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the Free CMSWire NewsletterThere's no denying that the social Web is changing the world. Every arena from business to casual communication is being intimately rearranged by collaborative technology. Subsequently, it is more important now that ever before to consider how we can successfully guide our lives into an age of total information awareness and connectivity.
The Third Wave
If you want to know how far you’ve come, just take a look at where you’ve been. According to John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the first great wave of innovation in computing hit in the 80s when the PC was introduced, followed by the boom of the Web in the next decade. Today, the convergence of three high profile areas of interest — mobile, social and cloud computing — are creating a third tsunami of change.
From the Web of Pages to the Web of People
"We are now in a stage of the Internet where people are first class objects," elaborated Marc Davis, a Partner Architect at Microsoft. And it's true— individual preferences and relationships matter much more than they used to.
For example, display ads and search results are now determined by a user’s Web history and location, meaning every experience on the 'net is as unique as the person undergoing it. That two people can be looking at the same site, or querying the same term, and see entirely different results is transforming fundamentals and changing rules.
The Web of the World
And it's not stopping there. Consider the changes that engagement, cloud computing and social networking are causing now that they've been granted portability. Everything that happens in real life, can now happen in digital form.
Sound crazy? Consider the numbers: The world population is closing in on 7 billion, and, according to Davis, there are 5 ½ billion mobile devices in existence. These devices know who we are and who we know, what we like, where we've been, where we plan to go, and when we do what we do. They are personal, ubiquitous, and, by connecting everything we know, ushering us from the Web of people straight to the Web of the world.
The Role of Entrepreneurs
This last year was one of the few times in history when entrepreneurs were behind the curve, constantly struggling with how to jailbreak data and put it under user control. Whether or not we'll gain enough information awareness in 2011 to ease some of this frustration remains to be seen, but ultimately that's what's going to have to happen.
"The opportunity here is to understand and to produce the right flows of rights and permissions and data so that this ecosystem can actually work correctly," said Davis, and though he noted that much of this is up to large corporations, entrepreneurs can do their part by creating social apps that make the data that is available easier to understand, bring together, and share.
From the Ground Up = Necessity
At this year's announcement of the sFund, big time CEOs like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Pincus of Zynga all agreed that starting applications from scratch is an absolute necessity.
Zuckerberg, who is particularly excited about what sort of Facebook partnerships will emerge in the next five years, readily admits that his social network has no intention of adding on capabilities that aren't an inherent part of the Facebook DNA. In other words, it's not about creating a Swiss Army Knife all by yourself—it's about focusing on your unique DNA of your company and designing products for easy integration with those of other companies.
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