in PC technology and low-cost communications are bringing a revolution."
VCs Aim to Out-Angel the Angels Khosla investments range from $100,000 to $25 million, in areas including Internet technology and clean energy.
The End of a 1,400-Year-Old Business Kongo Gumi's case suggests that it's a good idea to operate in a stable industry. ..... cited the company's flexibility in selecting leaders as a key factor in its longevity ...... the practice of sons-in-law taking the family name when they joined the family firm. ...... mingle elements of conservatism and flexibility ...... switched temporarily to crafting coffins during World War II. ..... Despite its incredible history, it was a set of ordinary circumstances that brought Kongo Gumi down at last. ...... during the 1980s bubble economy in Japan, the company borrowed heavily to invest in real estate ...... social changes in Japan brought about declining contributions to temples ....... in 2006, the end arrived. The company's borrowings had ballooned to $343 million and it was no longer possible to service the debt. ....... evolve as business conditions require, but don't get carried away with temporary enthusiasms and sacrifice financial stability for what looks like an opportunity
The 10 Worst Corporate Practices
The World's Most Livable Cities
Asia's Most Livable Cities
The Coming Virtual Web more realistic, interactive, and social ..... Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash in 1992 ..... The metaverse, as Stephenson called it, was essentially the Internet. .... the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft, which is revolutionizing online games with sophisticated graphics and complex team strategy. ..... There, Entropia Universe, and Second Life ..... online games and virtual economies. ..... virtual worlds are inherently social settings. "You go up to an avatar and you know there's a real person on the other end" ...... social activity dominates what people want to do online. ...... the 3D Internet ..... many people don't even have personal computers that can handle the often heavy processing demands of virtual worlds. The amount of data required by 3D environments also can tax even high-speed Internet connections. ...... 3D excels for a number of applications, such as medical scans, architecture, and chemical modeling, most information is best accessed and analyzed in more mundane, 2D fashion. ....... Dozens of universities are conducting classes and other activities inside Second Life. At Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., for instance, some freshmen are taking the English 104 composition course partly inside the world, writing about field trips they take inside Second Life. A sign of how compelling the notion is: The first class drew 300 applicants for 18 slots. ........ inject real-world richness into online business negotiations and collaboration ...... people are more influential when they look directly at their counterpart ..... PCs need the benefit of a few more rounds of graphics-chip improvements, as well as faster broadband speeds.

Search: Much Is Lacking

Search as is is not good enough. If you can't find what you are looking for, as often happens. The user is not in control enough.

Search is especially poor on the multimedia front. You have to find a particular site, and then search around inside that site, often you have to be a registered user to make use of the stuff offering.

There is no one place where you can go to search through all photos online, no one place to look for audio and video clips, all of them, no way you can zero in like you might zero in onto a map, zoom in, zoom out.

It would be nice to be able to zero in on content providers based on their geographical location. That would really help.

There is not enough standardization. All of the web is not being shown as one search space. Participating sites would benefit. If you make it easier for users to find you, that is good business, right?

Ad offerings will have to get creative if the ad model is to be the primary revenue generator. Tiny ads. This photo brought to you by Coke. Can you say that in an inch in length, and 1/10th that in width, maybe in less? Of course, you can see the Coke logo which, if you click on takes you to the Coke website, perhaps.

Multimedia search as it stands is primitive.

1. Make it super easy for users to create and store media.
   
2. Make it super easy for users to find media.
   
3. Make it super easy for users to share and consume media, to display media on their own sites.
   

So the emphasis has to be on standardization of search so as to make it as easy as possible for search to happen. Maybe content providers and search engines should actively collaborate to that end. And the way to maximize sharing is to rely on the ad model. The average user wishes to be able to display for "free." And that is where the big money is, in the "free" zone.

Say if I took a photo, and uploaded it at some photo sharing site like Flickr, and I had the option to let just about anyone to display that image, as long as I could have that little link ad, that maybe links back to my own site, I would be okay. What about you?

Revver has a pretty good model for video.

Textbooks are game. Textbooks also have to be offered like media. Ad supported. Maybe disable copy and paste, at the author's discretion.

The average web user is going to want to produce content. Right now search is chaos. What is the GPS version of web search?

Advanced search options need to get much more intuitive.

Google is huge. It is an elephant. As it grows bigger, it is going to get less nimble. That will create huge markets for niche search. One size will not fit all.

Redefine search.

What am I looking for? How long does it take me to find it?



Some combination of machine search and social search might also work, especially when the end user is in control as to the degree of it.

It is to Google's advantage that it also provides platforms for content creation, like Blogger.

Just like it does with text, a good search engine should be able to help you search through multimedia without the multimedia sites actively collaborating. Multimedia sites should get indexed as they spring up, and they could spring up anywhere, any part of the globe.

Multimedia in English has been problem enough. The problem is compounded when you demand - as you should - that the multimedia search has to be language neutral. The machine should be able to understand any media in any language and offer it to you in your language of choice. That has to be the goal.

But first search has to get language neutral for text. Multimedia will be step two.

What if you are not necessarily looking for the most popular and most linked to and most visited sites to show up at the top. Some of the best sites for what you are looking for might be on page 350 or worse. How will you ever find them?

The advanced search option is not advanced enough, and it should not be a separate page where you basically have to fill out a form, it should be as intuitive as simple search. You tweak a few things here and there and you are ready to go.

Also how do you make it easy for people to do mashups and still not destroy the ad business model? How do you make RSS stuff really simple, as the name promises but has not delivered?

Create content. Consume content. The netizen demands those two basic functions.

And my pet peeve of all: why can't you "blog" in mathematical symbols? Like you can find chess players to play chess with at Yahoo Games, you should be able to collaborate on mathematical work. Just do a search and find them.

What does the netizen want? That will be a perennial question. It will still be asked a hundred years from now.

Remember that adage from the last dot com bust, that a site is all page hits and no revenue? Looks like page hits are all that matter after all. It was not a bad business model to start with. Just a little too early.

A Web 3.0 Manifesto
Dell, HP, Apple
Google Books: Primitive
The Next Search Engine
Memo To Bill Gates
Google And Languages
Internet Phones, Video Blogging, Nano
Google: Poised To Be The Number One Software Company In The World