I recently came across this quote: “Dial tone is a fabulous metaphor for one of the key principles of Web 2.0, which I’ve called “the architecture of participation,” but which might also simply be described as the design of systems that leverage customer self-service…” – Chris Shiflett
It means something very simple yet very fundamental about the participatory web. The Internet today is buzzing with teeming ‘Social meeting places’ or ‘friend listers’ and ‘Mash ups. But if you really think where all this is leading to, stop for a moment and recall what has been the primary reason for adoptions of most new technologies. The main driver behind adoption has always been the end user value that results from a strategic provisioning for leveraged capability.
In a recent company transcript, David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer of Google was heard saying: “Google’s business model has focused on what’s known as the “long tail” of the Internet – the millions of individuals and small businesses that cater to niche interests and markets. We lower the barrier to entry for these small publishers and advertisers, and we match them up with users who are interested in what they have to say or sell.” This resonates the same philosophy of ‘leveraged participation’ in a big way.
The phenomena of ‘Social bookmarking’ and ‘User generated content’ have been a major ‘proof of concept’ in this direction by leveraging human social activities that requires exchanging, sharing and reuse of information to fulfill personal or common objectives.
Web 3.0 is touted to be a major break through with semantic reasoning capability of the ’smart programs’, but to me it is equally important to understand the nature of this ‘leveraged participation’ through endless shades of human social activities like volunteering, activism, planning, co-authoring or wiki-ing….it is practically a open field for the smart users to define the true essence of the future of our very own web.
What would then be an appropriate and usable experience that can effectively utilize and enhance this ‘leveraged participation’ on the new and unknown terrain of a highly intricate web that is extremely distributed, amazingly synchronous and astonishingly granular (See how Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0). Experiences will tend to be highly fragmented in this era of ‘open architecture’ and universal ‘plug ‘n play’. The challange is to stitch them all together and at the same time provide a seamless continuity with dogged persistence.
You might also like to see the slide show on the Web 3.0: ‘Socially Voiced Co-Creation’ by Twain Luu, here…
