Coming off the buzz and excitement of the Web 2.0 Conference, the concept of Web 2.0 has come under fire in certain quarters of the Web community. A lot of the concern being expressed is whether it’s possible, much less desirable, to capture the fluidity and the continuous spectrum of progress in the Web space with a single, simple umbrella label. And whether other folks are just taking advantage of the excitement to make a buck.
Another recurring worry is whether or not the idealism and breathlessness surrounding some of the Web 2.0 promotion (which I’ve occasionally been guilty of myself) is blatantly ignoring the lessons learned from the first Internet bubble.
It’s a tough call since Web 2.0 things are clearly happening all around us. And it’s also increasingly obvious that Web 2.0 has become a pretty large movement. I myself have watched Web 2.0 emerge and head towards the mainstream as the first generation of Web 2.0 places began to appear in the form of Technorati, Flickr, and del.icio.us. Never mind all the original Web 1.0 places whose best parts were Web 2.0 all along. And like Kathy Sierra posted about recently, Web 2.0 makes people think.
In the end, Web 2.0 is not a religion. Though some will inevitably treat it as such, and some will work hard to deride it as meaningless, all of that doesn’t matter. Web 2.0 has been entirely successful in raising the general consciousness about a set of practices and a mindset which makes the Web work much better for the people that use it.
Key to this mindset is realizing and leveraging the importance and centrality of the user. Web 2.0 reminds us that the Web exists solely to provide us with meaningful and useful experiences. And active participation is a particularly valuable way to engage users on the Web. This can trigger marvelous emergent properties that are highly desirable, such as the ability to harness collective intelligence and foster radical trust to name just two of the more important value propositions that Web 2.0 emphasizes and provides a short path to.
As I prepare articles and speeches on the topic, I’ve been struggling mightily to bring focus to the large and ill-defined borders of the Web 2.0 memes. Ever more increasingly, my visualizations and depictions involve describing how people leverage Web 2.0 concepts and what it does for them, rather than the technical virtuosity often present in the pure technology pieces of Web 2.0 like Ajax and other cool Web 2.0 related ideas.
One of the visualizations I use (shown below) shows where I’m heading with my latest depiction of people and how they work with Web 2.0 places. In this picture, I show how people generally have three different roles in relation to the way they interact with participatory sites.
Some people are primary participators and provide both raw information as well as enrichment. These are the folks that are making Web 2.0 an active, useful, and vibrant place the most. Consider these folks your Flickr picture uploaders, your del.icio.us bookmarkers, and Ning information mixers. Notice that all three of these activities are creating new information at different levels, either as original source or by adding on top of what came before.
Other folks are secondary participators and mostly consume information, though they may contribute occasional enrichment in the form of tagging, rankings, reviewing, etc. These folks are also an important and probably larger group of people than the primary participators. What these people do in the Web 2.0 space is valuable and should be encouraged too, though making them primary participators should be the goal and this is what Web 2.0 concepts encourage.
Lastly are users that merely passively consume things on the Web. This is no doubt the largest group of users on the Web and are predominate in Web 1.0 since they routinely have no mechanism by which to participate on the Web. Web 1.0 design concepts failed to strongly encourage involving its users and thus we are often left with the silent, one-way Web.
Another important way to look at it is that passive users are the Long Tail of the Web populace. Encouraging this group and coming up with easy ways for them to participate with you is a problem which Web 2.0 answers with specific solutions. Activating and engaging this huge, latent group of people is something Web 2.0 guides you towards because it provides a higher degree of value. This is key because these same users will innovate and use the participation mechanisms in unanticipated ways that are useful to them, without central control. This makes it possible for them to get exactly what they need in a way that just can’t be achieved by providing the entire experience for them. Thus, turning passive users into primary and secondary participators by dramatically lowering any barriers to participation should be a central goal for all Web sites, Web 2.0 or not.
In the end, how you make it easy for your Web users to blog, podcast, media share, mash, tag, etc. doesn’t matter. But always give them rich, easy, and sharable ways to contribute their voices clearly and loudly on the Web. That’s how Web 2.0 works.
