In honor of the Web 3.0 Conference going on in New York, I wanted to write a piece today not to answer the question “What is Web 3.0?” There are plenty of articles that try and accomplish that task, and to me the easiest answer still is: Who cares?
It doesn’t matter what Web 3.0, it doesn’t matter what exactly we call it. All that matters to 99% of the people surfing the web is how it is going to affect their daily digital lives. I see three ways that is going to happen in the near future.
1. Knowledge Engines (give me data, not webpages)
There has been a lot of attention paid to Wolfram Alpha, which just launched in beta last week. Do I think it’s a “Google killer”? Nah. It doesn’t have quite the right ingredients to go mainstream yet… a funny name, a focus on deep but niche data, no easy answers for the lazy college student. But, it’s not the only “answers engine” coming on the scene. Look for Google Squared to launch shortly. As consumers become more familiar with this new type of service, they will flock to the service that offers the best answers, even if it has a really funny name.
2. Social Discovery (you’re no longer browsing alone)
Start ups like Headup and the very promising Glue offer contextually relevant social information as you browse. Soon consumers will see that they have a much better option than finding out what 500 complete strangers said about a restaurant or a book… they can find out what 10 of their closest friends and colleagues said about it, without even having to ask.
3. The Open Social Graph (social goes everywhere)
With the announcement yesterday that Facebook is going to integrate with OpenID, it’s a great time to start asking… what is this really open social web going to look like? Much of the magic is going to go on behind the scenes, in the secret (to consumers anyway) world of linked data. Formats that describe relationships, interests, and social activities already exist, and have the potential to infuse some relevance to the increasingly noisy social networks. As more companies latch onto OpenID, consumers are going to see their online worlds bleed together. Retail opportunities inside Facebook, social opportunities on news sites.
Why do brands and marketers need to care?
The opportunity for marketers to leverage what Web 3.0 is going to change about the web is a whole lot more than semantic advertising. While behavioral targeting and contextual ads leave a lot to be desired, semantic enabled ads along cannot fight the impending trend… online ads are losing engagement. Most solutions are failing to realize the potential of the medium. It’s like bringing a radio announcer to television, and forgetting about the new addition of vision and motion. Ads often lack interaction, context, and socialization. (Comparison courtesy of Joe Marchese, SocialVibe)
No… brands and marketers need to care because Web 3.0 is going to take all the social chatter online and start piping it into relevant tools, discovery mechanisms, and applications that will actually enable consumers to make smarter decisions and inform purchases. Social recommendation (semantic enabled) will replace online advertising. And unless we do everything we can to make sure our content is part of the stream… that we are forward-thinking, open, and friendly in this growing pool of linked data… we are going to be left out of the conversation.
For more, check out our series on Web 3.0 from last year on how the next generation web will change the way you connect, discover, and share with the social online world. And how this movement is going to make marketing more relevant and measurable.
Marta Strickland