The Futurist: Will Human Laziness Burst The Web 2.0 Bubble?
- September 27th, 2007
- Read 5210 times
- 37 Comments
At first, the Web was simple. It was a world so full of static pages with useless information that a GIF of a dancing hamster or (god forbid) baby could turn into an overnight sensation. It was an era so enthralled with its own existence that its purveyors, creators, and financiers never really asked if it was sustainable until it was too late. And, as we can all learn from South Park, without a Phase 2, Phase 3 can never equal profit.
Pop.
Web 2.0 is/was a bit different. If the defining trait of the first Web cycle was the stupid animated GIF, the current “It” sites all have one thing in common: They are, to varying degrees, reliant on user-generated content. Without your neighbor/classmate/sister/girlfriend’s tireless devotion to keeping her profile up-to-date, MySpace would merely be a place for FOX to promote its properties. Without a horde of news junkies yearning to see their username in digital print, Digg would be an ugly page of yellow and white (and their new profile feature would be a joke).
And that is why the Web 2.0 era will come to end sooner rather than later. Because if there is one immutable law of humankind, it is that we are really, really lazy.
Do you have a Friendster profile? If you do (and you don’t happen to live in the Philippines, where it is bizarrely popular), chances are you haven’t touched it in a few years. Maybe it was because something newer and more feature-filled came along in the form of MySpace, or maybe you just got sick of it. Either way–You gave up on it. As did I.
And MySpace–that was great for awhile. Everybody who was anybody was on it. Hell, your mom may have even sent you a “friend” request. Then you got lots of spam and your computer started to crash because of unsolicited death metal songs playing through your speakers. Either way, Facebook gave you everything you wanted from MySpace, only it was much cleaner, easier to use, and a bit more “mature” feeling. Hell, you’re no kid anymore. Leave MySpace to the tweens.
So then you built up your Facebook profile. Refound the exact same people you had “friended” on Friendster and MySpace, and added a bunch of cool new “applications” of various quality. You may even think you have a permanent “home” for your profile now. That is, unless Facebook begins to remind you too much of your college years, and all the high school kids who are now on it take over. Then it might be time to grow up and invest your time in LinkedIn.
The point is, it is hard work keeping up with these things. And there will be a point down the line when, even if it’s not done in a collective shrug, the Web world will just say “screw it”, and update their pages more and more seldom, until Facebook resembles Friendster.
And Wikipedia–perhaps the Web’s greatest gift to humanity –is essentially based on the idea that people will be generous with their time and editing skills. While the prospect of giving the gift of knowledge to the world may sound tempting, there will come a point when the only people who have time to frequently check up on articles and update them will be egomaniacs making sure that everybody knows that Scott Tuckerson Kicks Ass or that their best frenemy’s name appears in an article about oral sex.
Right now, the bubble that the Web exists in is not so much a financial bubble as it is a time bubble. There is still a novelty for a lot of people associated with finding friends on social networking sites, Digging their favorite stories, updating articles about the history of pinball, and leaving comments on their favorite blogs. But that will wear off. People will revert back to the things they used to do: like Minesweeper and work. And without millions of generous mouse-clickers, most of Web 2.0 is weakened, if not entirely useless.
Whenever it gets here, Web 3.0 may be bigger and better than what we have now, but you can bet that it won’t be foolish enough to rely on the unreliable. And there is nothing more unreliable than human nature.
Seth Porges writes on future technology and its role in personal electronics for his column, The Futurist. It appears every Thursday and an archive of past columns is available here.
yeah…it is a hard work to keep up with all those social software. One minute they are there, and the other minute they are gone. The lifespan keep getting shorter.
Hail Web 3.0 and 4.0 and 5.0 etc etc..
if social sites start to decline in the next couple months, it’s probably because everyone’s playing halo 3!
Wikipedia will survive not only because of the egomaniacs, but because of companies with a vested interested in maintaining and updating certain topics.
Interesting. You claim that human beings are by nature, lazy, and this will defeat web 2.0. But you also state that there’s nothing more unreliable than human nature - so how can we ever rely on the fact people will be consistently lazy? Seems like you are forgetting one very important feature of web 2.0: VANITY. It will trump laziness every time — all the profile building, DIGG submitting, etc. feeds ego (like Neil says above), which is the foundation of human behavior online and off.
