The ecosystem of Web 2.0

Yesterday I gave a customer presentation about Web 2.0. The technology behind it, the social implications and presumably why anyone outside a room full of obstinate developers should give a damn.

The question that kept coming back was a simple one: How does all this fit into the real world? A perfectly reasonable question.

Developers have a tendency to become intoxicated by new technology. Give us a shiny API, a clever framework and something with “beta” stamped on the logo, and we’ll happily convince ourselves that civilization has just taken another magnificent leap forward.

Meanwhile, the rest of humanity is trying to pay the electricity bill, watch football and figure out why the printer stopped working. And that’s fine. Because the interesting thing about Web 2.0 isn’t really the technology. It’s what happens when ordinary people get their hands on it.

You can roughly divide the population of the web into three groups: creators, producers and consumers. Perhaps one percent are creators. These are the people who wake up one morning with an idea, spend several caffeine-fuelled months building it, and eventually release it onto an unsuspecting world.

Then come the producers. They take what the creators built and fill it with stuff: photographs, blog posts, reviews, comments, videos, opinions, cat pictures and the occasional piece of useful information.

Finally there are the consumers. Everybody else. The great silent army clicking, watching, reading and lurking around. Happily consuming everything the first two groups have spent their evenings and weekends producing.

Of course, the boundaries aren’t particularly clean. Creators consume. Producers consume. Consumers occasionally wake from their comfortable slumber and produce something themselves. Everyone feeds everyone else. That’s where it starts looking less like a website and more like an ecosystem.

The creators need producers, otherwise they’ve built an elegant but deserted nightclub. Producers need consumers, otherwise they’re performing to an empty room. And consumers need both, because without them there would be nothing to consume except corporate homepages and animated “Under Construction” GIFs.

Consider YouTube. Three guys built the site in a few months during the spring of 2005. Then they opened the doors and humanity came charging in. Within months, thousands of people were uploading videos. A year after launch, YouTube had almost 20 million visitors every month. People were watching around 100 million clips every day, while another 65,000 videos were being uploaded daily.

Nobody at YouTube could possibly have created that amount of content themselves. That was the point. They built the restaurant. Everyone else brought the food, invited their friends, rearranged the furniture and occasionally started a fistfight in the kitchen. And this is perhaps the most fascinating thing about the social web: nobody is really in control.

You can build the platform. You can establish some rules. You can put up a logo, write a business plan and stand proudly in front of a PowerPoint slide showing an arrow pointing reassuringly upward. But once millions of people arrive, the thing develops a life of its own. You don’t really know what they’ll create. You don’t know how they’ll use it. And you certainly don’t know where it will lead.

That’s the ecosystem of Web 2.0. Messy, unpredictable and largely powered by people doing things nobody originally planned for. Buckle up. Sign in. Apparently this is the future.