2007: Web3.0 the Distributed Collaboration Web
2006 was all about two-dot-oh. Whatever that may be precisely, everyone agrees about the fact its all about ‘collaboration’.
Collaboration is cool, it is productive and it is easy. You don’t need to think about where to stick your tags, because gazillion others already did that: delicious. You can not just look at images, you can tag, annotate, share and so forth them: flickr. You don’t need to browse all these stupid skipintro sites to find gigs or artist info: last.fm.
But all this has one mayor downside. What happens, for example when web2.0 goes down? What happens when web2.0 is sold without too much considerations for you? Or when it eats all your hours of data-sifting, all your hard work, just to make some more bucks? In all these cases, you’re basically fsked. If Yahoo! decides they can make more bucks by closing you out from your gigabytes/years of flickr data, bad luck for you. And what about the weeks you spent fiddling with premiere to get that 5 minute video for youtube finshed, only to find out that you are no longer the real owner?
I see a great opportunity for Drupal. Decentralisation. Distribution. P2P communication between webapplications. To Take Back The Web2.0.
Another, more positive reason why that Distributed Web may become the 2007 hit, is the large integration-hype we already see emerging all around. 2007 will be about integration of services, tools and applications. Instead of having your bookmarks only on a single website they can be accessed on many websites, or in your preferred desktop application. Instead of logging in to your Drupal site, to manage hundreds of users on a clumsy HTML interface (even if spiced up with some AJAX), you can use Outlook to manage them. This requires sites to talk to eachother, and to talk to other applications. In order to achieve that integration, we will be building the foundations of that web3.0, the distribution, for free.
Drupal (the community) is relatively small, though I believe large enough to set stuff in motion, to be of substantial influence in the cutting-edge web-folks circles. Combine that, with the cutting edge Ruby on Rails code we see (there is a plugin for about every progressive idea) and the huge, progressive, userbase of wordpress, and we can start that web3.0, the Distributed collaboration web.
Web3.0 the Distributed collaboration web: You run your own bookmarkservice on your own Drupal/wordpress installation (or in your homebrewn RoR app), you run your own image galleries on your server. And you allow openID logins, or even run your own openID server.
Under water, your site, will collaborate with a flock of friends and relatives. Your site will constantly ping out changes, will provide tagclouds over XMLRPC and will gather information over that same XMLRPC, over opensearch. It will share taxonomy trees with other sites. In contrary to the (spammed to death) trackback concept, which is the first step on this road, this is not something to merely publish content all around. This collaboration is about aggregating information on the moment that you need it. And about telling others you have interesting information available.
An example: I submit a weblink to my own Drupal site. The moment I do that, I get my own tags to choose from (freetagging), but simultaneously, a ping goes out, asking my own central tag-server: do you know anything about this link? If yes, it will send back tag-suggestions. Anyone can run a tagserver, in fact, every site can be one, Drupal can act as server. Same idea as the DrupalID. On my site, i see a little “wait…”-icon, once my site received (the) suggestions, I can choose from them. Viola, a personal delicious, yet all content stays on my own site, in my database, instead of being handed out for free to a multinational. I control the level of privacy, I control who, where and how that data is used.
We obviously need to find good standards for this, but I believe that in 2007 will see the start of this. I am sure that at some point a large two-dot-oh company will go down, and then, either by selling out all your data, or taking all your valuable data with it will make a lot of people nervous. Such an event will be a boost for what I am quite sure will happen: The Great Decentralisation of the Web2.0.
Happy 2007 :)
Disclaimer: These are only ideas, more wishful thinking then actual predictions. Yet they are what I believe to be the hit of 2007.
Great post, great ideas. In
Great post, great ideas. In the last couple of weeks as the non-tech but data appreciative folks I know are finally starting to warm to the Web 2.0 I am right with you in predicting the crash out…but for me I feel very strongly that a company doesn’t even have to go down. What we’ll find is that folks will begin to question the value of free, in general…or not even pay attention to it. I am talking about adoption rates. There are many of us who absolutely needed delicious when it first came out because drupal node_populate and cck and js weren’t ready yet. But now we don’t. Some of us still use it, some of us don’t. Most people, like 87%, still haven’t figured out the need for it. They just don’t wonder, when they look around the web and feel overwhelmed and add’d out, where the heck their stuff is. They are already getting used to hard drive crashes, viruses, etc etc. They are getting used to Web 1.0 because they aren’t even prepared or asking the questions that Web 2.0 was developed to address. Doesn’t mean some of them aren’t users, but we are talking a whole planet here.
