If “web 2.0″ really is here, and what seemed to be the future just a few months ago is now reported more in the business pages than the technology pages, what’s coming next? What’s the attitudinal shift that will give rise to new technologies of communication?

Henriette Weber, talking about the recent technology conference Lift07, noticed that

there was nobody who said the word “blog” or “web 2.0″ which to me is a very visible sign that “blog” and “web 2.0″ is getting passé… slowly but firmly. It is not where the geeks are anymore.
Does this mean that Web 2.0 is dead ? hardly

Her take was that the pioneers (the “geeks”) are feeling that something’s missing in the way we use the internet now, and she suggests that perhaps what’s happening is that communities are moving away from the web, citing Twitter and Jaiku as examples. For those who haven’t come across these yet, an explanation.

Twitter is what Hieronymus Bosch would have painted if he’d been shown Teletext, the culmination of all that is banal and tedious about blogging: users update the world on their hour-by-hour activities, sharing their hanging out and their dog washing with the world. Mine is here. I use it to keep it in touch with friends, and to get the weather in Singapore. Once you’re set up via the website, you can send and receive updates via SMS or IM, which means that you might never have to go to a browser at all to be part of things.

Jaiku is an application for your mobile phone that displays your friend’s location and comments in your contacts book, creating a “presence stream” for you and your friends built through SMS and the cell network. As a member of their circle, you can leave comments on other people’s updates. If you want to try the full functionality, you’ll need a Nokia s60 v2 phone (so it won’t work on my N80, which is version 3. Nothing works on my N80. Don’t ever get an N80).

What these two applications have in common, apart from the small-scale, local microsharing of individual lives (perhaps a return to the days when you only wanted a few people to know about your Livejournal?), is that the web doesn’t have to be a part of the process: you can move your social gardening to your mobile platform or IM application, and not need the browser at all. Quite a change from the “browser-based OS” ideas of the last few years.

These are only hints of new directions, of course, and Henriette makes the point that they’re still tied to the web for admin tasks (the browser is still “home” in some way). But perhaps it’s worth, when we think about communities and the ways technology can sustain and nurture them, trying to leave the browser and the desktop out of our thinking for as long as possible? Maybe that way we’ll be ready for the next wave of innovation, rather than trying to catch up.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 4:04 am and is filed under design, innovation, internet, mobile, tools and technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.