When you look at the power of the Web 2.0 trend in the Internet economy, most people point to the success of Facebook, or the influence of Web 2.0 on business and e-commerce, but the most dramatic example was the political campaign of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama, dubbed “Obama 2.0” by some:

• According to the Washington Post, Obama raised about a half a billion dollars from online donations.

• On Facebook, Obama has more than three million friends, compared with about 600,000 for McCain.

• Obama’s campaign videos on YouTube have been viewed an estimated 100 million times, more than triple the number for McCain.

Still, many people are unclear about what “Web 2.0” means. Some see it simply as a new style of web design — simple layouts, bright colors, tabbed navigation, larger font sizes, and boxes with rounded corners. Others equate it with social networking because of the use of Facebook and text messaging in the Obama campaign. Some people see it as just another Internet “meme” — a catch-phrase or idea popular in cyberculture.

For example, in the ancient days of the web (the 1990s), many sites offered you a way to create a personal homepage (e.g. Geocities) or a blog (Blogger.com), but Web 2.0 sites, such as the pioneering MySpace and the newcomer Facebook, offered a personal homepage that also included a blogging tool, photo galleries, and a way to find and add a network of links to other users. While email and instant messaging had been around long before that, the Web 2.0 sites integrated different tools for interactivity and connectivity.

Where did the term Web 2.0 originate?
The term Web 2.0 first became popular in 2004 after an O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference (O’Reilly is a highly respected publisher of technical books). Even at that time, though, there were websites that offered interactivity and connectivity, and blogging had already been around since the late ‘90s. Facebook had just been launched that year, but it was only intended for college students, not all Netizens. Photo-sharing site Flickr was also launched that year in Vancouver, so it really was a watershed year for Web 2.0 in many ways.

Sites like Go2Web2.0 (www.go2web20.net/) list hundreds and hundreds of Web 2.0 sites. Web 2.0 is not just about social media, though. There are many types of Web 2.0 sites ranging from blogs to wikis (see the list of examples on page 55). As well, many British Columbia companies (and several on Vancouver Island) have developed Web 2.0 sites, such as Flickr, Flock, Udutu, Sitemasher, and DailySplice.

How can businesses benefit from a Web 2.0 strategy?
A recent article in BusinessWeek titled “Why Web 2.0 has Corporate America Spinning” lists the following reasons Web 2.0 is becoming such a popular buzzword in the business community:

• Corporate blogging. Executive blogs, such as those by General Motors and IBM executives, give companies a channel for informal dialogue with their grassroots customers and also provides a way to offer another perspective on what people are hearing in the mainstream media.

• Problem-solving. Web 2.0’s emphasis on social networking can create opportunities for collaboration and outside-the-box thinking in larger organizations. Wikis offer a way to share information and also track how that information changes as people add to it.

• Staying young. Older executives know that Web 2.0 attracts younger employees who are already interacting and sharing information online outside of work. It’s good for recruiting and retention and helps create a more youthful culture in a company.

Web 2.0 is also changing the thinking behind e-government
Over the past few years, the big buzz in public sector organizations was about how to use technology to transform government into e-government. But the popularity of Web 2.0 has started the public sector talking about something that’s being called “Government 2.0.” From the government of Canada right down to municipalities, governments are interested in how they can use social media, such as blogs and message boards, to engage the public, create citizen-centric e-services, and share information.

The city of Toronto’s Web 2.0 Summit, held on Nov 26 and 27, 2008, was held to share ideas about how Web 2.0 and social media (such as wikis, blogs, and social networking profiles) can increase civic engagement, reach all communities, and improve city services, as well as learn new ways for elected officials to engage communities on the services that affect their quality of life.

Here are some different types of Web 2.0 sites and specific examples of each type.

Blogs
• Blogger is one of the original free blogging services, now owned by Google.

Bookmarking
• StumbleUpon is an addictive software that you add to your browser to “stumble” on random websites, but you can also indicate your preferences with a rating tool or suggest sites that should be added.

Chat
• Meebo is the web messenger that lets you access instant messaging from anywhere, such as MSN/Live, Yahoo!, AIM, Google Talk (Gtalk), Gabber and ICQ.

