I recently attended a conference that focused on all things “digital” but mostly Web 2.0. As speaker after speaker asked questions like “Who uses RSS?” or “Who’s on Facebook?” mine was one of very few hands in the room that kept going up. Someone in the group actually asked, “Does RSS really work or is it just a myth?” The people at the conference who were my age (in other words, old) looked to me, as someone of their own generation, to explain all of this folderol to them in words of one syllable. The few younger people in the room looked at me and then looked at each other as if to ask, “How come this old guy knows all about our stuff?”

Well, the answer is, I’ve been on the Internet a long time. By that I don’t mean that I’ve been staring at a computer for hours today (though I have). I’ve been online for more than 20 years, before there was a world wide web, when being online meant using a modem to connect on your phone line to a closed service like a pirate bulletin board or a nascent commercial service like Compuserve or AOL. Back then, my motivations for going online were pretty much the same as they are now – for the most part I was using the online world as a way to meet people (especially female people). I was very active on a number of bulletin board systems (BBS) and co-managed (or “sysoped”) several forums
on Compuserve. I used to host a weekly chat session on one of those Compuserve forums, Dr. Spike: Bad Advice For Bad Lovers. I’m not saying that Oprah owes her entire career to me but you never know.

Some of the people I met online remain close friends 20 years later, in no small part because we were able to recognize kindred spirits behind those anonymous pixels on screen; if not quite pioneers then at least people who “got it” early on, people with a desire to get out in front, stay out in front, and keep searching for that elusive something or other that we can’t quite describe and yet know is out there in our future.

If Web 1.0 was all about publishing bits of data and waiting for people to come and look at it, Web 2.0 is all about online collaboration and interaction and it’s more than just having fora where someone can post a review of a restaurant and then someone else can tell them they have the palate of a peasant. A big part of it is utilizing new software development tools to create real applications that run inside of a web browser - which is the thing that Microsoft has lived in fear of for more than a decade and why they tried to own the internet and why they are fated for eventual irrelevance. (Okay, putting out products like Vista doesn’t exactly help them either.)

Most of these Web 2.0 sites and products are being developed by young developers fresh out of school (or in many cases people who have dropped out of school because they couldn’t wait a couple more years to get started). They can do this because the barriers to entry keep getting lower and lower. In the 80s, AOL spent billions of dollars building phone networks and content for their subscribers. Today all you need is a computer (and new open-source based equipment like the Asus EEE means almost anyone can afford one), a few bits of software, an idea and a name. Why build content when you can provide the framework and then, if your idea is good enough, the users will provide the content for you?
Facebook was the success story of 2007 because of a simple idea: provide a framework that doesn’t just allow people to meet online but also a development environment in which anyone could build some crazy little mini-application like the Super Fun Wall or something that lets you bite your friend’s vampire with your vampire or allows you to rank your friends by how “naughty” they are and millions keep coming back to the web site every day. Facebook claims that they now have 400,000 developers who have created more than 24,000 of these mini-applications. Facebook has two problems – the first is that they haven’t yet worked out a consistent way to make money off all of this and the second is that as the perceived industry leader, everyone else is now trying to eat their lunch. And rest assured, someone will. If Microsoft and Yahoo are vulnerable, if MySpace is already yesterday’s news, then everyone is someone else’s midnight snack. It’s the web equivalent of a cowboy movie, there’s always a younger, faster gunslinger coming to town wanting to make his rep by killing Wild Bill.

One other rule of Web 2.0 seems to be to have a silly name. If all of the good domain names are taken, make up a word. So that means we already have Plurk trying to surplant Twitter. And another rule seems to be that any idea is worth trying (in part because, as I said, the barriers to entry are getting lower every day). Two days ago I ran across a new service called Wakoopa. They’ve raised US$1 million in venture capital money to create a Web 2.0 site that will have a social network based around the notion that each time you run an application on your computer or mobile phone, it will get logged on their site, creating a community of people who use the same application and are looking for more. Does this sound like an insane business idea? It does to me and yet they’ve already got more than 30,000 users who have generated 250 million hours of software usage data. It’s the “Long Tail” concept, sell more of less and if they manage it correctly, they could have a profitable business.

Another rule of Web 2.0 seems to be to come up with things that the younger generation can instantly grasp while leaving older folks out in the cold. Tell a 50 year old that your avatar can sit in a virtual room with your friends’ avatars and watch an Assy McGee cartoon and that 50 year old will most likely ask, “Who the hell would want to do that?” - assuming , of course, that the 50 year old knows that Assy McGee is a cartoon series or even grasps the concept of an avatar. But for millions of kids, this is the stuff they’ve been waiting for. Old people seem to think that people should relate to each other “in person” and that these new applications that seem to be inevitably leading to generations of people spending their entire lives locked in their bedrooms or sitting in internet cafes are bad things, but I disagree. To me, it’s the 21st century equivalent of saying, “If man was meant to fly, he’d have wings.” It takes people from small one horse towns around the world and puts them on an equal cultural footing with someone sitting in Hong Kong or New York.

The last rule is that change is a constant. People who are waiting for things to “settle down” before jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon are going to be left behind eating dust. If anything, the pace of change will only accelerate. Within a couple of years, if you take a vacation and don’t log in, when you come back you’re going to find that all of your friends have migrated to some new service like FlippyFloppoopa.com and you’ve been left behind. If you don’t exist in the virtual world, you’ll no longer exist in the real one either.

Me? I’m not sure what the hell I get out of all this aside from killing time but I love it just the same. Add “Spike HK” as a friend on Facebook (my profile photo is the same as the column logo here) and follow “SpikeHK” on Twitter or “Spike (Hong Kong)” on FriendFeed. I know, I know, it’s not very Web 2.0 of me to have different nicknames on different services but be nice to me, I’m old.