I think this list of Web 3.0 features is really worth absorbing. As a recap, "Web 2.0" is a shorthand for dynamic user interfaces and a first cut of de-coupling application from data using web services. I'd re-phrase their "Web 3.0" vision as follows:
- No user data is hostage to any one service silo. (Web 2.0 isn't there yet.)
- Aggregators will squeeze value out of the juxtaposition of any and all data. "No value left behind."
- You have a single, integrated historical view of your digital life.
- All data is perfectly liquid, loosely coupled and re-combinable. (DRM on your metadata = commercial suicide.)
But there's one thing missing, and maybe it'll have to wait until "Web 4.0". It's what we drew on our platform roadmaps at Sprint, which was "Commercial Web Services". In this world, money is able to flow in the opposite direction to the bits. We foresaw that Sprint was in a great position to become a commercial web services directory and broker. Indeed, all those "billable events" and pricing plans suddently became relevant again; although the end-user experience might be subscription all-you-can-eat, there was underlying accounting needed for the disparate data resources that the applications drew together. And Sprint was in a perfect intermediary position, because it could use it existing wireless and fixed customer bases as a bootstrap to launch a kernel of commercially viable web services for identity, messaging, provisioning, authentication, etc.
There's an existential danger to the telecom industry that the hub for passing money in exchange for bits falls outside their domain. For "telecom" is really only a bundle of vaguely associated things brought together by technological and historical accident. The network can be used as a loss leader to bring people into your marketplace hub. The complex and expensive billing system can be turned from a bug in the business model to a feature, as long as that billing and settlement is "downwards" to atomic service providers, and not "upwards" to users.
But fail to build such hubs, and all you got is loss, rather than a loss-leader.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:47 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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