TechCrunch
The Ephemeralnet
In the aftermath of the dot-com crash, a new era for the web began to take hold – a turning point whose seismic shift was hyped under the moniker “Web 2.0.” The concept referred to the web becoming a platform, a home for services whose popularity grew through network effects, user-generated content and collaboration. Blogging, social media sites, wikis, mashups, and more reflected a changing consciousness among the Internet’s denizens – one which Tim O’Reilly, whose Web 2.0 conferences helped solidify the term as a part of our everyday lexicon, once described as a “collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain.”
Since that time, because of humans’ intrinsic need to apply a structure to amorphous things to give them a semblance of order – things like the web, for example – there have been many attempts to define what “Web 3.0″ might be. At one point, the assumption was that Web 3.0 woud be the “semantic web.” A place where machine-readable metadata is applied, allowing the web and the services that live upon it to understand the content and the links between the people, places, and things that fill its servers.
To some extent, the semantic web did arrive in things like Google’s Knowledge Graph, an upgrade to Google Search whose underpinnings include a database filled with millions of objects and billions of connections between them. But semantic technology never became so widespread so as to define a new era of the web itself.
Meanwhile, others claimed Web 3.0 would be the shift to mobile devices, the rise of the “Internet of Things,” or would emerge from web services growing more personalized to their users – Google’s predictive search service “Google Now” could be seen as one example of this, perhaps.
But none of these got to win the Web 3.0 branding, either.
So what will come next?
Will another notable turning point for the web as we know it ever evolve?
Yes, of course, and it’s happening now.
It’s harder to spot because this time around because it’s not growing out of the ashes of a largely desiccated web as with Web 2.0, which blossomed following the dot-com era’s end. Instead, the new web is growing up alongside the web of today. It could, one day, take over, but that remains to be seen.
And we don’t have to call it Web 3.0. That’s a bit simplistic. But it does deserve recognition.
A Rebellion
In retrospect, what Web 2.0 meant to the vast lot of the web’s users was a large number of lightweight services – software perpetually in beta that ran online not out of a box. It harnessed the wisdom of the crowds and the willing contributions of user data, which, in the end, became the services’ value.
Facebook’s social graph and profile data, for instance, is now the product it sells to advertisers who target anonymized demographic groups based on things like age, education, location, and more. Wikipedia grew from the efforts of thousands who aggregated their time and knowledge to building an online encyclopedia. Even the “blogosphere” is a Web 2.0 product, one where a network of writers and publishers linked and commented, reblogged and shared.
But the web is not a static thing. It grows and shifts to reflect the society it serves.
For those who saw the web emerge in their lifetimes, the ability to publish and connect with a vast audience around the world is a marvel. To rediscover long-lost friends on social networks, or chat with someone on the other side of the globe, or share photos with your friends and family so easily, still amazes.
But today, a new group of web users is coming of age. They aren’t in awe of the connectivity and openness the web provides, that’s just the way it’s always been. And sometimes, they even kind of resent it. Barely able to remember a time when the web didn’t exist, this group has been forced to grow up online, living in public like the artists in the human terrarium under New York City once did in an art project-slash-eerie premonition of a future yet to come.
“In the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire,” said Ondi Timoner, who documented this and other controversial human experiments in his 2009 film “We Live in Public.”
He also warned us of the dangers of living our lives exposed, with what now sounds like common sense: ”the Internet, as wonderful as it is, is not an intimate medium. It’s just not,” he said. “If you want to keep something intimate and if you want to keep something sacred, you probably shouldn’t post it.”
But we did it anyway. We posted it. We liked it. We shared it. We hashtagged it.
And when we ran out of things to document about ourselves, we turned towards our children.
Now of age, those young digital natives whose lives we cataloged without their consent are rebelling. They’re discarding the values of the previous generation – those of their parents, the authoritarians – and defining new ones.
They don’t want open social networks, they want intimacy. They don’t believe every action has to be meaningful and permanent. The imagine the web as deletable.
The Rise Of The Ephemeralnet
The incredible growth of Snapchat, the “ephemeral” messaging service where pictures and videos are taken, shared, then discarded – allowed to become memories – is often pointed to as the key trend defining this new era, but that’s just wrong. It’s only one example.
Among its active users, Snapchat is engaging and addictive, and representative of an increased desire for privacy. However, it’s not the only service out there defining a different kind of experience. The global messaging market as a whole has given way to a fragmented collection containing dozens of similar services each with millions of users of their own. While these may not have the parlor trick of “disappearing” messages, they also represent a rebellion against the “one network to rule them all” concept.
These messaging apps are often used with a close set of friends or family members, where data shared remains fairly isolated and private, as opposed to publicized and findable on the larger web. It’s not about anonymity. It’s about a different type of community. One not cluttered by bosses or parents. One less searchable.
Even Twitter is returning to its SMS roots among these younger users, who revel in its semi-private nature. Twitter users can adopt pseudonyms, and you can’t surface tweets older than a week through Twitter search, which makes it feel like less of a permanent record, and a freedom to be “real” without consequence.
Meanwhile, on the youth-dominated social service Tumblr, users also don’t have to sign up with their “real” identities. This allows them to explore and experiment with new identities and sub-cultures, the way young adults naturally do in the offline world.
And on a growing mobile social network for sharing secrets, Whisper, which this month saw over 2.1 billion pageviews, users can express their innermost feelings – even those they’re ashamed or scared of – and become connected with a community for support, or, in the case of darker impulses, with actual help. And all this before they identify themselves by name.
