Kyle Shannon speaks on Web 2.0 and social media

This evening, in my Emerging Programming Paradigms class at Polytechnic, the topic was social media and how it will impact the business processes that my students are facing now and in the coming days. Fortunately for me, a friend came to discuss his perception of Web 2.0 and social media by putting it into a more corporate context than I could.

Below is a live-blogging of Kyle's presentation:

What is Web 2.0 and social media and why should you care?
by Kyle Shannon

Web 1.0 companies that survived the bubble is the ones that have been able to "atomize" their services and allow for syndication of functionality to other locations. The goal has been to make people become the advocates for the company by offering services that can be syndicated (think google AdWords, Amazon Affiliates, etcetera).

Web 1.0 world - one person with a blog could wreak a lot of havoc. Remember the Intel chip problem - one blog post, one Excel sheet, mailed to all of the blog's fan base, eventually got to a reporter and from there, it made a story - Intel now has to recall the processors.

RSS allows for syndication of content - which can now go alongside of the atomized services - which is where the eyeballs are.

Used to be "there" - website is not going to go away - functionality is going to go wherever they are. It will be where the functionality is needed for others.

Rather than thinking of Web 2.0 as the next set of APIs, just go out and have fun with it. Check some of the sites that show Web 2.0 companies:

• programmableweb.com
• mashable.com

Homework assignment - go to programmableweb.com - lists all of the mashup sites and all of the APIs that are currently available and look at the company names that are providing APIs. Try to find one that existed before 1990. They are all small companies.

Best Web 2.0 applications - go play with this stuff - get a sense of "where these guy's heads are at". The dark side is users are having fun and building up expectations which is experienced in the Web 2.0 offerings. "Why doesn't Acme Co. do this?" Think of it as an end-user perspective.

Examples of business applications: zillow.com - combines databases and google Maps to add functionality that neither had before.

Kyle believes that microtransactions become more important - ringtone, widgets that does something that I am willing to pay 10c

As entertaining as watching cat videos (140K videos of cats on YouTube), there is still a large amount of amateur content that might have a higher level of creation that has yet been untapped.

Kyle also believes that the Web will become much more visual - convergence, blending of entertainment and commerce and personal content. The Web will become a more immersive experience...

Think back to desktop publishing - a lot of people who could not design, and most part went back to the designers. A number of the amateurs (minor league) of content developers will form.

His suggestion: Get on the beta list of Joost - doing for television what they did for telephony (using the same system). Most people look at it and say, "Oh - this is TV!" But you can also open widgets which have chat and information and commerce and so on.