A blogging friend of mine, Yvonne LaRose asked me an interesting set of questions on Facebook. I wrote her back first thing this morning and then I thought it made sense to publish my answers. Who know, maybe you’ll find the content interesting as well.
Yvonne asked about what I thought about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and if I had any new terms I might be able to tell her about. I offered enterprise mashup and bacn . Bacn because it’s timely and relevant and enterprise mashups because that’s what I’ve been working on for the past four months (more to follow on this later).
Hi Yvonne,
Sure I’ll give it a go!
I think web 2.0 has been beaten to death. In memes, articles, and white papers it has been defined in a great number of ways. For me web 2.0 is about interactivity. Web 1.0 was about publishing and getting offline stuff online. Web 2.0 was about empowering individuals and adding conversation. In my opinion this brought *people* in to computers and the Internet for the first time in a meaningful way.
Web 3.0 is very up in the air as to what will shake out. Many refer to this as the semantic web, a place where a much richer tagging and classification of underlying data will drive greater access to content. Think enabling technology. I think all the technical stuff that underlies web 3.0 is very cool but the focus should be about humanizing the web, or humanizing technology.
I think that what is happening with web 3.0 has a chance of doing this. To me, I’ve always been a geek and a technologist but I feel now my mission and use of this technology is here for the purpose of connecting US - we the people! Just like Facebook did for this exchange between you and I Yvonne. A bunch of 1’s and 0’s in programming made it all possible to execute but a person and a group of people made things like blogs, messaging clients and Facebook. For these reasons I beleive we are living in a renaissance.
New terms: hmmm.
As you say, mashup is a really good one.
How about enterprise mashup! I just completed a four month project on enterprise mashups (company mashups for profit). It’s about combining multiple data and or web functionality to produce something. At the very least a useful aggregation of stuff on the web but if done well, a solution or tool that is better than the sum of its parts.
Example: You want to build a site for collectible baseball cards. You build a mashup that collects classifieds information from eBay, Craigslist and forty different speciality sites that sell collectible baseball cards. You put it all together in a new online database and design a user-friendly search engine to sit on top of it. Then you get fancy and add a shopping cart that lets your site users buy baseball cards from any of those sites through your own new easy-to-use baseball card shopping site. You get the data by using mashup tools to scrape the web sites you want the information from. Scraping is no different than Google robots (bots) crawling sites to check for changes so they can be indexed in the search engine.
“Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.”
Now, I think since I’ve done all this work early on a Sunday morning I’ll go publish my reply on a blog somewhere - maybe someone else will find it useful. Hopefully you got some little thing from all my blather!
Boomers are an interesting lot - and there’s a hell of a lot of them. A good combination for employers, marketers, politicians, and web 2.0 startup companies looking to build vast piles of money from them, win their favor, or harness their expertise in the work place. There’s a post from yesterday on the New York Times titled “New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age” and it’s a good read for anyone wanting to get a 50,000 foot view of newer social sites like eons, and multiply.
“…there are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.” - sourced NYT
So what’s going on with online social networking tools in this crown jewel of market segments? In a word - lots.
“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.” - Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog Infectious Greed
Said another way, online Boomers don’t suffer from shiny object syndrome (ohhhh, that’s pretty, let’s try that!) like younger generations are famous for. Even as an entrenched Gen X’er at 38 I no longer look at a BMW without having the accompanying thought that you give up a lot of hard earned cash (see: freedom) to drive around in a pretty car. I sure as hell didn’t do that when I was in my 20’s. Web companies, employers, investors and venture capitalists are all seeing the direct benefits of catering to Boomers and for good reason.
There’s anecdotal evidence now with early web companies in the space that their instincts on Boomer’s stickiness is well founded.
“Peter Pezaris, president and chief executive of Multiply.com Inc., based in Boca Raton, Fla., said he believed that older customers were stickier than younger ones, but said the evidence so far was anecdotal. He said 96 percent of the company’s active users returned each month, a statistic that he said impressed the venture capitalists who considered investing in the site.” - Peter Pezaris CEO Multiply
In the job search engine space we have the boomer focused RetirementJobs.com, a niche Boomer version of CareerBuilder or Monster. RetirementJobs.com published some interesting research last year that corroborates some of the news featured in the New York Times piece.
“RetirementJobs.com research shows that on top of experience, workers over 50 stay in jobs longer, waste less time at work, and relate better to companies’ older customer base. Employers are increasingly luring 50+ workers given that half the U.S. workforce of 130 million people is scheduled to retire, or take a retirement job, in the next 15 years.”
RetirementJobs.com polled their users and pulled out some interesting charactertistics.
Right at the top is flexibility and lifestyle integration. Freedom. From looking at these numbers you’d have to conclude that Boomers no longer agree with their youthful battlecry so perfectly echoed in Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee - “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Like any other generation Boomers have their own unique needs and desires and they need their own kind of pad to hang out in online. I believe that the only thing holding them back from being just as addicted to social networking sites as our younger generations is a relevant hang out. Get relevant and people will get connected.
Blogs. Tumblr. Twitter. Vlogs. Google. FaceBook. Syndication. Jaiku. Pownce. YouTube. Myspace. User-Generated Content. Indigenous Content. Del.icio.us. Online Community…. Data streams flowing via RSS, ATOM and furiously converging to create a River of Reputation…. a River of Relevance.
I started playing with Slideroll yesterday and ended up creating this slide show regarding how Employer Brands are affected by ‘Rivers of Reputation’.
This is a work in progress meant to get across the concept of the decentralization of the Employer Brand via the flow of easily accessible information regarding your brand that is being generated by individuals everyday. Let me know your thoughts.
Oh yeah, and this video coves user generated content, social media, personal publishing, blogs, online community, video, web publishing technologies like HTML, XML, and RSS and has same great music from deus to go along with it (oops, this is the deus I meant from the music in the video - two new music finds in one!).
EXCELER8ion is where Julian and Shannon Seery Gude write on Social Media, Interactive Marketing, Technology and Internet Business Topics. 