While some confuse the “Ephemeralnet” with the so-called “SnapchatNet,” in reality, it’s not only a new way to socialize online, it’s a new way to think about everything. You can see the trend also in the rise of the (somewhat) anonymous and untraceable digital currency Bitcoin. Unlike traditional transactions, Bitcoin is decentralized and doesn’t require banks or governmental oversight or involvement. And though it’s not entirely anonymous, there are already efforts, like Zerocoin, working to change that.
There are also efforts at making other forms of communication more ephemeral, too. Phone calls become more private through apps like Burner, SMS secure through apps like Gryphn or Seecrypt, and internal business communications unarchivable through apps like O.T.R.
As we head into the post-PRISM era, there’s even a chance that this trend towards privacy will become further entrenched. Take for instance, a little-known service like anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo saw traffic spike by 50 percent in just over a week after the PRISM reveal. If it can now find traction for its online service and accompanying mobile apps based not just on PRISM fears, but on connecting with this larger trend of impermanence, then it could even have a shot at siphoning away a big enough handful of users to sustain its business.
But at the end of the day, the Ephemeralnet may never get to become as defining a trend as Web 2.0 once was. Though it may find adoption beyond the demographics of its youngest participants, it will continue to share the web with the services that preceded it – services too big, too habitual, and too lucrative, to die off entirely.
But in the meantime, a new social norm could still be established. One where those who play for the cameras are outed and ostracized; where we value human connections enabled by technology over meaningless “social” scores; and where we care more about our relationships, and less about the number of likes and shares we have.
@aweissman you only use hashtags if you want to be found. I think there’s a certain stigma around people who try too hard on the Internet.
— ninakix (@ninakix) June 17, 2013
Image credits: giphy; lead – unknown via Weheartit
PandaWhale's Slow And Steady March To Relevance
Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.
There is an interesting shift occurring in consumer websites and apps where users perform microwork that reshapes experiences. Classic examples of this are how Pinterest users are grabbing images from the web, personally reorganizing them, and, in the process, building a new image search engine, much like Google Images. And some would argue even better and more relevant. Or consider Instapaper and Pocket users who grab content to read later, stripped free of bloated ads and other unnecessary information. There are more and more services fitting into this trend, which I’ve called a “web of extraction,” and one emergent property that’s doing this in a novel way is one you may not have heard of: PandaWhale.
Go to PandaWhale and you won’t be visually impressed. The site isn’t winning design Webby’s any time soon. Users who come to PandaWhale create “stashes” of images and/or links to share publicly with others, and each stash represents an entirely open web page entirely crawlable by search engines. On each page, like a Quora thread, Tumblr post, etc., users can log in via various sites to PandaWhale and do their own patched-together version of a RapGenius annotation or commentary on the stashed item. The product tends to appeal to web users who want to save and organize links, as well as allow others to comment and co-create with them.
Based on that description, PandaWhale doesn’t sound too different from many other sites that do these sorts of things, but lurking under the hood is a wily strategy that is being rewarded by one of the biggest dogs on the street: Google.
The name PandaWhale partly derives from the theory that there are whales and pandas on the web, where a few whales who have big ideas and big audiences create and organize content, and where many pandas sit peacefully and consume that content, much like a panda would graze on bamboo. In startup-speak, the pandas are the unique visitors who somehow end up on a site like PandaWhale, and the whales are the rabid collectors who stash content and interact with others through a variety of online personas, some real and some through pseudonyms. While it’s important to have many whales stashing, it’s really about the quality of each new page, as well as how much each whale creates.
The juice behind PandaWhale’s recent growth is that this small group of whales subtly conducts important work for Google by bringing content (including images) from regions of the web where Google’s crawlers cannot easily explore. These whales stash images from Bing or GIFs from Tumblr and other types of media appended with social data that Google can’t quite rank, and then, as each stash is an open web page, it becomes visible to the search giant. In the same way Pinterest toiled for years before their growth spurt of 2011, PandaWhale could be on a similar path. Who knows?
There are many places to share and communicate around images and links, such as Reddit, and many of those sites have dense networks around them. Perhaps that’s why PandaWhale isn’t over-designed visually, but carefully designed and architected in such a way such that it’s searchable, organized by topic, and encourages new images and links in every stash. So far, Google’s algorithms like it.
Finally, while the architecture and user behavior may be the juice, PandaWhale’s secret weapon is that it was built as the digital reflection of a real, offline community of startup geeks and technology veterans who meet in-person and help each other out without, in my opinion, want of fame or fortune. That’s how I found out about the site when it popped up, why it may sustain the ephemerality of today’s launches and mindless growth-hacking tactics, and why I’ve been using it to essentially find random facts and opinions on technology and get the pulse of what the whales think. For what I do, I can’t look around the same places everyone else does for information — this is one of my secret places to test theories and form ideas from others. I don’t know what will happen to PandaWhale in the sense that it doesn’t look like a business (yet), and it doesn’t do any marketing or PR. Nor does it have crazy, insane-in-the-membrane email settings (I love the daily digest email), and the site is all fugly, to be honest, but perhaps that’s its charm.
Well, let’s see what happens. People all over Twitter and in the tech world often bemoan finding new, great, uncontaminated sources of information. VC firms are now directly hiring journalists and investing in content. Years ago, Marc Andreessen penned a great answer on Quora about what he would like to see in tech journalism, with a focus on discovering people and companies that “don’t have heat on them.” Traditional tech media for early-stage startups is saturated, but that’s not to say they’re covering everything and moving in a good direction. We’re in the middle of a media shift — a shift where powerful entities are taking on more editorial control, but also where individuals in networks are creating new types of information and surfacing things even the best editorial couldn’t. PandaWhale may be part of that shift. Or, at least, it certainly has been for me.
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