Just this month PR Tactics, the newsletter for members of the Public Relations Society of America, (www.prsa.org) published an article I wrote on the same topic of Web 2.0 and laziness. It will be interesting to see if the predictions come true…
Social networks are like clubs - fan clubs, user groups, hobby groups, religious groups and like.
While technology makes it easy to setup new groups (”social networks”), I don’t think this phenomenon will change our lives.
Having said that, there are some interesting areas where communities and lots of value to life.
- Amazon’s user comments / preferences : One could never know what others thought of a particular book in a bookstore. Knowing what others think is very value-able. The trick is to either motivate the buyers to give their inputs (UGC) or extract that out of regular sales process.
- Job search / Match making : there is not better way to successfully do these without being part of the community. What if I don’t need to search for my next job, it comes through a referral. :)
Maybe one-day we don’t need to market our products /services !! Business would come to us, because we are involved in appropriate community of users.
I don’t know how much I agree with you.
As far as I see it, “Web 2.0″ effectively transformed the internet and our interaction with it into a form of real communication. One could say that this has always been the case with the internet since it’s early days, however I believe that the popularity of “Web 2.0″, with it’s focus on usability, has made the internet a more accessible tool for those who regarded the internet as “silly computer stuff” in the 1990s.
I think that since we, as a human society, have always enjoyed debate and social communication, the incorporation of the internet into a real, viable tool and medium makes well sure that the social contribution aspects of “Web 2.0″ are here for the long haul.
I believe the internet as a whole exhibits the behavior of a 5 year-old with severe ADHD. Websites come, websites go, our attention gets shifted from service to service and website to website almost involuntarily. You illustrated this well in your post and I agree. However, I believe that the core aspect of these “new” benefits that “Web 2.0″ brought to the internet will make sure that “Web 3.0″, whatever it may be, will heavily rely on the backbones of it’s predecessor.
Piddle — Web 2.0 doesn’t exist. It’s just The Web — evolving. The concepts behind what’s heralded as “Web 2.0″ have mostly been around since the beginning of the web — they’re just being developed further.
As for Porges’ article, he’s much too hard on people. It’s not so much that they’re lazy or fickle. It what he mentions as a secondary point: they only have so much time to spend playing with their computers. They have jobs to do and lives to lead away from the social parts of the Web, and even away from computers entirely. At least, the majority of normal, well-adjusted people do.
I used to suspect the same thing about blogging….novelty today, gone tomorrow. After all, who has the sustainable motivation to contribute useful commentary on their blog over weeks, months, even years?
Turns out I was half-right, half-wrong. Yes, people give up on their blogs after a year or so. But does that spell the collapse of the blogosphere? Nope - a new generation of fresh bloggers pick up where the others jumped off.
Kinda like the bar scene….
I sort of half agree, and TW’s comment above me is the main reason.
Yes, millions of blogs lay abandoned. But millions are not abandoned. And hundreds of thousands are maintained quite regularly and have a decent readership. And a few thousand have morphed into a solid business…like Techcrunch.
I think the main thing to consider is the focus on technology / business model vs. the focus on the user.
Yes, much of what you say is true. The novelty wears quickly, but there is life beyond the novelty. I haven’t updated my MySpace page in ages, but I do occasionally get the odd friend request from someone I haven’t seen in a decade. And without MySpace I might never have seen that person again (even if our contact was only virtual).
People have always nurtured their hobbies. The lifelong guitar player who’s never played a gig, the lifelong painter who’s never been exhibited, etc. Maybe the feverish early adopters will grow tired of the trendy Web2.0 sites, but there will still be those who don’t care about the business model or geek-chic status of a particular site.
It’s the people who hope to become insta-millionaires on a fad that have the most to worry about, not the social web itself.
Here’s what I think: Good social applications operate at two levels, personal and social. At the personal level, they provide some personal utility. At the social level they provide ’social’ features via interaction and collaboration.
The way to find out if a social application is “good” is to ask if it is useful without the “social” aspect. Would I use del.icio.us without its social network? Yes, sir. So, I think that as long as UGC is a consequence of the site being useful to me as a person, I will keep creating it. And useful here could mean serving my vanity, helping me organize my media, bookmarking and annotating web pages, etc.
In short, be it Web 1.0, 2.0 or n.0; good sites live, bad sites die.
