Web 3.0 Overview– How to take advantage of the next shift

Web 3.0* will bring a fundamental shift in the way we interact with data online. Along the way, there will be opportunities to create the next Google or just understand how brand engagement will evolve……

* Web 3.0 is a contentious marketing term and used to illustrate the next significant development for the web until/if something better comes along!Photo credit – Loosends http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunaspin/3206373800/sizes/m/

First of all, who is Jeffrey Veffer?

• Active member of the Internet community for over 15 years with deep experience in Interactive content and video

• Part of start-up team for Discovery Channel’s website exn.net• Set up streaming media business for Excite@Home Canada • Founding member of Innovation and Strategy team at Bell Canada• Background in Architecture and Design (yes really!)

Company - http://brandsential.comFacebook - http://facebook.com/JeffreyVefferLinkedIn - http://linkedin.com/in/jeffreyveffer Twitter - http://twitter.com/jeffreyvefferBlog – http://jeffreyveffer.com; http://combinedoptimism.org (and others!)

Comparison of Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0

Highlights of each phase

• 1.0

• 1995-2003

• Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape

• Infrastructure and getting content online

2.0

2004-2009

Google, Flickr, Facebook

User interface and social community

3.0

2009

Siri, Primal Fusion, Twine, WolframAlpha, ???

Structured data, meaning and context

Photo credit - http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3546/3765013717_37dbd75b30_o.png

Web Era

Dates

Significant Companies

Major focus

Characteristics of Web 1.0 and Significance (or why should I care?)

• Web as information portal founded around capabilities of browser (Remember NCSA Mosaic?)

• The site is the destination (Where original content resides)

• Rudimentary interactivity (on a page by page basis) and content is relatively static (stays pretty much only on page where it was created.) Brand engagement is dominated by “on site” interaction.

• Lacks social interaction• Lacks context

Significance• Web as resource for everyone- doesn’t

require technical ability to explore.• Getting traffic to site is high priority• User experience confined to reading

content primarily• One to many (broadcast) paradigm for

the site owner• Context result of site hierarchy and

users frame of reference• Search engines’ relevancy increasing

but common complaint is that there are too many non-related results (i.e. a lot of “garbage”)

* Web 1.0 = Get it online; Web 2.0= Make it work – Source Jason Goldberg

Characteristics of Web 1.0 (“Get it online”*)

But machines (devices + browsers) don’t understand the data underneath the content :<. [Humans take this understanding for granted.]

An example – Excite search for Blue Jays – results: the bird or the Baseball team? Doesn’t understand the “concepts” or “linkages” between the words

Characteristics of Web 2.0 and Significance (or why should I care 2.0?)

• Web as a “platform”• Increased social interaction (era of User-

generated content)• Content is more portable/sharable – widgets,

RSS• The content is the destination, wherever it

lives – need branding / recognition around content.

• Power of community (crowd-sourcing)

Significance• Now sites can interact on more than

just html links.• Users are contributing and have a

stake in the content/brand• Content isn’t just present on main site-

can promote brand in many locations• Crowd-sourcing*• Search has progressed but common

complaint (still) is that there are too many non-related results

Characteristics of Web 2.0 (“Make it work”)

* Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. Source Wikipedia

Photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ycc2106/

But machines (devices + browsers) still don’t understand data underneath the content :< [but getting better]

An example – Hakia.com Search for Blue Jays. Knows that there are two distinct concepts (Baseball team and Bird and categorizes results)

Characteristics of Web 3.0 and Significance (or does the web know what I mean?)

• What does “web” look like to me? How is my view of the content shaped by my personalization? Does it look like everyone else’s web?

• Web 3.0 is a collection of technologies that consist of the semantic Web, linked data, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, mashups, & APIs

• Mobility – take/create/view my content “everywhere”

• Interaction becomes, well more interactive! Automatic updating for status and “lifestreaming” becomes more mainstream.

• Advertainment – Brands sponsor content interactions to build engagement

Significance• Personalization (not just style and

format, but content) will give save users time and become more relevant

• Advertising: not just one-way push – Brand advocates become more prevalent as easier tools develop to interact/rate products and services. Brand engagement becomes critical as trust model changes from old style “push” to relationship building through many different channels and users.

• Search becomes more contextual, learning and using your preferences to make results more valuable

Characteristics of Web 3.0

Search becomes more “natural” and conversational

An example – Siri Search for “Jays tickets for tonight.” Knows that Jays=Baseball team and that I want to purchase tickets for tonight’s 7:30 PM game against the Yankees

But is Web 3.0 just all about Search?

• No, for the large part it is about context.• What is context?

• But also context can refer to “channel” (on what device content is viewed) or “correctness” (is content suitable to satisfy need?) or location (where is content created or consumed?)

con·text (kŏn'těkst') n. The circumstances in which an event occurs; a setting

Photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion

Why is Context important?• Context allows personalization, saving time, saving money and creating

greater opportunities for those that know how to deliver it to customers.

• For example in 2006 developers created “Mash-ups” where data could be overlaid on a Map, such as the Craigslist housing mash-up over Google Maps- but you still needed to know what areas to search or at least look on the map!

• But Semantic applications would know what you “meant” when you said, “I’m looking for a 2-bedroom close to the beach and transit for under $2500!”

• As you might imagine this won’t be easy because the mass of data currently sitting in databases across the web is not structured, which means that software at this point in time doesn’t know the context.

