In my Web 3.0 class last spring I heard the story of Six Degrees. Six Degrees was a social network that started in 1997 and shut down in 2001. It was one of the first online social networking sites and according to this screenshot (thanks Way Back Machine) they had over 2 million users in 1999:
We spent a lot of time in class analyzing why Six Degrees didn’t survive the dotcom bust. Social networks were going to be huge! The power of the network effect would crush new competitors!
…and yet they didn’t make it.
I think the demise of Six Degrees shows the importance of timing. How many pre-youtube youtubes tried and failed because most people didn’t have broadband and couldn’t support streaming video? There are tons of theories out there that speculate on which products are widely adopted, but more and more I am realizing that timing is one of the most compelling factors.
I’m taking a class at Sloan called “Evolution to Web 3.0 and the Emergence of Management 3.0″ about what exactly “Web 3.0″ will look like. We’re tracing back historically through the evolution of web technologies and we’ll use that knowledge to sketch out what we believe web 3.0 will look like. Perhaps more importantly, we’re also exploring how changes in the web will affect the future of mangement.
The professor has not directly equated “Web 3.0″ to the “Semantic Web” (which many people do) and since our class started in January, the Web 3.0 entry on wikipedia has been deleted. Most credit Tim Berners-Lee with defining the “semantic web” in a 2001 issue of Scientific American - he’s coming to speak to our class on Monday (4/27), and I’m very excited to hear his take on how his vision has evolved over the past 8 years.
I don’t think “web 3.0″ is just some buzzword - there will be very tangible changes in search in the next few years that adopt more semantic, contextual principles. In an interview with Charlie Rose in March, Google’s Marissa Mayer pointed out that the future of search will address the difference between an “answer” and a “result” (first 2 mins of the video).
That idea - the shift from “results” to “answers” - will be central to web 3.0, should it ever move away from buzzword-only status.
