Web 2.0. Yes, that wonderful, wonderful world of Web 2.0. Where information and technology will solve all of the worlds problems, make it possible for us to communicate instantly with anyone, where all human knowledge will be instantly searchable in nanoseconds, and yes, it will also eradicate poverty, achieve universal tolerance, global literacy and intergalactic peace.
All hyperbole aside, Web 2.0 has been a wonderful thing. Today, we can search human knowledge using Google, we can communicate instantly with friends and family using Facebook, we can publish our thoughts and share our opinions (like I’m doing here) with the world using WordPress and we can publish/receive news (like a plane landing in the Hudson river) while it happens on Twitter, all among a myriad of other things. For the record, I love Web 2.0 (as a user) for its ease of use and for the so many immensely useful services it provides (though I must admit I’m not a fan of the business models that often accompany Web 2.0 companies, especially advertising related models).
Image from ConnectionCafe
But, “Houston, we have a problem.” The problem is what I would call “information fragmentation” in the world of Web 2.0. Yes, each Web 2.0/social media site in isolation may be very easy to use, but to try and get all of them to cooperate and more importantly keep track of all our information is becoming a complete nightmare. Here is just a short list of just some of my information assets:
- Personal Blog: www.sneaker.org
- Professional Blog: www.k9ventures.com/blog
- Twitter: @manukumar and @k9ventures
- Plaxo Pulse
- Flickr
- Google Reader
- Google Talk
- TwitPic
- FriendFeed
- Netflix
Gosh, I can’t even keep track of them in a list, and I certainly don’t want to link to all my accounts on various services for privacy concerns. Just recently, I discovered that I had a MySpace page! I didn’t even know I had a MySpace page, and in fact, I used to take pride in saying that I didn’t have one (they built their network by being spammers in my opinion). Until I discovered that I did — probably one I set up years and years ago, and never thought about it twice after that. (I have since promptly deleted the MySpace page, so that I can stick to my assertion that I do not have a MySpace page!)
Our bits are spread out all over the web. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that bits of us are spread out all over the web. Subtle difference. The deluge in the number of services out there has now resulted in new services (like FriendFeed and Ping.fm) which try to help you take control of all your media and interactions. However, aggregators only work in theory. In theory, the pitch for an aggregator is that “We will be the one stop shop for X.” The problem is that there are a dozen one stop shops. And so you ultimately end up building an aggregator to aggregate the aggregators! The travel industry is a great example of this with the airline sites, then sites like Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. Then sites like TripAdvisor, Kayak, Vayama. I’m just waiting for the next level up (Update: Didn’t have to wait too long, as soon as I finished this post and went back to check on my feeds, I found this on TechCrunch: Travelzoo’s Fly.com Launches Yet Another Travel Search Aggregator). It’s the Madoff scheme (Ponzi is becoming too old for people to know what it means any more!) of aggregators.
Likewise in social media, everyone is trying to aggregate everyone else. Till recently, I had my Twitter tweets being cross-posted to my Facebook status. I recently severed that connection. Now I have FriendFeed aggregating my tweets, my Google Reader shares, my blog posts all together. Oh, and I also have a FriendFeed tab in my Facebook profile. Everything is going in circles, I guess that must be the true indication that I have embraced Web 2.0 and social media, and more so, that I feel caught up in its embrace. An embrace of so many tentacles that it’s like being caught in, oh, oh, wait for it… a Web!
Lets make this more concrete with some examples:
- Blog comments: When you post to a blog, you typically have comments on the blog. But then you also have trackbacks and pingbacks. And now you also have tweetbacks. The conversation has been splintered. I can get comments on the post, I can get tweets back in response to the post, I can get an email, I can get a phone call, a direct message on twiter, a like on FriendFeed or now even on Facebook, a comment on Facebook. It’s just all over the place. Fred Wilson has argued in his posts that (paraphrasing) comments should be treated as a first class citizen — as a true part of the conversation that is ocurring. But, comments are now being splintered all over — on Twitter, on FriendFeed, on Facebook, on blogs, in emails and in direct messages. Capturing that conversation has become and continues to become more of a challenge. There have been some good steps like Disqus integrating FriendFeed comments, but that is only the beginning.
- Status messages: Status messages are everywhere. And the buzz on the web is that status is the hot thing, popularized by Twitter and Facebook’s “What are you doing?” question. (Fred Wilson says that “Status is the ultimate social gesture”) But there is also GoogleTalk status. When I update my GoogleTalk status it is seen by people in my contact list who are also on GoogleTalk. But there is no (simple) way of connecting that to my Facebook status (emphasis on simple, though Xoopit recently announced GMail and Facebook integration through a plugin), to my Plaxo status, to my LinkedIn status. Ping.fm provides some hope of being able to do this. And I’m sure if I took the time to figure out the map of where all I want my status messages propagated (and avoid any circular references) it may very well do the trick. But, all of these services are supposed to be mass-market services. It shouldn’t require this much effort and thinking to make it all work right. While on one hand I am pleased by the diversity of options, on the other hand I lament that there are simply too many options.
- Pictures: I made a conscious choice to not post pictures on Facebook. Even though Facebook is intended to be for friends, there is a huge amount of intermingling of family, friends, teachers, co-workers, professionals and business contacts on Facebook. Yes, they provide a way to keep all these lists separate, but it just takes to much work. So I have my pictures on Picasa, in private albums that I share selectively. But then I also have a Flickr account and I also have a TwitPic account for posting images to Twitter.
