Conches

Change.org Idea: Limit Media Consolidation

At the urging of Arthur Codington, via a post on Facebook, I recently commented on a Change.org idea.

Limit Media Consolidation

We need more voices in the media. Establish policies that limit the number of radio/tv stations one company can own. Create incentives that give voice to perspectives we're not currently hearing in the mainstream media.

My comment is attached here (and on change.org), please go over to the change.org idea to post yours

Social Impact Metrics

I just wrote a post over at the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Blog on Social Impact Metrics.

http://blogs.salesforce.com/nonprofit/2008/12/social-impact-a.html

What I think Twitter's Business Model Should Be

I Twitter. A lot. I read a recent blog post by Nick Bilton at O'Reilly on Twitter's potential business model. Essentially Nick recommends highly personalized "smart" advertising via Twitter. 

"@nickbilton, 45 other Twitters in Brooklyn love the MINI Cooper, they say it is easy to park in your area and great on gas. Check it out here."

While this is probably inevitable at some level, It would be really unfortunate and, I think, it misses the value of Twitter all together.  I have been writing about how I think Web 3.0 should be defined, characterizing web3 as uniquely user centric. I believe Twitter could be an interesting example of this if some new development happens.  That new dev is what I want to write about.

So, Twitter needs a business model.  Instead of creating another advertising delivery platform I would like them to figure out how to leverage their product by providing deeper services through new development.

Some ideas:

Compete with Yammer and provide powerful organization focused functionality.

"White label" Twitter to provide features for specific communities that are rooted in fee for service websites.  This is very powerful if these communities stay very porous where they can be discovered by Twitter users at large.  The driver to join is more about access to content than it is introductions to new Twitters.  Some examples are:

• last.fm
• ancestry.com
  
• salesforce.com
  
• Amazon.com (product and web service communities)
• GlobalGiving.org, Kiva.org, Ashoka, etc.
  
• Software or other product user communities independent from but sponsored by the the corp
  
• other...

Buy / Compete with MrTweet.net helping users find convergence with like minds, or even more interestingly, discover shades of grey or promote difference to fight agains the preaching to the choir or tribes mentality.

The User Centric Web

In my last post I blathered on about what I thought should characterize Web 3.0.  This time I want to quickly look at a handful of sites that I think are great examples of what the web should be.

PAAS

Providing a "roll your own" web platform is defintely a hallmark of the user centric web.  Some notables here are Amazon (S3, EC2, etc), Google Apps, Salesforce.com, etc.  These platforms for solutions.  They require an "initiative" with something resembling a business model.  These platforms can be molded to create interactive environments for other users to interact with.  These new tools are definitely a democratizing force in web development analogous to what the handheld video camera and iMovie did for video production.

The User Centric Web

Web 2.0 focuses on interactivity it tended to be about creating environments for Ttribes or consumption cults.  Web 2.0 is primarily a way for consumers to design their consumption.  The next iteration of the web will do better than Crowd Sourcing, it will facilitate individuals in creating value and it will provide tools for that value to be discovered.  Some great examples are:

Web 3.0: WE can't let THEM decide it for US

Here is how Wikipedia defines it:

Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web'—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.

Nova Spivack defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously including:...

This stuff makes great sense and it is a logical extension of web 2.0; actually, I would suggest that it IS web 2.0.  We will see the rise the semantic web and various sense making tools will emerge to help us filter and discover.  However, what I see in the definitions above is really, really, really interactive television where the USER has great control of the information that they can digest.  What is massively wrong about this definition is that it's nothing new.  It's a feature set. 

It is unreasonable to version the Internet in terms of features.  If features were the only variable then we are surely well past web 3.0.  So what do I think web 3.0 is...

Google App Engine

Now everything changes, if Google can tie a bow on this pretty package.

Google Apps
Google App Engine
Google Gears

Goodness.

clipped from googleappengine.blogspot.com Introducing Google App Engine + our new blog At tonight's Campfire One we launched a preview release of Google App Engine -- a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users. Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features: Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions) Automatic scaling and load balancing Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email Fully featured local development environment