The Internet has always been good for three things: 1) Interaction with others (e-mail, IRC, forums, social sites), 2) Information (newsgroups, information-based web sites), 3) Entertainment (humorous e-mails and newsgroup postings, audio and video). In addition, some people have always had the urge to be creative in some or all of these areas, and share their creativity with others. Think about what allows people to do that most easily (I don’t at all disagree that people want to do these things with a minimum of effort) and there is your Web 3.0.
For example, I see Second Life as a pre-3.0 thing (I say “thing” because I’m not exactly sure how to categorize it). But people are using it for social interaction, to inform others, and of course for its entertainment value. I say it’s “pre”-3.0 because I do not believe there anyone living today will ever see something on the web become really huge as long as the end-user has to pay to play (you might say that things like eBay or Amazon are an exception, but bear in mind that people can enter both sites and look around and do everything EXCEPT make an actual purchase of a tangible item without paying a cent).
People will get tired of paying to exist at any level above that of a bum on a park bench in Second Life - BUT - if someone can figure out a way to run a similar type of virtual world and still give away most of the functionality for free (and in particular, don’t insult those who have matured enough to not be suckered into paying for goods that exist only as bits of data on some server), I think that will be the first (and probably the largest) Web 3.0 application, and will completely change (again) the way people use the web. Imagine if, instead of using a web browser, you started up a program that displayed your virtual world, and when you wanted information you’d go to the building that houses that information (a library, museum, or exhibit of some kind). Of course you could always call up a screen to use things like Google, but the interface would attempt to mimic a real or fantasy world.
And also, I think that web 3.0 will finally start to do away with using the keyboard as an interface. Some smart computer maker will finally figure out that they really need to build in decent speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities (tip: Nuance and Cepstral are two companies that should do very well if they continue to refine their products and don’t get too greedy). In ten or twenty years people are going to be seriously put out if you ask them to use a keyboard for anything, except of course for the grizzled old Linux veterans that won’t give up their keyboards until you pry them from their cold, dead fingers.
In short, I don’t see social sites disappearing, but the ones that are big today are probably not the ones that will be big five years from now. The ones that thrive will be the ones that make their users do as little works as possible to actively participate. For most people, you can’t get much easier than talking. My bet would be that Apple will be the first company to have a totally speech-controlled computer (and I say that even though I’ve never owned an Apple roduct, I just think they are the ones that can pull it off) and the other companies will follow.
People love to talk to each other. That’s never going to go away. Web 2.0 just makes it a lot easier to do.
Nothing lives forever. Be it web 1.0 or web 2.0 … The point is, web 2.0 made a huge difference and made an impact on millions of lives. It doesn’t even matter if a big part of it doesn’t survive for long, what’s important is, it made a difference. And made the online world a better place…! :-)
Sorry, this argument is weak.
People have been social networking since the beginning of the web. It’s not a fad. Sites like myspace may become friendster, but there will always be social networks.
Another reason these social sites will die off is when people who use them start to suffer the effects of their postings. When they find out that they are losing job opportunities perhaps because of what they posted at some point in the past. There have been a number of stories in the news in the last year of this happening. And what if you feel you need to make some resume “adjustments”? Can’t do that easily when versions of your complete history are available online or through some social site profile aggregation service forever.
Boredom & laziness are certainly other reasons. But additionally, once people settle into a family, kids, more job responsibility, etc. they often find that they just don’t have the time to play on these sites. Similarly, vanity only works for those whose friends (real or virtual) are also participating. Once people grow up into the typically suburban life, they’ll find that few of the people they live around will have the time to pay any attention to the online world including things like the number of Digg recommendations you’ve made. No one will care (or maybe even know what you are talking about). It’s too much working a full day, commuting, taking care of the kids, etc.
IMO, the social networks that survive will wind up with members predominately under 30, over 65 (lonely retiree’s or the unemployed.
Good article. I would sum it up a different way. The internet is boring.
The writer must be getting old (well, he remembers the time the web had only dancing hamsters :) ) and can’t keep up anymore with the trends. I think one of the comments above was right. It’s like the bar scene. When you turn over 30 you get tired of going out. But, there’s always a new generation going to the bars, finding what is hot at the moment. And there has been bars for hundreds, sorry, thousands of years. The same with web 2.0 (or social sites). There will always be new generations filling up the space.
