The Web Is Becoming More Social

The web feels different lately. A few years ago, most websites were closer to digital brochures. You visited, read something, and left. The website belonged to whoever built it, and visitors were an audience, not participants.

That description is becoming outdated. Not because any single decision changed it, but because several websites appeared at the same time and all of them are asking users to do something rather than only read.

What is actually changing

Flickr launched in 2004 and changed how people share photographs. Instead of emailing a picture to five friends, a user uploads it once and anyone can see it, comment on it, or add tags that make it findable by strangers. The photograph belongs to the person who took it, but it lives in a public space.

del.icio.us does something similar with bookmarks. Saving a link used to be a private act on your own computer. On del.icio.us, bookmarks are public, tagged, and searchable. If enough people save the same page, it becomes visible. A shared collection of bookmarks turns out to be more useful than any one person’s private list.

MySpace went further. A profile page, a list of friends, a customizable space that slowly becomes a picture of the person who built it. Last year News Corporation paid $580 million for it — a number that surprised many people and made it clear that something real was happening.

YouTube arrived last year and solved a problem nobody had articulated clearly: sharing a video clip was technically possible but practically difficult. YouTube made it trivial. The number of videos being uploaded every day is already more than anyone can watch.

Wikipedia is a different kind of experiment. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit sounds like it should fail immediately. Errors will accumulate. Arguments will never end. Instead it has grown into a large and mostly reliable reference, maintained by thousands of volunteers with no central authority telling them what to do.

What the term “Web 2.0” is trying to describe

Tim O’Reilly and others started using the phrase “Web 2.0” in 2004 to describe this shift. The label is imprecise and the debate about its exact meaning is already tiresome, but the underlying observation is real: the websites attracting the most attention in 2006 are platforms, not publications. They grow because users create the content and the connections.

A useful test: does the site become more valuable as more people use it? A static company website does not. Flickr does, because more photographs and more tags make it easier to find things. del.icio.us does, because more people saving and tagging pages surfaces what is actually useful. These sites use their users as co-authors.

What this requires from users

The shift creates something new: an online identity that accumulates over time. A username on a forum, a photo collection on Flickr, a set of bookmarks on del.icio.us, a blog — these things slowly build a picture of a person that other people can discover and follow.

This is interesting but also unfamiliar. Most people have not had to think about what their online presence says about them, because most people have not had one. Now the question is becoming relevant to anyone who participates in these spaces.

There is also a different problem. When everybody can publish, we get more voices and more noise together. Not every popular post is correct. Not every viral page is worth reading. We will need to develop ways of filtering that do not exist yet — personal habits of attention, collective signals of quality, new kinds of editors and curators.

What I find genuinely interesting about this period

The web in 2006 is still early enough that the rules are not settled. Many of these platforms are only two or three years old. It is not clear which ideas will last, which companies will grow, or which of today’s experiments will look obvious in retrospect.

The experiments are also strange enough to be fun. A bookmarking site that makes your private links public. A video site that lets anyone upload. A phone company spending hundreds of millions to buy a collection of profile pages. None of these seemed obviously correct before they worked.

Maybe this is why I like having a small place of my own online. Not because it will be read by many people, but because it feels like participating in something that is still being figured out.