Web 3.0?
October 19th, 2008 | Published in Blog, Business, Design, Gadgets, Sci-tech, Software, Web, ideas | 3 Comments
ReadWriteWeb recently posted an article talking about Yahoo’s Y!OS initiative. Here’s a quote:
Dubbed the ‘rewiring of Yahoo,’ Y!OS 1.0 launched this week with the introduction of the social suite. Its strategy focuses on opening up almost everything to developers, including content, traffic, and Yahoo’s user base.
I’ve been thinking the walled garden approach to social media is not very good in the long-term. It comes with the risk that if a compelling enough substitute were to come along, you lose members.
Alternatively, if a service were to use an open way of managing user profiles, it could possibly avoid the risk of be usurped. Giving up user profiles might seem risky in itself, but the service could adapt more quickly to the changing capability of a user’s profile “agents”. Today my profile might be the aggregation of my activity on Twitter+Facebook+Blog+Flickr+Google+LinkedIn+… but tomorrow it will be different, with different kinds of data. Today I manage most of all that activity manually. But just as notification of this new blog post will auto-post to Twitter and Facebook, I see a time coming soon where all of this can be done through a “dashboard” of sorts.
This dashboard would have to be stored online somewhere, in a safe place. But this profile dashboard is not like Gmail ot Wordpress. It should be a kind of API instead, where a whole slew of software products can be developed to interact with your profile and in turn your profile with all the services synced to it. I could then use an iPhone client, or a web application, or a robot; I could have a robot ‘tweeting’ photos and info about my vegetable garden, and over time I could play, mashup, and mix the dataset in all kinds of ways to learn how to get more veggies.
I don’t know if Y!OS is the answer, but it seems there are a growing number of solutions that are getting us closer to when you let your profile do most of the information filtering of the blinding information that will be the web in 10 or 15 years, maybe sooner.
October 19th, 2008 at 8:58 am (#)
I’m starting to have a clearer vision of what this will look like. With this dashboard interface (whatever it will look like) we will be able to customize our interaction with the web to such an extent that it will eventually come to recognize what information we will want to be aware of, without us having to go out and seek it. and if new areas of interest open up, we can add and customize the information we receive on that also. There will be one point of contact through which we can manage all our information and communications, incoming and outgoing, personal and professional. It’s integration into our lives will become as natural as the way we use phones and cars.
I can already hear some people saying, “so we’ll all live in isolation and never interact with anyone in person…just through computers? Sounds horrible!” But I can see how this new way of managing our lives will actually allow us more time and freedom to not be in the office or in front of the computer. We can already see that this dashboard could be managed from mobile devices. And if we streamline how we do our business, manage the logisitcs of our lives (finances, shopping, making appointments, communicating), and get information that is important to us, we will have a lot of time left over for the most important things in life; family, friends, fun:)
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:52 am (#)
While I share your optimism about the technology enabling more free time, history has shown that doesn’t tend to happen.
But then again the future “smart agent” internet might open up all kinds of new ways to generate residual income streams, and maybe reduce the need to bill-by-the-hour.
Maybe this will help to free up our time for what’s really important?
December 5th, 2008 at 10:53 am (#)
I’m going to hold off until they come out with a seven-bladed titanium version of the internet. Then I’ll invest.
And I want it to be able to fix me a sandwich. A *good* sandwich too. Not a gas station sandwich.
Sandwich.