Take foraging as an example. Whenever an ant finds food and carries it back to the nest, that ant leaves a chemical trail (pheromones) along the way. Other ants sniff the chemical trail and follow it toward that same food source. As more ants find the food and carry it back to the nest, the path gets a stronger chemical dose and, in turn, becomes more attractive to fellow foragers. Individually, these ants are following a simple set of rules and acting on local information: follow the pheromone clues and bring food back to the nest. However, the colony as a collective is behaving in quite a complex way: creating a sophisticated highway system that leads to the best food sources.

Collective Intelligence and the Web

So, what do ants and chemical trails have to do with the web? For starters, lessons from colony behavior can be applied to enhance the way we search for information, products, and solutions.

The Internet puts an unprecedented range of goods and information right at our fingertips. And while we now have the ability to find what we want, when we want, many are finding that more isn't necessarily better. As Barry Schwartz explains in "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less," too many options actually cause more psychological distress than good.

Think about it. How many times have you abandoned a search after hitting page 7 (or maybe 2) because you couldn't find what you were looking for, and then ended up doing multiple searches with different search terms? The sheer enormity of results often makes searches exhaustive, tedious, and overwhelming; we're forced to wade through pages of results before finding the product or link we want.

Of course, the answer is not to limit the available products or retrieved results. After all, access to this rich "long tail" of goods has been a key driver behind the success of many online retailers. Instead, websites try to minimize this search exhaustion by predicting what a person really wants and putting these products up front. It's a great idea in theory, but not so easy to implement in the real world.

The Limits of Web 2.0, and the "Squeaky Wheel" Syndrome

With a strong foundation in collaboration, community, and user participation, the Web 2.0 movement seemed to solve this dilemma by factoring in the contributions of users to narrow down choices. Eager community participants can make their voices and opinions known through user reviews, recommendations, ratings, tagging, and more. Websites have tapped into these crowd-sourcing techniques to determine the relevance of search results. While these methods may help tame the tangle of options, they suffer from one major problem: bias.

Traditional crowd-sourcing demands active participation from its members. The problem here is that not everyone contributes. Only certain types of individuals are likely to make an effort, and they are driven by various motives, from a mere hope to be noticed in a crowd to an altruistic desire to help others to a need to rant about a negative experience. In short, only a subset of the population (the squeaky wheels) will participate, significantly limiting the sample pool and possibly skewing the results with personal bias and inaccuracy.

But what if there was a way to sidestep these biases and gather a perfect representation of consumer attitudes by tapping into the opinion of every single person who visited a site or conducted a search?

Back to the ant colony...

The Next Phase of Social Search: the Super-Community

Watching a trail of ants march toward crumbs of food, it's hard to imagine that ants aren't aware of their actions. But according to studies on swarm intelligence, what appears to be intelligent behavior actually results from nothing more than the complex interaction of simple actions.

Likewise, websites can tap into the implicit wisdom of the community to more accurately predict the most popular and relevant results of any given search. There's a wealth of information in the everyday online activity and behavior of website visitors: every successful or failed search, every page visited, every purchase or abandoned cart represents valuable information. These natural behaviors and actions reflect the true and unbiased opinion of the community as a whole.

By listening to these implicit actions, website owners can gain new insight into the preferences of the silent majority; by leveraging the data, they can optimize results for future searchers. Just like ants that leave a chemical trail each time they bring food back to the nest, we leave real-time feedback each time we visit a page or select (or ignore) a result.

With each search, we unknowingly participate in a cooperative design that improves the search experience for all searchers to follow. Simple, self-guided actions -- entering keywords and selecting results -- drive the greater common good. And as more people participate, both the chemical trail and the overall system grow stronger.

This new participatory strategy gives greater power to the super-community, in which the collective intelligence of all site visitors is harnessed to create a better search and shopping experience for everyone. With each search, the community carves out a faster, more efficient pathway to desired information and products, no different than the trail of pheromones leading to food sources. And like the ants, web searchers act as a collective team (whether they know it or not), yet another example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

Scott Brave is a founder and CTO of Baynote, Inc. Prior to Baynote, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and served as lab manager for the CHIMe (Communication between Humans and Interactive Media) Lab. Scott is an inventor of six patents and co-author of over 25 publications in the areas of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. Scott is also an Editor of the "International Journal of Human-Computer Studies" (Amsterdam: Elsevier) and co-author of "Wired for speech: How voice activates and advances the human-computer relationship" (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Scott received his Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction, and B.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford University, and his Master's from the MIT Media Lab.

