Participatory Web
I was watching the Web 2.0 video documentary (24 mins) from TechCrunch and some of the things that were said really struck me. I’m pretty engrossed in Web 2.0 but if I say that to someone – if I say I work for a Web 2.0 company – they look at me like I have three heads.
I mean, Web 2.0 to us internet geeks means interaction and networking on the web. It means next generation internet where content is not simply two dimensional (reading), but three dimensional (reading, writing, interacting). This makes sense to us geeks. But to the average person, there is no interaction on the web. Blogs, for those who read them, are the closest to interaction. Oh and MySpace, but it is not billed as Web 2.0 even though it is.
Some might question my sanity on this, but check out Upcoming.org, the service that allows people to contribute upcoming events and local people can participate in those events. The need: Making event attendance rise. The Solution: Using the web to connect two groups of people together – the event creators and the event attenders. See? Web 2.0 doesn’t have to be some creepy new-fangled internet stalking bit. It meets real need through people creating content.
This is a screenshot of my Upcoming.org profile page. Notice the skew in participation between the Bay area (Silicon Valley) and Baltimore and Washington. The Bay area has always been the leading uptake on new technology. Most of the internet technologies start there and maybe after 5 years we might see them on the east coast.
What happens when individuals stop thinking of these services as too techy, or too unknown and start embracing them? Churches could post their special events on Upcoming.org. Announce class reunions, perhaps. Perhaps you’re having a big pub crawl next weekend and want certain people to be able to find out about it.
What about Yelp? I reckon most people have never heard about Yelp. And why? They have a great Web 2.0 service for connecting locals together through reviews and opinions on places around town.
Hello? Craigslist? It’s the new Wanted section, yo! Anyone who is slick will use Craigslist for finding jobs, houses and yes, even missed connections! (All Baltimore links)
It’s all about using the tools available to meet common everyday needs. It’s time to jump on the bandwagon, people, and start using the new internet. It is no longer just a bed of perverted boys, shopping discounts or a series of tubes. It’s the answer to today’s everyday problems.
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Written by Aaron Brazell on August 9, 2006
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I think that when people hear about Web 2.0 as being about connecting people and social networking, they still think about Friendster and MySpace, which in my opinion serve no purpose because they don’t solve a problem. I finally got the whole Web 2.0 thing when I realized that this new social networking isn’t about the online chat rooms from high school (ah, 1997…those were the days…), but rather a tool to connect people in the real world. Yelp, Flickr, and Upcoming are all examples of that.
How do we get people to make that same jump? How do we get people to get over that idea that online social networking isn’t just for nerds and perverts?
I think the important thing is to not talk about this stuff as Web 2.0 or social networking. A lot of my friends use Flickr and Evite, but tell me that they don’t “get” blogging. As they see that there are tools out there to solve their problems, they will start to get on the bandwagon. So interconnection of these various online tools is vital. The more open APIs there are and the more that these different sites collaberate and realize that no one uses these things in isolation, the better. This is already happening, and I love that.
I think you nailed it, Lauren except I disagree about Friendster and MySpace. Both have significant problems but, if you look at MySpace, it does serve at least a perceived need among its target audience – the need to puff up teenage egos with friends. You and I both can stand here as professionals with deeper connections than the facile ones at MySpace and say it doesn’t meet a need but that’s in our mature almost-30something minds. Teenagers love feeling like they are in a group and having 350 of their closest friends at their fingertips is worthwhile to them. That’s how AIM got to where it is today.
I think that when people hear about Web 2.0 as being about connecting people and social networking, they still think about Friendster and MySpace, which in my opinion serve no purpose because they don’t solve a problem. I finally got the whole Web 2.0 thing when I realized that this new social networking isn’t about the online chat rooms from high school (ah, 1997…those were the days…), but rather a tool to connect people in the real world. Yelp, Flickr, and Upcoming are all examples of that.
How do we get people to make that same jump? How do we get people to get over that idea that online social networking isn’t just for nerds and perverts?
I think the important thing is to not talk about this stuff as Web 2.0 or social networking. A lot of my friends use Flickr and Evite, but tell me that they don’t “get” blogging. As they see that there are tools out there to solve their problems, they will start to get on the bandwagon. So interconnection of these various online tools is vital. The more open APIs there are and the more that these different sites collaberate and realize that no one uses these things in isolation, the better. This is already happening, and I love that.