Education
• Udutu was created by another Vancouver Island company and provides a free tool for authoring e-learning courses that can also be downloaded and distributed for free.

Emails
• Gmail is one of the most popular of the free webmail services, created by Google.

File Sharing
• Mediafire is a free tool for easily sharing files of any type or size over the Internet.

Games

• Trendio is an online prediction game.

Images & Photos
• Slide.com is like Flickr or PhotoBucket, but Slide.com makes it easy to link your slideshows to other social media accounts, such as Facebook.

Micro-blogging
• Twitter is a leading micro-blogging site that allows people to post short updates about what they’re doing, called “tweets,” and follow other people’s tweets, too.

Music
• Odeo is a kind of YouTube for audio files… users can browse, download, and share audio files.

News
• NewsGator allows you to read all of your favourite news, websites, and blogs all in one place.

Office Tools
• Zoho Office Suite is a growing suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools that range from a simple word-processing tool to project management and customer-relationship management tools.

Podcasting
• DailySplice.com is a social media company created by yet another Vancouver Island start-up.

RSS
• FeedBurner helps bloggers, podcasters, and commercial publishers publish RSS news feeds or offer mailing list subscriptions.

Social networking
• LinkedIn is a kind of Facebook for business users, a social networking site for connecting with other businesses and professionals and is also used for job searches and hiring.

Video
• YouTube is the most popular free video-sharing web site and lets users upload, view, and share video clips.

VOIP
• Skype is voice over IP (VoIP) software that’s free to download and offers free-to-call long distance numbers.

Web Development
• Sitemasher.com is a development and hosting platform (created by a Vancouver company) that includes integrated content management and search engine optimization. Sites can be designed for free, and developers only pay subscription costs after they publish the site.

Wikis
• Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet with content created by its users.

Article originally published in Douglas Magazine.

I’ve tweeted this before on my Twitter pages @usabilitydesign and @socialmediamash, but I have to expand on this issue here because I think it’s going to be something that is going to become an issue for Twitter micro-bloggers.

In case you’re new to Twitter, or not familiar with how it works, when you post a 140-character-or-less micro-blog on Twitter that includes a link to something you’ve referenced, Twitter will either handle that link one of two ways. If the link is not too long, Twitter will convert it to a clickable link and leave the URL as it was when you entered it.

The usability issue

If your combined text and URL is greater than 140 characters, Twitter won’t convert the URL to a TinyUrl then count your characters based on the length of the shortened URL. You have to either provide a shorter URL yourself OR shorten the text part of your tweet, which is a usability issue. Why should a URL count in the 140 characters you’re allowed?  

However, your post is less than 140 characters long, but the URL itself is quite long, Twitter will automatically convert it to a “TinyUrl,” (see http://TinyUrl.com), which is a shorter format link that redirects to the link you had specified. Nice of Twitter to do that for you, but here’s the problem. 

The security issue

Anyone can set up a Twitter account if they have a valid email address, and unscrupulous people who are phishing for your personal data or trying to install a virus or worm on your computer can use TinyURLs to mask what URL they are sending you to. You don’t know what the URL is until you click on the TinyURL version and open the site. By then it could be too late for you,

The TinyUrl.com site actually offers a more secure way to share a link that is being rediercted by a TinyUrl. It’s called “Preview,” and if you use the Preview version when you are manually creating your TinyUrl, then people who click on your TinyUrl link are first redirected to the TinyUrl.com site where they can see the actual URL and decide whether they feel it’s safe to click through and go to the site or not.

When Twitter automatically shortens URLs to TinyUrls, however, we don’t have a way to let people review the link before they visit the site.

A reasonable solution for both issues: embedded URLs

 Here’s a solution that Twitter could implement, if they really care about this issue.

If Twitter gave their users the ability to embed a URL in the text of their tweet… e.g. instead of entering a long link such as http://digitalpractices.org/2009/04/15/twitter-links-are-a-major-phishing-risk that Twitter will shorten into a TinyUrl, the message could simply refer to this blog post that I wrote, and thus Twitter users wouldn’t have to use up so many of their allotted 140 characters to include an URL. This would solve a usability issue on Twitter.

