I’ve been thinking recently about where the internet has come from and where we’re at in both the consumer and business adoption cycle. The first stage of mass adoption was about maintaining a singular web presence (i.e. A website). Up until 1999 and prior to Google becoming a household word, new sites were discovered primarily through link portals like Yahoo. Google wasn’t the first search engine but the speed at which they built adoption of their product assured eventual domination. In 1998 when Google was still in Beta, they were processing only about 10,000 searches a day. A year later, as buzz rapidly spread, they were processing 3,000,000 searches a day.
Not unlike today’s internet start-up’s, Google released its product (the search engine) and only after it had built a sufficient audience did it introduce AdWords, its means of generating revenue from its sizable online audience. The power of presenting context-relevant ads to a user’s search created the “just in time” advertising market we know today.
Just like Google dethroned Microsoft and Microsoft dethroned IBM, I believe there is another King soon to take its crown as the dominant IT Company. But first, let’s examine what’s changing to make Google’s primary product less relevant:
Whereas the first wave of web adoption was about maintaining a singular web presence in an isolated silo, the second wave of web adoption is much about a much more tightly-woven web. Today’s web is all about us moving more of our real lives onto the web and using social networks to stay connected and share our lives with those we know and trust and for some, share their lives with anyone who will take an interest!
Without a doubt, Facebook is and likely will remain the dominant gatekeeper of our citizens personal data. This week, it was announced that Facebook has finally begun construction of its own data-centre and of course, much ado has been made of Facebook’s continual refinement of its privacy settings, to give users more granular and transparent control over what information they share with whom.
That said, the shift to evolve Facebook “the Product” to Facebook the “Business” is a far biggest task than simply growing members or adding/changing features on the site and it’s in this transition where the the rubber hits the road.
As our behaviour and use of the web in this highly socialized, intimate way continues, so too will new companies and ideas present themselves and try to build businesses around managing and sharing our personal lives online. For many of us, there are still lines between what is “private” and “public.” But it seems that the practice of sharing our lives online is irreversible and those lines will continue to rapidly deteriorate.
The Companies that will dominate are those that manage the very delicate balance of facilitating demand for sharing our lives whilst ensuring that that the data underlying these voluntary exchanges is monetized in a hyper-transparent, trusted and ultimately consumer-controlled way. And that’s exactly where Wantsa is headed.
David Strebinger
