The term has been hijacked to mean something much softer, that the planning of the conference is deferred to the day of the conference. But the speeches are still speeches. The audience asks questions. The experts are on stage. Zzzz.
But the original concept, pioneered at BloggerCon and the term coined by Len Pryor, was deeply disruptive. And it mirrored what blogging was doing to journalism.
Un-Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0 as BloggerCon was to RegularOldCon. And as blogging is to journalism. The source and the destination become one. :-)
So Web 2.0 was nice, as training wheels for the next steps in the future web. A two-way medium. The people who pioneered Web 2.0 are to be congratulated and thanked. But now it's time to Un it. :-)
Because Web 2.0, while it started out as a freedom-inspiring thing, has been coalescing to being a dangerous form of locking-in the user's data so it can be applied to a corporate business model. We all know the dangers of this. It robs platforms of their openness. It makes moving data around impossible. And it makes creating hybrid systems impossible. It's not a very web-like direction for something that's inspired by the web.
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If the Web is Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Web 2.0 is Small Pieces Trapped In A Silo.
Hat-tip to David Weinberger for the term.
In Un-Web 2.0 you get full control of your data, and the services just get pointers to it, or copies of it. The originals live with you. Pointers are much preferable to copies because then you can keep updating the content after it has been incorporated in someone else's content tree.
Food for thought. :-)
If the Web is Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Web 2.0 is Small Pieces Trapped In A Silo.
In Un-Web 2.0 you get full control of your data, and the services just get pointers to it, or copies of it.
I think this drifts in the same general direction as Phil Windley has also been going lately.
Speaking of unconferences, IIW is also coming up in about a month. Love to talk about (and work on) this there.
Kyle, yes "free" has led to a really crazy system where SoundCloud tries to hide the MP3, but has buttons that lets you share the podcast with Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter -- etc.
Presumably they get kickbacks of some kind from those companies, and probably have deals with them that say they can't show you the MP3 either, otherwise people would share the podcast with one of those services to get around the federation of silos.
I think free stopped being the attraction to the core users, the types of people who thought Here's to the Crazy Ones had great appeal. We pay Apple huge amounts of money for the right to be a member of the club. Money isn't the problem they think it is, but as long as VCs are willing to write the checks, it's more fun to just make software and go to Web 2.0 conferences and go public without ever having to make a customer happy.
When the internet was being bootstrapped, the focus was on protocols. Email, gopher, usenet, irc, ftp, http. They are essentially APIs without providers.
Web 2.0 was all about the companies. Companies need a way to make money. They need not only to pay for the resources they provide, they also need to grow the business.
Not really sure where I'm going with this. But there's an undeveloped idea among these thoughts.
The problem is FREE.
Most Web2.0-esque companies trade FREE services for value in keeping the data silo growing.
Somehow we have to offer developers an incentive to play nice.
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