I think that when people hear about Web 2.0 as being about connecting people and social networking, they still think about Friendster and MySpace, which in my opinion serve no purpose because they don’t solve a problem. I finally got the whole Web 2.0 thing when I realized that this new social networking isn’t about the online chat rooms from high school (ah, 1997…those were the days…), but rather a tool to connect people in the real world. Yelp, Flickr, and Upcoming are all examples of that.
How do we get people to make that same jump? How do we get people to get over that idea that online social networking isn’t just for nerds and perverts?
I think the important thing is to not talk about this stuff as Web 2.0 or social networking. A lot of my friends use Flickr and Evite, but tell me that they don’t “get” blogging. As they see that there are tools out there to solve their problems, they will start to get on the bandwagon. So interconnection of these various online tools is vital. The more open APIs there are and the more that these different sites collaberate and realize that no one uses these things in isolation, the better. This is already happening, and I love that.
I think you nailed it, Lauren except I disagree about Friendster and MySpace. Both have significant problems but, if you look at MySpace, it does serve at least a perceived need among its target audience – the need to puff up teenage egos with friends. You and I both can stand here as professionals with deeper connections than the facile ones at MySpace and say it doesn’t meet a need but that’s in our mature almost-30something minds. Teenagers love feeling like they are in a group and having 350 of their closest friends at their fingertips is worthwhile to them. That’s how AIM got to where it is today.
I think you nailed it, Lauren except I disagree about Friendster and MySpace. Both have significant problems but, if you look at MySpace, it does serve at least a perceived need among its target audience – the need to puff up teenage egos with friends. You and I both can stand here as professionals with deeper connections than the facile ones at MySpace and say it doesn’t meet a need but that’s in our mature almost-30something minds. Teenagers love feeling like they are in a group and having 350 of their closest friends at their fingertips is worthwhile to them. That’s how AIM got to where it is today.
While I hate to jump to the defense of MySpace, I have to say that it does serve a purpose other than to puff up the normally inferiority complex-ridden ego of adolescents. I am neither a teenager nor an “almost 30-something”, but whatever it is that falls between. I didn’t even know what MySpace was until I had graduated from college (which I survived without ever creating a Facebook account). MySpace has actually allowed be to reconnect with old classmates and keep in touch with people near whom I no longer live. So for me, MySpace is what it is billed as: a social networking site. I socialized, I network, I log off… every “friend” is a real friend and I have nowhere near 350 contacts. And, while MySpace will probably be forever dominated by teenagers, it still should not be written off entirely. Until Classmates.com gains popularity or Facebook.com changes its policies (not every old friend of mine had the opportunity or desire to attend college), MySpace is still the most popular social meeting place. And I don’t care how ugly it is; I just want to be able to say hi to some old faces.
That said, I will say that I agree with what you (Aaron) and Lauren are saying. Web 2.0 — shunned buzzword that it may be — is more the future than it is the present. Only geeks and people that are well tuned-in to the inet use these sites, although I do think that they are gaining in popularity. As Lauren said, if they fill a need, the people will use them. The idea of web communities is very appealing: collective knowlege is always greater than an individual’s, so we all have a lot to gain from using a site such as Yelp or Upcoming.org . Once the word gets out, they’ll gain a much broader user base.
I agree that MySpace does fill a need to some extent, and I too have reconnected with old classmates on there. But honestly, after a friend finds me, we read each other’s profiles, and we send each other the “What have you been up to?” email, we don’t keep up the communication. I think it is generally because we don’t have any reason to. The sites that successfully keep people communicating and connecting over a longer period are sites that don’t exist purely to network. MySpace is effective because so many people are on it that you are bound to find people you know on there, which is cool. It’s like a huge directory. But once you get over the initial excitement of finding people you know, then what? MySpace and Friendster (I haven’t used Facebook) have tried to solve that by adding IMing, message posting, and blogging to the sites. Those work to a certain extent, but as more and more sites have these tools and they become expected, the novelty will wear off, and folks will look more and more past the technology itself and towards what it can do to fill specific needs.
And this is exactly why Digg, blogs, Upcoming, Flickr, etc all work well and have high probability of uptake. We get past the corny gamesmanship of “meeting people” and hit that much deeper area of everyday life.