(Photo by Il conte di Luna.)

In ten years time we may look at Skype in the same way we look at Amazon and Google, as a huge built-to-last company, for these ten reasons:

1. It has revenue, about $500 million in 2008. Ahem, only in the strange world of Web 2.0 is that considered remarkable. I love using Twitter, but without sustainable revenue their future has to be in question.
2. It is profitable. We're talking "high-teen margins," according to eBay's CEO at the Accel Symposium. That does put it in a different league. It means they can survive the harshest of economic climates. If Facebook is having to raise money in these markets their model must be fundamentally flawed, which means their time as an independent company may be limited. To control your own destiny, you need to be profitable.
3. Skype's growth is accelerating in a tough market. Skype is publicly talking about growth rates of 30% to 40%. That's not bad in an economy where flat is the new 30%. Skype has the perfect recession pitch: cut costs now! This shows in its most recent numbers. In the last quarter, Donahoe told us that Skype-to-Skype grew 73% and Skype Out grew 63%.
4. Disruptive technology. Disruptive technology is an over-hyped term, but in this case it really fits. Skype's peer to peer technology enables them to dramatically under-price the competition and still make money. New users don't cost much money - compare that with Facebook and YouTube. Even better, each new user that comes on improves the service for others - the core P2P proposition.
5. Viral marketing. Skype is the perfect viral business. I have lost count of the number of people I have told about Skype, for the simple reason that I want to communicate better/cheaper with them. Many of them are doing the same.
6. Massive market with vulnerable incumbents. $2 trillion is a lot of money. That is the size of the global telecom market. As to vulnerable, how many people feel so loyal to their telephone company that they won't switch to get lower prices? Yes, when Skype dominates the market it won't be worth $2 trillion any more. Even if it is worth 25% of that, say $500 billion, that is OK for the dominant player. Faced with the Skype threat, incumbents have a horrible innovator's dilemma. To really match Skype will destroy their current business even faster.
7. Just wait until it bites into those cell phone bills. Skype on mobile phones - really native Skype you can use for free wherever there is WiFi - has been possible technically for some time. This has been held back by the mobile operator's head lock on the device manufacturers. At some point the dam will break. Consumers pent up anger over nickle and diming cell phone bills will ensure that a real alternative will be welcomed.
8. Skype is totally mainstream. This is not about being hip or early adopter. Just show the video conversation to anybody with loved ones in distant places. You will see the surprise and amazement that makes it seem like magic.
9. It is a sticky service. Google still gets my business because they are better than the alternatives. But switching to an alternative will be totally simple. When somebody suggests using something other than Skype, I resist. I have my contacts in there, know exactly how it works and have integrated some external tools. Skype can continually add new features to make the experience better as our hunger for communication is pretty well limitless.
10. Skype can do an IPO. For anyone younger than 30, we should probably spell that out: Initial Public Offering. We keep being told that the IPO market is moribund because of Sarbanes-Oxley. Baloney! The IPO market is moribund because we have lacked profitable high-growth companies that move into huge markets.

My prediction is that as soon as market conditions improve, eBay will sell Skype through an IPO. Their shareholders will pressure them to do so. There is no synergy logic in being part of eBay. The value of Skype is obscured by the problems in eBay's core business. The Skype IPO can be early in the market recovery, as their story resonates so well in a recession (markets usually recover well before the economy recovers).

Who Else?

Who else can take the title "biggest winner from the Web 2.0 era"?

• Google: not really Web 2.0, though; born in 1999.
• YouTube: still losing money, no clear monetization model, and video-serving costs are substantial. It is hard to imagine YouTube as an independent company
• Facebook: how long can the great hope remain the great hope? At some point, it has to demonstrate a sustainable revenue model and some profit. It still doesn't have a native revenue model that makes sense to both users and advertisers.
• Twitter: see above.
• Salesforce.com: not really Web 2.0 either; born in 1999. More revenue than Skype today, but smaller addressable market.