Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social
At the Web 2.0 Expo & Conference in San Francisco, Kevin Kelly, co-founder and Editor-At-Large for Wired Magazine, delivered a brilliant keynote outlining his vision for the future of the web. I was impressed by his clarity and by how simply and succinctly he was able to simplify complex concepts to share his vision.
Kelly described six broad trends for what lies ahead at a 5 to 10 years horizon. What he envisions can be summarized in six words: screening, interacting, sharing, flowing, accessing, and generating. I’ll do my best to convey what he said.
6 Directions for the Future Web
Screening
Screens will not just be on desktops. We already see screens in grocery markets, gas stations, and in our hands with our smart phones. This trend will only intensify. Screens will be everywhere, on every flat surface. Walls and even our reading glasses will be screens.
Screens will be the destination of data. The word “screening” describes what we will do with screens and their content: we will screen content. TV, film, video, podcasts, books, music, magazines, radio, blogs, newspapers–all content from these media sources will be on screens. With screens everywhere around us, the web will no longer be something that we go on: The web will now be something that we are inside of, rather than outside of, like now.
Interacting
Our interaction with the web is currently limited to our fingertips and eyes. We receive audio and music from the web, but the web does not interact with audio or images.
If you look at how toddlers interact with content on an iPad, they have much more of a full body interaction, almost like a dance. Soon a large threshold will be crossed: We will be able to talk to and see through the web. And the several billions of cameras that we have will give the web a sense of vision. Screens will become windows that we are looking through.
And the camera will be looking back at us. Eye tracking software will look at our eyes and determine where our attention is spent. Software like Affectiva, which is already operational, will read our every mood and will be able to distinguish not only our level of arousal to a content, but also the nature of our valence, positive or negative, and the content will be adjusted accordingly. The web will be watching us and adapting the content in real time.
This will usher more of a full body engagement with screens and cameras, creating two way windows where we look at the world and the world looks back at us and a symbiotic dance begins to unfold.
Sharing
Most of the innovation that is coming will be through the social aspects, and sharing is at the heart of these social aspects. Anything that can be shared will be shared. We are barely starting to see the rise of sharing. While we are seeing things being shared, we do not yet fully understand how additional value is being created. Self tracking is an example. Some people monitor themselves. They are monitoring and sharing what happens in their life: activities, mood, sleep, behaviors, productivity, weight, and health statistics, often on a 24 hour basis. They use these data to change their behaviors and also to make contact with others interested in their story and data. That increases the value of the information, as others use the information to change their behavior too.
On the meter of what is possible, we are on the very low scale of what can be shared. The value in sharing will become more and more apparent. We will see more things being shared that we thought would have no value being shared. Friends, location, investments, health records, memories, expectations, satisfactions, and disappointments–all of these are going to be shared more and more, in the right contexts and with the right tools.
Flowing
We are at the advent of a third metaphor to describe what is happening on the web. The first wave was with the PC. It organized everything like a desk: folders, files, etc. The desktop, with files and folders, was the metaphor for Mac and Windows.
The next metaphor was a web of pages and clickable links. The web of pages/links replaced a system of desktop-files-folders.
We are now seeing the rise of the third metaphor: stream-tag-cloud. Everything now that is being created is being created as a stream, and in real-time. RSS feeds, Facebook walls, Twitter streams, streams of Hulu, Netflix–these are the fluid components of the new environment. They flow in real-time. You see them and go in and out of them as you wish. We have moved from pages to streams, from PC to cloud, from today to now, and from “me” to “we”, as we learn to share things. We are also moving from items to data.
What we have is not a web anymore but an ocean of streams. We can take them, aggregate them, weave them together–yours and mine.
This emerging view of life streams is another metaphor for how we manage what is happening on the web. These streams are being produced not just by a few persons or by many people, but by everything. The internet of things is on the rise. From the door knobs in your hotels to your shoes giving data about how far you walked, data will be produced all the time, everywhere, and about everything. “Always on” is the new default, and in this new world, if it is not real-time it does not count anymore.
Accessing
With these streams of data flowing through us, everywhere and all the time, there comes a shift in ownership. You no longer have to purchase individual items:
You get them on demand. Music, films, videos–you have access to them without owning. This tectonic change will revolutionize a lot of business models.
Having access is now getting better than owning it. If you own an item, you need to maintain and update it. There is a better way, which is just having access. We are starting to see a movement away from ownership and towards access. You could fit all the music of the world onto a 6 terabyte hard drive, which you can get for $600 from Amazon.
Tomorrow these 6 terabytes will be able to fit on an iPod. In this new world, there is no reason anymore to carry hard drives. No reason to buy another track of music when you can just access it anytime you want it. The only location and time to buy something is where and when you need it, and it can be done just 5 seconds before. No reason anymore to stockpile or inventory things before you are ready to consume them. Access is now better than ownership.
Generating
The web is the largest copy machine. Anyone can make copies of anything, which makes copies less valuable. What becomes more valuable, however, is what cannot be copied easily. What is hard to copy and easy to pay for is what has a future.
Trust and reputation cannot be copied easily. They have to be generated inside the context of each exchange with the customer. They are generatives. There are 6 generatives, or areas where it is not possible to copy and where value will be created: immediacy, personalization, authenticity, attention, and interpretation.
Attention is the ability to capture people’s attention. Whoever can get people’s attention can get paid for it. According to Om Malik from GigaOm, the economics of attention are much more unforgiving than the real economic underpinning of a product. You can find money for your company from an investor, but it wouldn’t really matter if you don’t have users’ attention. Attentionomics is a hard reality especially in highly competitive and somewhat subjective marketplaces like Hollywood movies, music and even fashion are markets where “attention” determines the outcome.
Immediacy is a reason to pay. If I can get a free copy of an article right now, without having to wait, I am ready to pay for it rather than wait one hour for it. I am not paying for the article but for the immediacy.
Personalization is another thing worth paying for. Maybe it will be a custom version of a symphony tuned specifically for the acoustics of your home. You will be glad to pay for this customization of a symphony otherwise available for free on the web.
Access to software may be free, but you will be ready to pay for authentication.
You will pay Amazon not for books but for recommendations, findability, and reviews. And if you want music, it will be free but you will be ready to pay for embodiment–to see the musicians in person.
In the upcoming web, we will also be ready to pay for interpretation. Maybe software will be free, but the manual explaining how to use it or how to customize it for your specific needs will be something you are ready to pay for. Accessibility will be where there is a frictionless charge, 24/7.
Where will the money flow?
Kevin says that no one is clear where the money will flow, but that, historically, wherever the attention has gone, the money has followed. Wherever the attention will flow, money will follow.
At are your reactions to Kevin’s views ? I would love to hear your comments.
Photo courtesy of Newyork808 via Flickr Creative Commons
Jean-Marie Bonthous, PhD, is Principal of Seamless Social. He consults and speaks about social media strategy, social CRM, influence marketing, social media analytics, and how to grow a social business. He has been a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies for more than 30 years and has led many successful, high-impact consulting projects, including change management IT-enabled business transformation initiatives in the $50-100 million range, balanced scorecard-driven strategy formulation and implementation initiatives, and strategic marketing projects.
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