As for security, Twitter followers and browsers could simply hover their cursor over the link to see what it is. That way, they can at least have a fighting chance at finding out whether the link looks like it point to a legitimate Website rather than a creepy phishing site or some shady IP address spreading malware.

What do you think? Are you concerned about phishing or malware attempts when you click on TinyUrl links in Twitter posts?

What if you could share your own private network with the people and organizations you trust, exclude all other Internet connections (Web, email, etc) unless it passed your own criteria for inclusion, and could police your network by blocking any sites or emails that violated your rules in any way? What we think of as “the Internet” could fast become “the Intranet (capital ‘I’)”.

While everyone’s still garnering an understanding of what Web 2.0 means, a Web 3.0 could creep up and overtake it because of bandwidth, security and proprietary content drivers.

EXAMPLE 1: BANDWIDTH AND ACCESSIBILITY

SavetheInternet.com is a coalition that has “banded together to save the First Amendment of the Internet: network neutrality.” Their site defines Net Neutrality thusly:

Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It’s why the Internet has become an unrivaled environment for open communications, civic involvement and free speech. The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies – including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner – want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video – while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

Their concern is that the open playing field of the current Internet, where everyone gets equal; bandwidth consideration, will be lost in favor of a Web 3.0 where private enterprise offers a faster, but more exclusive Net for those who can afford it.

EXAMPLE 2: SECURITY AND USABILITY

Personal InfoCloud, by Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions, talks about about how users have a kind of preferred way of accessing information online, what he calls the “Local InfoCloud”:

As the my understanding began to lean toward familiarity as a core component of the definition of Local InfoCloud, the term began to embrace the social and community aspects (I am working on shying away from the term community as it is a broadly used term and I am trying to be a little more precise). Interactions with people, services, networks, applications, etc. that are familiar are means of bringing information closer to us as people with data, information, and media needs. The Local InfoCloud eases access. It eases the ability to find and refind information. It is information that is closer to us, not necessarily in physical proximity, but in the ability to access, in which familiarity is bread. I spent much time considering changing the label from local to community or social, but there were elements that did not perfectly fit that either.

Location-based services may be created by a service, but understanding the mindset, terminology, dialect, and cognitive frameworks that are germane to that physical location the information can be structured to resemble or mirror the social elements of understanding in that place. I will get to a better understanding of this when I talk about the Location aspect of the Local InfoCloud. As well, thinking in the Model of Attraction framework the Local InfoCloud is that which is attracted closer to us than the Global InfoCloud.

What I extrapolated from Vander Wal’s blog is that the Internet, or the “Global InfoCloud”, could become much less appealing for users than their own private network where they could control how they find and refind information, and how they interact with more familiar people, services, networks, applications.

EXAMPLE 3: PROPRIETARY CONTENT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Back in the late ’90s when I wrote a weekly Internet column for our local newspaper, one of the things I predicted was that the Internet would become more proprietary, just like how online subscription services such as AOL, Compuserve and so on used to operate a few years earlier. That’s not to say that you won’t be able to access any content on the Net, but any content worth accessing would be fee-based.

In a recent New York Times book review, the issue of digital publishing is given another spin. When all books are digital, it makes it easier to combine and recombine information like never before:

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. “Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together,” wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. “The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single, isolated book.”

Of course, that should alarm the entire publishing industry, especially authors. Up till now, a book with its two sacred covers was a complete work, a product, a publishing unit of sale, a reference and an ISBN number. But if your book simply becomes a part of the swirling maelstrom of data on the Web, integrated into other databases and chopped into fine bits like the old K-Tel food processor infomercials we used to see on TV, who makes money on it? And who gets the credit if your content is simply hashed up into other dynamically generated pages of material?

Again, that’s where a network of private intranets would appeal to those who want to preserve the integrity of their intellectual properties. You control who can access it, who can buy it, and what they can do with it. I can think of many other reasons why Web 3.0 may happen sooner than we think, but I’d really like to hear from others on this subject. Post your responses here, or email me  and I’ll share your thoughts in this blog.