Web-IV convergence: social networks and applications

The news is coming fast and furious. I thought the dot-com boom was life at Internet speed, but this is ridiculous. It wasn’t all that long ago that Web2.0 was just a bunch of WYSIWYG tools to ease development of web content. In that respect, Web2.0 did for the Internet what Microsoft Word did for computer word processing. (Think back in horror to the days of color-coded key combinations for document formatting with the old WordPerfect.) That is, Web2.0 made it easy for anyone to publish content to the web.

It was only a few short months ago, on May 24, 2007, that Facebook led the next evolution and brought applications to the masses by introducing the Facebook Platform. Web-IV is the ultimate convergence, and this was one of the defining events in taking us from Web2.0 to Web-IV. Think about it, until this point, Web2.0 gave people easy ways to produce content (blogs, wikis) and to aggregate content (mashups). But May 24th marked the day that interactive, feature-rich applications were elevated to that same social status. It became simple for anyone (with just a little technical know-how) to build an application and have it immediately used by the ready and eager masses.

That was ground-shaking, earth-shattering, sea-changing. But, alas, that was sooooo May. Now Google and its posse are riding out trying to tame the wild west of social networking with OpenSocial. And, it’s so much more than just a common technology for developing applications on social networks. Lost in all the coverage is the fact that this is the first significant move to finally, finally bring all the social networks together.

I fully expect OpenSocial to, first and foremost, provide a “single sign-on” level of interoperability to the social networking space. I would be shocked if one of the first applications developed on OpenSocial wasn’t some way to better share information and connections across the various social networks. It’s inevitable.

The natural course of all communications networks have followed the same path. One need only review the history of the telephone industry to understand the phenomenon. First, there are a lot of small network providers, who all fight really hard to protect their “walled gardens.” But, as Metcalf’s Law explains, the value of a network grows as the square of the number of nodes in the network. So, after a while, a small number of dominant players emerge and gobble up all the smaller networks.

So now the question becomes, will Google become the Ma Bell of social networking in our new Web-IV world?

Web-IV: the name that says it all

Web-IV is here. Yes, the messages of the past 6 months combined with the announcements of this past week have signaled that the evolution has completely bypassed Web 3.0 (I always hated that moniker anyway). The Web has skipped a generation.

So, what is Web-IV? Web-IV is the ultimate convergence:

• the Internet
• the Web
• the Mobile Web
• Cellular networks
• Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and their brethren
• content
• applications
• consumers
• producers
• enterprises

Obviously, the ultimate convergence is kind of a big topic. It’s much too big for a single post. So, this blog will be exploring the theme over the course of several entries to come. But first, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take a moment to explain why I chose Web-IV as the name for this stage of the Web’s evolution.

I’m a firm believer in the power of symbolism and Web-IV embodies the ultimate convergence not only as the name that, as I said before, indicates that the Web has skipped a generation. But, delving deeper, let’s look at all the constituent parts of this symbol: Web-IV.

“Web” is the obvious part. It represents what we’ve come to understand as the world wide web in its first and second incarnations: dot-com and Web 2.0.

“I” stands for the Internet, which is the underlying networking infrastructure on top of which sits the web.

“-” symbolizes the expanded infrastructure that has evolved. This includes the cellular networks and the wireless technologies that untethers the web from its traditional edge: the desktop.

“V” indicates convergence, that all the various aspects outlined above are being brought together into a single, coherent whole.

And deeper still, the “IV” is a Roman numeral for the number 4. This is relevant for a number of reasons. First, the Roman numerals are used to further emphasize convergence, playing off the saying “all roads lead to Rome.” Second, the number 4 is a homophone of the word “for” and is commonly used as a shorthand in text messages and IM chats. Thus reading the phrase with the homophone, “Web for …” speaks to the unlimited possibilities of the ultimate convergence.

Now that we’ve named the phenomenon, soon we’ll explore the phenomenon itself.