Web 3.0 is “our” way of saying we are already past that crash, and partly because “we” realize our needs are changing, and what we are doing on a daily basis is changing in response to that. I still love helping people build community sites. I think it’s great to be able to throw one up in 2 days that has all this incredibel functionality built in. However, it takes most folks who aren’t me months to figure out what the significance of even the simplest of functionality is, much less drive signups.
Great thinkers have looked at the 2.0 model and discovered the ethical dilemmas contained therein. I am happy to move on, and I am a bit overwhelmed by the incredible number of usability upgrades, educational offerings, and use cases that must be generated in order to make the barrier to entry and overhead for the distributed Web 3.0 a reality. But I’m down. Count on me.
Subscription Nets, Open Intelligence, and Peer Production.
Let’s do it! Drupal rocks!
One glitch
While I fully support this idea and have been wanting to move my data to this type of model for a while now there is a small problem that will prevent the full realization of what you predict -> the masses don’t want the overhead. Firstly, many people don’t want to spend the money on either a sufficient connection to run their own server or on a hosting account. Secondly, most people don’t want to deal with managing and maintaining a server/service. Most of the blogging/bookmarking/tagging/etc sites are propelled forward by two things, its a free service and people don’t have to manage it.
I think we will see some hybrids of this concept and you’ll have companies that offer to deal with the costs and maintenance of this type of world. You’ll then end up with these pools of decentralized accounts, which brings us back to a situation controlled by companies but at least it will hopefully provide us real ownership and access to the data due to the nature of the “decentralized web”
Indeed, its not JoeSchmoe-safe
Nor meant to be.
The simple explanation is: If CMSes like Drupal, or frameworks like Railfrog lower the barrier to run such services, then we have achieved what I meant.
See Jabber: you are not required to use the Google Talk server or jabber.org server, you can run your own. On your intranet (corporae chatserver) or for your clients, Jabber servers are rather simple (yet still too hard IMO). Instead of only three or four Mayor chat servers (MSN, Yahoo!, IRC and AIM) we now have tens of thousands, an every day increasing number, actually.
The Jabber Model is what I have in mind for this distributed web. For some services maybe even more scattered, for others a tad more centralized.
Great ideas, great focus ...
this seems to be the way the web will go.
In any case, drupal seems to be ready - on a smallish base - to go ahead.
Some points that may be unseen - because a lack of interest - on the side of the drupal community:
Communities may well grow and develop, when - and only when - they can handle the integration of other people - specialists or enthusiasts - who bring in information, needs, requests from their point of view.
The web - what ever number - is a happening not just because some cool coders and hackers make it happen, but because there are real people, with real business, with real interest who so many time are turned away or bashed of, just because the do no know nothing about “the secrets of php etc.”.
On the other hands, great tools, like drupal, IMHO are sailing the web way below there potential.
Here are some tags to thing about in means to improve:
… documentation ?
… internationalization … ?
… organization of content at drupal.org, including a permanent review of modules and snippets - I gues this would need an extra kind of task force ?
… marketing … ?
… well I do not want to bash drupal, as this would be quite unfair to such a great tool and to the people who make it happen.
But the fantastic tools - modules - and ideas that exist around drupal would merrit to be used more even on drupal.org.
As a matter of an idea:
Why not have a sample installation - up to date - for every module and theme, or group of such. Should be possible to automate most of the process with standard data sets and install routines.
So a coder who presents a module would have the installation in a standard environment where he / she and everybody else can see if and how it works.
Such oportunity would also allow to benchmark and compare the needs for resources.
In any case, Thanks to You and the drupal community.
Merry Christmas season and
Happy and Prosperous New Year.
Roland
Costa Rica
Great article! Happy 2007 :)
Great article! Happy 2007 :)
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