While doing some research for a work project I'm doing currently, I came across this illuminating PEW report from January 2005, called Internet Evolution: A decade of adoption: How the internet has woven itself into American life. The following extract is from the introduction, entitled 'Internet: The Mainstreaming of Online Life'. Here it is, with one comment in italic inserted by me:
"The New Normal
The Web has become the “new normal” in the American way of life; those who don’t go online constitute an ever-shrinking minority. And as the online population has grown rapidly, its composition has changed rapidly. At the infant stage, the internet’s user population was dominated by young, white men who had high incomes and plenty of education [RM: not unlike the make-up of the Web 2.0 Conference attendees]. As it passed into its childhood years in 1999 and 2000, the population went mainstream; women reached parity with men online, lots more minority families joined the party, and more people with modest levels of income and education came online.
This transition altered the internet’s social environment. These early adopters loved the liberation they got from being online. They liked the fact that they could get news from nontraditional sources. Back in 1996, 56% of those who got political news online said they preferred the internet because they could get extra information that was not available from traditional news sources. At the same time, just 18% said they preferred the internet because it was convenient. These early adopters wanted to topple all manner of institutions and establish a new order in virtual space. They had a utopian sense of the transformative power of the new technology.
The later adopters are not looking to this technology to overturn the existing order. They like the internet because it can make them more productive and more connected. Theirs is an unsentimental outlook. Like most later adopters of technology, they need to be shown that there is a real, immediate and practical value in embracing the new."
1) Web 2.0 is still in the 1996 era in terms of Internet take-up;
2) perhaps some of us Web 2.0 pundits have been guilty of focusing too much on "utopian sense of the transformative power of the new technology"; aka the Bubble mentality.
3) the tipping point will be when Web 2.0 becomes convenient and practical for mainstream people to use - making them "more productive and more connected". We're still a year or two away from that point, I think.
It's an excellent report to read and a timely reminder to us all of the context of Web 2.0, within the ongoing evolution of the Internet.
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"...the tipping point will be when Web 2.0 becomes convenient and practical for mainstream people to use... We're still a year or two away from that point, I think."
that's a bit vague -- what web 2.0 apps do you think will be "mainstream" in a year or two? what does "mainstream" mean? what web 2.0 apps -- if any -- are "mainstream" now (not saying there aren't any -- just asking)? i'm at a top 20 mba school and most people in my class don't even know what RSS is. it's quite possible that the people in my school are luddites >;) but somehow, i think they're pretty mainstream.
i'm not naysaying - i am very pro-web 2.0 and like it. but i was a web developer and am in the industry. i'm definitely not "mainstream".
this seems premature. optimistic. but premature. :)
Posted by: kayvaan | October 23, 2005 9:36 PM
from here (Austria) the Web 2.0 discussion seems also too centered around broadband PC, and generally about the technology layer. (see: the summuary of his latest Eurpean Tour by Thomas "folksonomy" Vanderwal: http://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1743)
Mainstream adoption will(maybe, probably)be driven by mobile and cross-platform applications. and these will, as it seems now, have to rely on RSS and related technologies, with or without the knowledge of the user.
Posted by: martin | October 24, 2005 1:11 AM
kayvaan, great questions! Let me take a stab at answering them:
k said: "that's a bit vague -- what web 2.0 apps do you think will be "mainstream" in a year or two?"
R replies: well RSS will be used a lot more in a couple of years time. Think Microsoft's rollout of RSS in Vista, Yahoo!'s continued innovations in introducing RSS to their millions of users, etc. Also I expect web-based apps to gain more popularity in the office and business. I expect user-generated content to become even more important with media companies and portals, I expect social networking services to evolve more so that everyday people use them. And lots more (perhaps a separate post is in order).
k asked: what does "mainstream" mean?
R replies: basically I mean non-geeks. Mena Trott of SixApart would say her mother.
k asked: what web 2.0 apps -- if any -- are "mainstream" now (not saying there aren't any -- just asking)?
R replies: very few - and that was the point of this post. We're still early in the adoption scale. RSS is still largely unknown by mainstream people, for example. Yahoo is taking the approach that we should sell the *benefits* of RSS to mainstream people, rather than the technology. So that's one way to move these things mainstream. Also 'mainstream' sites like Amazon, eBay, MySpace are Web 2.0 and getting more so over time - so we're getting there.
Martin, I agree mobile and cross-platform applications are/will be important.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 24, 2005 3:09 AM
HI Richard:
I totally agree with you on this post. Web 2.0 is no where near mainstream yet. Outside of the small tech community already obsessed with it, hardly anyone has heard the term. This is why I argue that we are no where near a Bubble 2.0. I think thing as a lot of time left before it run its course.
I wrote more about this in my post:
http://www.sproutit.com/bigact/2005/10/24/more-on-web-2-0-economics
Posted by: Charles Jolley | October 24, 2005 3:56 AM
Will mainstream users recognize the difference? If "web 2.0" apps become commonplace, will any of the people who were late adopters of the web perceive a change, or will they simply be using a cluster of websites for their communications (some old, some new), like every other year? Aesthetic disasters such as myspace are worthy of inclusion in the "web 2.0" meme, despite the lack of O'reilly crew insiders working them. I'd call such sites fully mainstream, and I think that the big year-to-year changes we see from inside the bubble appear to be a smooth decades-long gradation from ground-level.
Posted by: Michal Migurski | October 24, 2005 8:37 AM