I think the point is clear by now and so I won’t keep beating a dead horse. Web 2.0 and Social Media are wonderful and great, but at the same time they provide us with a plethora of options accompanied by a lack of easy interoperability (the kind that my mom could figure out). Information is being produced and created in unprecedented ways and at an unprecedented rate. It is being shared in unprecedented ways at an unprecedented rate. But, it is being fragmented in unprecedented ways. This is problem and an opportunity (as always). However, this is one case where I’m skeptical if just yet another technology (Google!?) will be able to help vacuum together all our digital bits from all over the Web.
February 15th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Why not maintain your long-term professional network on LinkedIn, store your photos on Flickr, use Digsby to chat with everyone (using one or both Twitter accounts–if you need both, then you actually *want* to fragment personal vs. professional), write your one or two blogs (same as above), and read everything using Google Reader. Drop everything else. Is that so fragmented?
February 15th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
@Daniel Tunkelang: Doing all of that already (though with different tool choices)
My point is more about fragmentation of the conversation and also about how difficult all this is for normal users to figure out. You and I don’t qualify as “normal” :-p
February 15th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
What I find more problematic is tracking conversations across different blogs. I wish that replies to all of my comments fed into a single RSS feed, ideally integrated into the same client I use for other conversations, like via Twitter. But that’s a more fundamental problem with the way comment threads work on blogs. We aren’t even able to do the simple stuff, like merging comment threads for related posts.
February 15th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Anyone reading this and understanding what all the tools are definitely not “normal”
@Daniel I find the same problem. I like using Backtype subscriptions to track comments on posts (not just direct replies but the “rest of the conversation”), allows you to receive the rest of the comments by email, feed or aggregated on your own Backtype subscriptions page on the site.
It’s technically possible to use Disqus to create a single comment stream across multiple posts, but what’s really needed is a way to combine it across all platforms. I wonder if that will ever happen
February 16th, 2009 at 10:44 am
It seems to me that it should be easy to asymmetrically merge a comment stream via its RSS feed. Do it both ways, and you get a symmetric merge. Why can’t that be a general solution to the problem? Doesn’t everyone export RSS feeds for their comment streams? I just don’t know of any comment feature that lets you import them. If there is one, I’d love to try it on my own blog.
February 16th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Daniel: Import comments? Not quite sure what you mean, probably just me being dense
What about this: http://www.backtype.com/home/widgets
February 17th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
“All hyperbole aside, Web 2.0 has been a wonderful thing. Today, we can search human knowledge using Google…”
In the dark ages of Web 1.x, we were able to search human knowledge with Altavista, Lycos etc. The search engine is one of Google’s few lines of business that’s *not* Web 2.0, don’t you think?
February 17th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
@SkippyFlipjack: Well, I don’t think you would call Google Maps (as it exists today) Web 1.x. Nor for that matter Google Earth, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, Google Code, or searching news paper archives etc. etc. When I talk about “human knowledge” and “Google” I talk about it in the broader sense of it than just web search. I remember Lycos from when it was still running in the Spider Closet in Cyert Hall at CMU and yes, it was a search engine in the dark ages of the Web 1.0 days as you put it, but the quantity and the variety of information it and other search engines of the time indexed was a small subset of what exists today. Besides, I’m not really trying to debate what’s Web 1.0 and what’s Web 2.0 — that wasn’t the point of the post
February 18th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Manu, I think you have missed out social bookmarking.
The problem is not only at information fragmentation but also information overload. I have more than 500-1000 feeds a day on my Google reader. How do I read all of it and then make use of it ?
Most of the articles are much more interesting that the traditional media but even then the question persists “Is this information useful” ? Am I moving from being a Technology junkie to an Information junkie ?
February 18th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
@Vyom You are absolutely right that information overload is a huge problem (though I would argue that it is an orthogonal problem to what I discussed above as ‘information fragmentation’). I also have way too many feeds that I’m trying to keep up with on a daily basis (on top of email, twitter, facebook, linkedin etc) and the volume is past the breaking point. I’m already sacrificing sleep/weekends in order to keep up and I to wonder to what purpose. Yes, the information does make me better informed, smarter and more aware, but the signal to noise ratio is not good enough. The truly useful gems are far and few and there is too much stuff to sift through to find it. The people who are in the “we will built yet another technology to solve this problem” camp will argue that it calls for better filtering, recommendations, rankings, etc etc. However, even though I love technological solutions to problems, I have yet to find a good solution for this.
I am fast approaching the point of believing that the problem isn’t the technology or too much information. The problem is us and our unsatiable desire for more information. Google Reader was a great boon for me and helped save me tons of time when I moved to it and didn’t have to visit sites and could go through the feeds much faster. But then where do I end up today — with so many feeds that I can’t even keep up with those!
There is a great graph that shows technical progress in the form of the Moore’s law curve but then overlays on the same graph the amount of human attention/time/bandwidth. Unlike the Moore’s law curve which is exponential (and I would argue the information overload curve is also exponential with the increase in the number of publishers), but the human attention curve is a flat line. One can argue whether it should be sloped one way or the other, but the point is that the two are fundamentally incompatible!