Remember, you read it here first. Wolfe's three laws of the brave new Web 2.0 world are: Mobile is the new desktop, the home page is dead, and social networks like Facebook and MySpace presage the media company of the future. These catchy Web 2.0 catch-phrases popped into my head during a heavy week of session-sitting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here's why I'm optimistic that those of us who are ready to embrace the virtual future are going to be in for a fun ride.
These aphorisms are part of my attempt to make sense of the rapidly shifting playing field, in which those of us who've spent the last several years ramping up our blogging efforts -- and patting ourselves on the virtual back for being in the forefront of the new-media revolution -- find all of a sudden that we're no longer quite so cutting edge.
Nope, that title would go to the folks who've put together the powerhouses that are the online social networks. I'm talking about sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and Hi5 (the latter is the Spanish-speaking world's popular destination.) Hence my first new-age Web law:
Social networks are the new media companies.
Only a few months ago, I was mightily perplexed by the popularity of sites like Facebook and MySpace. However, I figured that, after people grew tired of farting around with pictures or movie quizzes (or, for MySpace users, when they reached puberty), they'd move on to "real" sites. You know, sites like this one.
Savvily, the people at Facebook, MySpace et al, appear to have thought of this, too. And they've got a solution. They've opened up their social networks to developers, who can build their own apps and post them so users can put them on their own FB and MS pages. There's even an open API for developers, called OpenSocial, which most of the social nets are supporting, to a greater or lesser extent.
There's another wrinkle, which is that developers can put their own ads inside the social-net apps they build. This is a method of monetizing one's social-app, akin to whatGoogle (NSDQ: GOOG) allows when you drive traffic from your Web site to its Ad-Sense advertisements.
So now kids in Kansas or moms on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have the tools (OpenSocial) and the incentive (ads) to build FB and MS apps. Scarily, for the Time-Warners of the world, there's nothing to keep these table-top developers for building apps which are more popular and attract more users those from the big guys.
Indeed, in one important way, the pimply faced developer hordes have an advantage over the legacy media types. Namely, they're not encumbered by corporate planning cycles. Or, as those Royal Bank of Scotland ads put it, pace Steve Jobs, "just do it."
This doesn't mean that traditional media companies, which have spent the last five years transitioning pell-mell from print to online, are necessarily screwed. But it does mean that they get no Brownie points for the work they've done thus far. All they get is a swift kick in the social-networking pants and -- if they're smart -- notice that they've got to rush to embrace yet again another new model. That would be one that's built around very lean and rapid software development.
This brings us to Wolfe's second new rule, which is :
The Home Page Is Dead.
(OK, I'm a bit ahead of the curve here, but this is beginning to happen already.) Think people will always come to wearetheauthoritativedestination.com just because they've always come there? Hey, the people who publish the print edition of The New York Times think that, too.
No one, and I can't stress this enough, gives a shit about your brand. They care about what user experience you deliver to them. This obtains whether you're in the physical world selling a product, or online serving up content.
Take Ford as a prime example. The company was dying, not only because it was building the wrong mix of products, but because no one wanted its cars. New CEO Alan Mulally is turning things around, largely because he's refreshed the product line with attractive looking autos.
Then there's one of my favorites, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), which makes the Blackberry. Here's a product which is wildly successful, in spite of its anti-sexiness. Why? Because it deliver the apps users want to use, how they want to use it (great e-mail, reliably.)
I know, you're gonna counter that Apple has this whole idea of branding locked down. Maybe more than most, but come back after the Google Android phone is released, especially if Apple's iPhone doesn't keep pace.
My closing thought on the traditional home page being dead is a quick word about what's going to replace it. The new go-to destination of users won't be home pages but instead will be Web apps. That is, users will access content -- news, blogs, video -- and interact with your (their) communities via apps, hopefully apps that you develop and sell ads around.
So what are you waiting for? Get going; start developing your apps now. And don't be a planning deer caught in the Web 2.0 headlights, either. Develop lots of apps, quickly. Post them up and don’t obsess over them. Your users will tell you which ones they like; those should be the ones you invest in and develop further. (What do you do with this others? Simple. Throw them away.)
This brings me to my final thought, which is where we came in:
Mobile Is The New Desktop.
All this talk about the rise of social networks, the impending death of Web sites envisioned as traditional home-page destinations, and the need for lithe, rapid development points towards one final thought, which is perhaps bigger than all the others put together.
Namely, mobile is (more correctly, will be, but very soon) the new desktop. For all its flaws (most, in the scheme of things, relatively minor) Apple's iPhone, like the iPod before it, presages a new model of user interaction with technology.
One pundit at Web 2.0, Brian Fling, put it more succinctly. He sees the iPhone as a new medium in and of itself, as significant as radio, television, and the Internet itself have been. Moving forward, the iPhone itself won't be important per se because many phones will be iPhone-like. But Steve Jobs has paved a path which others, including /Android andNokia (NYSE: NOK), are beginning to follow.
Why is the phone-plus-browser-plus-email such a big Web 2.0 deal? The game-changer is not so much its functionality as the simple fact that it's. . . always on. All of us who've been repelled by our compulsion to send work e-mails at midnight understands this phenomenon. When you think about it, the Smartphone is the first device that fulfills McLuhan's prediction that electronics will become an extension of the human nervous system. We're getting there, although it's hard to see, since we don't have the benefit of hindsight.
Me, I'm not nervous about it, which isn't to say I don't have concerns. Mostly, I intend to participate in the mobile-apps revolution. Somebody's gotta do some stuff for us adults, right?
As the GTA IV is just days away, everyone is trying to guess how the new title will shift the numbers in the everlasting battle of gaming consoles.