• To illustrate, in the example above the application would have to know you (and the context) well enough that a 2-bedroom means apartment, and knew distance (to understand close) and $2500 means per month. (Understanding that we as human beings take for granted!)

Early vision – Apple’s Knowledge Navigator

• In 1987 Hugh Dubberly of Apple created the Knowledge Navigator video to support CEO John Sculley’s vision for a new way to interact with computers- a conversational dialog with the tablet style pc shows the possibilities once systems learn about their users.

• Gestures (similar to today’s multi-touch) allow the user to move items around in the screen

• It was revolutionary at the time (and still is controversial) in that what was easy to do in this dramatization is still quite difficult today!

The technology alphabet soup – RDF, OWL, XML

• Where the Web 1.0 was all about getting information online and creating backend systems to manage that, Web 2.0 has arguably been about the user interface and bringing desktop-like application functionality into the browser

• Web 3.0 will largely depend upon changes to the backend on how data is structured and tagged.

• Various formats are proposed to allow structuring including Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL) and XML as a framework. Other formats exist and currently there is no clear leader emerging as a standard.

• Because the web was largely built with HTML, browsers are only able to determine the organization of data on pages for the most part. There is no practical way for a browser to understand that item #1234 is a widget or that its price is $199.

In fact there’s no way for the browser to know that 199 is a price or that its connected to the product information!

“Why is this a problem? We’ve survived so far without the Semantic Web?”

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/

The problem- framework to make sense of the massive amount of data flowing

• Startups are racing to somehow structure existing and new data to draw connections and uncover new value in these relationships

• But there are competing visions of how this can be accomplished– Various Data schemas exist on how to structure this data going forward– Relationships between data objects have to be established (and agreed upon!) so that for

example pictures about Bangkok belong to the set “Thailand” as well as “my Asian vacation.”• But how do we deal with the 20 billion or so web pages that currently exist? How do we

extract meaning from all this data, in a form that we can all agree on?

Linked Open Data Project-http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData

Lets look at some stats on the current state of web content to see the size of the problem...

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewiedewie/

Users upload 20 hours of video to YouTube every minute (or 200,000 hrs a week - equal to 115,000 Hollywood movies a week )Source- http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=on4EmafA5MA

Photo credit – http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2514/3765673385_52bed313b5_o.png

There are an estimated 22.51 Billion web pages currently accessible online; approx. the same number as neurons in a human brainSource- Wikipedia; Tim Berners-Lee, WWW@20 Consortium, April, 2009

Photo credit – http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2496/3766498848_39e6f6d48d_o.png

Content consumed per user per month is growing as fast as the number of users coming onlineSource-Cisco Whitepaper and Wikipedia

Photo credit – http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2439/3763207254_5f8638ed0f_o.png

What are possible opportunities to explore?

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/jplust/

Content will still reside in many places but understood in brand context

• Once again, unlike Web 1.0 brand engagement won’t just come from driving massive traffic to a website and hoping that some users stick around to absorb the message, but by having content exposed in many different channels which help customers.

• Customers will consume content that comes from large brands directly but will also engage their social network to find recommendations / reviews of content they’ve consumed. [but this will happen more naturally than now as systems develop to capture this activity] (EG Twine.com)

• Customers will want brands they trust to “mediate” content for them as an antidote to the ever increasing flow of information.

• Firefox addin called “Headup” (http://headup.com) allows cross referencing between activity on a users social networks and the page they are browsing right now.

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/montymetzger/

Opportunity to really enhance brand experience across multiple channels

• Flowing across multiply channels – eg from desktop to mobile and still personalization and knowledge is continuous and ubiquitous – Seamless operability across devices

• All data is linked and processing occurs mostly in the “cloud”

• “Data brokerages” can help brands understand in near real-time perceptions and feedback on products and services

• As “understanding” data becomes more prevalent, real-time collaboration/interaction will increase in frequency

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/intersectionconsulting/

Understanding data will free up resources for more intensive measurement of brand engagement

• Understanding that the major source of brand interaction is within a customers social networks rather than simply on a web page will enable new ways to promote positive brand engagement

• Opportunities to measure effectiveness of brand ambassadors will emerge as ways to measure frequency and velocity of messages about brands are created

• Furthermore, as understanding about language increases “tone” or sentiment will be able to be measured in conjunction with other metrics will enable brands to more deeply understand how customers are engaging with their products and services.

Photo credit – http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3488/3772366436_f3d5ae42bd_o.png

Brandvertainment

• From a brand standpoint, brands will more and more be expected by consumers to create content that is relevant. In other words what is the context (channel, correctness, location) that satisfies consumers’ needs? (Sounds a bit like deep customer needs or investigation or marketing 101!)

• Brands could sponsor content interactions to build engagement.

• One way to do this would be to recommend entertainment content based on a users profile Audi branded driving game for the iPhone

Who is leading the charge today?

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/max78/

Leaders in the current environment

• Siri – an application that aims to be a "Virtual Personal Assistant" (VPA) . The demographic that Siri is targeting initially is 18-35 urban and social.

• Twine – its founder call it "knowledge networking"- It’s a service that helps you track and discover content and products that relate to your unique interests.

• Primal Fusion- they want to make the internet work for you. Your ideas are captured in personal thought networks, which grow into powerful assets for building, organizing and expressing your knowledge

How to begin?

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/toby_maloy/

Keep following leading companiesListen to customersSet realistic objectivesExperiment and measure!And of course, have fun!

Thank you!

Visit us at brandsential.comJeffrey.veffer@brandsential.com