Steve Gillmor on Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of salesforce.com:
Marc even appears to understand the fundamental value, if not yet the disruptive quality, of RSS and “social production,” where creating and provisioning apps should be “as easy as creating blogs.”
I love that idea: that anyone—programmer or not, monied or not—can think up and build a cool Web service all by herself. I have my own such development project going right now and it’s thrilling.
However, I don’t see RSS and social production as fundamentally disruptive, at least from the perspective of the individual. But the perspective of the individual is what Web 2.0 is all about. Saying that Web 2.0 is disruptive is akin to saying that Copernican theory was disruptive. Yes, you could call it disruptive and that wouldn’t be incorrect, but you’d be missing the bigger point: Copernican theory put the sun at the center of the universe, in its rightful place. In Web 2.0, elements of the web universe orbit the individual. Companies, websites, advertising, and software must accommodate the individual instead of the other way around.
Battelle’s got the idea of Web 2.0 disruption stuck in his teeth, so let me offer this toothpick. What’s disruptive to me, an individual, is to have to modify the way I think and feel and work to match the structure and requirements of other people, organizations, and hierarchies. In Web 2.0, companies and websites need to adjust to me. That’s not disruptive. That’s supportive. Stowe Boyd uses the example of blogging in The Individual Is The New Group to illustrate the shift from group-oriented social tools to what he calls soloware:
Contrasting group forums with blogging is a good example in which to make the distinction between group- and individual-oriented social tools. In group forums, members of a closed group can post threads and comment on them. It is a closed model. When individuals blog in the open web, trackbacks and comments allow discussions to take place that are — in many cases — logically equivalent to forums, but since each individual blogger decides where to turn their focus, and what other blogs to comment on, bloggers are members of many groups at the same time. More importantly, the structure of blogging supports that model directly. In a group forum, you are a member of that one group, and not a member of any others: the fact that you may be a member of other groups is not explicitly supported….
The shift to the individual changes everything, and in revolutionary ways.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter if we characterize Web 2.0 as disruptive or as a perspective shift from groups to individuals or as a bunch of bubbly BS. If our lives are made better, and mine has been, that’s something to celebrate. Long live Web 2.0!
2 Comments
To the limits of my understanding, I agree with you that blogs are individual-oriented tools but more open. Maybe there is an analogy between closed source software and open software. A group is just talking to themselves or to whomever joins the group. A blog on the other hand is open for comment to anyone who chances by. Also an outsider can open up a blog to comment by posting a link. The analogy breaks down in that outsiders cannot change the comment of a blog but by posting a link in the comment they can divert a reader of the comment to another opinion.
Just trying to keep up with my limited understanding of what you are saying and doing!
Yes, you’re right, Dad. To get to the real innovation in blogging, you have to mention the social context. I didn’t make it clear that what I’m thinking about here is that we participate socially, but we do it from our own center instead of starting in a place someone else has defined.
There is definitely some relationship between open source software and Web 2.0 type stuff versus closed source and the last generation of software and services. I’ve been thinking about that too.
5 Trackbacks
[…] Two weeks ago, I joined a virtual team working on a big, hairy, uber-enterprisey system development project. In these two weeks, I’ve seen the wisdom of crowds and the power of virtual teams in action. I know the team members only as voices on a telecon, emails in my inbox, and comments on my Word document, but I’m already feeling hooked in and jazzed by the quality of ideas we come up with. The key is that we don’t develop the ideas in collaboration. We develop them apart and then fire them in the kiln of our conference calls. You know what it reminds me of? Blogging. The difference between blogging and participating in, say, a discussion forum or other group-centric activity is that the group matters more the individual. The activities revolve around the group rather than orbiting the individual. This follows the ideas Stowe Boyd put forth in his seminal blog post The Individual is the New Group. That, along with Kathy Sierra’s coverage of the wisdom of crowds, should be required reading for anyone pondering starting a blog. But really, you can’t understand it until you do it. I have worked remotely before, but I was the only one remote while the main development group worked together in a typical office environment. I had no idea what it might be like to work in an environment where we were all remote, where we all retained our individuality. […]
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