While I hate to jump to the defense of MySpace, I have to say that it does serve a purpose other than to puff up the normally inferiority complex-ridden ego of adolescents. I am neither a teenager nor an “almost 30-something”, but whatever it is that falls between. I didn’t even know what MySpace was until I had graduated from college (which I survived without ever creating a Facebook account). MySpace has actually allowed be to reconnect with old classmates and keep in touch with people near whom I no longer live. So for me, MySpace is what it is billed as: a social networking site. I socialized, I network, I log off… every “friend” is a real friend and I have nowhere near 350 contacts. And, while MySpace will probably be forever dominated by teenagers, it still should not be written off entirely. Until Classmates.com gains popularity or Facebook.com changes its policies (not every old friend of mine had the opportunity or desire to attend college), MySpace is still the most popular social meeting place. And I don’t care how ugly it is; I just want to be able to say hi to some old faces.
That said, I will say that I agree with what you (Aaron) and Lauren are saying. Web 2.0 — shunned buzzword that it may be — is more the future than it is the present. Only geeks and people that are well tuned-in to the inet use these sites, although I do think that they are gaining in popularity. As Lauren said, if they fill a need, the people will use them. The idea of web communities is very appealing: collective knowlege is always greater than an individual’s, so we all have a lot to gain from using a site such as Yelp or Upcoming.org . Once the word gets out, they’ll gain a much broader user base.
While I hate to jump to the defense of MySpace, I have to say that it does serve a purpose other than to puff up the normally inferiority complex-ridden ego of adolescents. I am neither a teenager nor an “almost 30-something”, but whatever it is that falls between. I didn’t even know what MySpace was until I had graduated from college (which I survived without ever creating a Facebook account). MySpace has actually allowed be to reconnect with old classmates and keep in touch with people near whom I no longer live. So for me, MySpace is what it is billed as: a social networking site. I socialized, I network, I log off… every “friend” is a real friend and I have nowhere near 350 contacts. And, while MySpace will probably be forever dominated by teenagers, it still should not be written off entirely. Until Classmates.com gains popularity or Facebook.com changes its policies (not every old friend of mine had the opportunity or desire to attend college), MySpace is still the most popular social meeting place. And I don’t care how ugly it is; I just want to be able to say hi to some old faces.
That said, I will say that I agree with what you (Aaron) and Lauren are saying. Web 2.0 — shunned buzzword that it may be — is more the future than it is the present. Only geeks and people that are well tuned-in to the inet use these sites, although I do think that they are gaining in popularity. As Lauren said, if they fill a need, the people will use them. The idea of web communities is very appealing: collective knowlege is always greater than an individual’s, so we all have a lot to gain from using a site such as Yelp or Upcoming.org . Once the word gets out, they’ll gain a much broader user base.
I agree that MySpace does fill a need to some extent, and I too have reconnected with old classmates on there. But honestly, after a friend finds me, we read each other’s profiles, and we send each other the “What have you been up to?” email, we don’t keep up the communication. I think it is generally because we don’t have any reason to. The sites that successfully keep people communicating and connecting over a longer period are sites that don’t exist purely to network. MySpace is effective because so many people are on it that you are bound to find people you know on there, which is cool. It’s like a huge directory. But once you get over the initial excitement of finding people you know, then what? MySpace and Friendster (I haven’t used Facebook) have tried to solve that by adding IMing, message posting, and blogging to the sites. Those work to a certain extent, but as more and more sites have these tools and they become expected, the novelty will wear off, and folks will look more and more past the technology itself and towards what it can do to fill specific needs.
I agree that MySpace does fill a need to some extent, and I too have reconnected with old classmates on there. But honestly, after a friend finds me, we read each other’s profiles, and we send each other the “What have you been up to?” email, we don’t keep up the communication. I think it is generally because we don’t have any reason to. The sites that successfully keep people communicating and connecting over a longer period are sites that don’t exist purely to network. MySpace is effective because so many people are on it that you are bound to find people you know on there, which is cool. It’s like a huge directory. But once you get over the initial excitement of finding people you know, then what? MySpace and Friendster (I haven’t used Facebook) have tried to solve that by adding IMing, message posting, and blogging to the sites. Those work to a certain extent, but as more and more sites have these tools and they become expected, the novelty will wear off, and folks will look more and more past the technology itself and towards what it can do to fill specific needs.
And this is exactly why Digg, blogs, Upcoming, Flickr, etc all work well and have high probability of uptake. We get past the corny gamesmanship of “meeting people” and hit that much deeper area of everyday life.
And this is exactly why Digg, blogs, Upcoming, Flickr, etc all work well and have high probability of uptake. We get past the corny gamesmanship of “meeting people” and hit that much deeper area of everyday life.