Hi Frank -
Sure, we can accept the concept of Web 1.0 and 2.0, as arbitrary generational divisions. But we all know that the process of change is a continuum.
People didn't wake up after 1300 AD and say "Holy crap - it's the Renaissance! NOW what do we do?"
"What's next? Fisherman 2.0? Coal Miner 2.0?"
Exactly ;)
Those of us who watched the rise, fall, and resurrection of Netscape (and the accompanying market gyrations around the stock) - and its more successful reincarnation as MS's Internet Explorer - saw some innovative practices, not least of which was giving away the software to create the market. McAffee followed, albeit for a different sort of product. Which strategy exploited the "freeness" of the medium as a distribution mechanism.
Both Google and Skype have used the same technique.
Search engines are hardly a new concept: there used to be many. Is Google a Whole New Thing, or a successful recombination of old ideas, with some tweaks - and a better understanding of what it takes to attain commercial dominance? Mating advertising with a search engine wasn't a new idea, either: it was just done differently, and done better.
Parent to the success of each innovation or recombination, each service and application, is the network itself. Which is, of course, no more than an extension of the air we breathe and the light we see, waves of which allow us to speak, hear, signal and see. The 'net's increasing penetration is the spread of a recombinant communications catalyst spanning print, video, voice, graphics - almost every major medium of human communication.
A huge accelerant to change: a subset of greatly improved communication.
"Remember CB radio, good buddy? Think about those paragons of adolescent social networking, MySpace, Facebook, and others of their ilk. Like television, they've all become a vast wasteland that makes Geraldo Rivera look profound."
CB radio has a parallel with the SMS in that they both evolved a curious code or jargon peculiar to the medium. Broderick Crawford's Highway Patrol probably contributed to universal understanding of The Big Ten Four. OTOH, U R probably aware of how much SMS borrowed from early messaging on the 'net ;)
And CB jargon took something from "hamsters", too... cbgazette.com
It's this constant recombination and reiteration that reminds me so much of Mandelbrot bulbs, and makes one question just how long an Internet Life will be.
Web 2.0? Telco 2.0? Enterprise 2.0 ? Obviously a concept whose time has come, which almost guarantees imminent disappearance of the descriptor's usage by good writers.
Jim |