Hi Seth, an interesting article. I agree with you on some aspects of it. The fact that the initial excitement wears of after creating a profile and putting a lot of time and energy in it is something I see happen all the time. But I disagree with you on your conclusion that it is human laziness that will burst the web 2.0 bubble.
I think web 2.0 has some fundamental flaws that need to be corrected. My major objection to most of the current services is that the service creator focusses on the value of the network being created, not on the value for the user that is using the network.
If interested, I wrote a post about it here:
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/the-flaws-in-web-20-and-how-to-correct-them
johns brought up a point I think is worth noting. I feel like once the harvesting of individuals’ divulged intimacies, uncensored opinions, and demographic data gets to a certain level of blatancy people will at least make some adjustments to their contributions to web 2.0. The Internet is no longer all that anonymous and there certainly are cases where peoples’ social sphere of Internet life has affected their professional one in not so positive ways, for example the one I highlight in this posting:
http://www.impartedpursuit.com/node/7
On another note, web 2.0 will definitely stick around in some capacity exactly because of your argument that people are lazy. People need to connect with others, but what’s the alternative to the Internet solution? Outdoors? Face to face? LOL can burn 120 calories an hour?!…I’ll just take the three key strokes.
I might get tired of updating my profiles. You might get tired of being a part of Web 2.0. But there are millions and millions of internet users out there that have been a part of Web 2.0 for less than a year.
Perhaps Web 2.0 will continue to be fueled by those that are first getting into it…the tweens and late adopters.
We’re all here weighing in, proactive, and not lazy… Long live 2.0!
Seth Porges:
You know…when I read the title of your post I thought it was a strong point to touch upon. But then as I begin reading your article…it like trying to find the yoke in an empty egg shell. No real content to your suggested question.
I dont think you really took time to go hard on this subject at all there is moreto be talked about here than what you went over
were you in a rush?.
What I will say is this, Yes there has been a lot of generated interest, as well as funding involved in the we 2.0 era.And that alone has triggered a upward trend in the online market. What I will say is Yes at some point in time this trend will begin to level off and then later it will begin its downward trend to correct itself.
But the way it’ll be manifested is in the requirements needed for new startups to survive. What I mean by that is, most half@$$ websites that utilize some form of web 2.0 services that doesnt have the right set of web2.0 tools, will deminish, and that number will grow exponentially.
As for major sites like Digg, myspace, and Youtube. It will be a mirrored effect in their web traffic drawback. But the key to continued success is that they dont overwhelm their sites with useless tools, but to implement the “Right Tools”. There is also one even more important attribute that I think all UGC sites have shy’ed away from that is selective content posting.
One thing I can say about Mike Arrington is though he looks like a raving lunatic, there is one factor among others that give him a value added point. There is a decision being made as to what SHOULD and what SHOULD NOT get posted on his main site….as small of a deal that might be, you can trust that its the most defining attribute that sets longevity regardless of the times.
web 2.0 is not restricted to social networks. I don’t think sites like Flickr and Google Docs (which is more like ‘web 3.0′ anyway) will die because they are platforms, and are useful for something (even if it is backing up photos - and people will never stop taking pictures).
On the flipside, there are just too many social networks and ‘web-based IM hubs’ already. Time for some to die, indeed…
According to Alexa today, the top 10 sites in the US are:
Yahoo!
Google
MySpace
YouTube
Facebook
Microsoft Network (MSN)
EBay
Windows Live
Wikipedia
Craigslist.org
Of those ten, six are explicitly social in their basic functions: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, EBay, Wikipedia and Craigslist. The four that aren’t are, essentially, search engine driven, and have social features driving some of their traffic.
People might be lazy. But a couple billion lazy people doing one or two things a month end up attracting lots of hits. It ain’t all about who posts the stuff, but who wants at it. Wikipedia gets nearly 50 million uniques a month. According to October 2006 data (latest available) on Wikipedia, there are only 43,000 editors who have made more than 5 edits. That’s a ratio of more than 1,000-to-1.
As long as .1% of the world isn’t lazy, apparently the rest of us are interested in what they’re saying.
Oh. And your point that people have moved from MySpace to Facebook… that’s not lazy. That’s finding a better service.
Hello,
Great forum!
I found a lot of interesting information here.
Does this forum helpful for you also?