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DEMO Roundup: Web 2.0 Goes To Work

According to Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMOFall 08 conference, we've already moved past Web 2.0. We're wrapping up the third generation of the Web. And we're moving on to the fourth. That's when social networking and Web 2.0 (which is actually Web 3.0, she says -- confused yet?) gets to work.

The generations of the Web went like this, Shipley said: The first generation, more than a decade ago, was just flat Web pages, displaying information.

The second generation added the ability to do transactions, especially buying and selling. That was the dot-com boom.

The third generation is the one usually called Web 2.0, and it includes blogs, wikis, Facebook, and other social-networking sites. It's the social Web, the era of user-generated content. "Power shifted from site owners to site users," Shipley said.

The problem with the social Web: It didn't generate a lot of wealth. "There really aren't a lot of Web 2.0 millionaires," Shipley said. By comparison, the dot-com Web generated a great deal of wealth.

Moreover, many social Web sites just aren't useful, Shipley said. Or, they haven't demonstrated their usefulness just yet.

That last was an aha! moment for me. She's right. Sure, there are exceptions: Wikipedia is a great source for research (so long as you take into account its inherent unreliability). Blogs are great sources of information, insight, and entertainment -- like Wikipedia, they're often unreliable, but when you've identified reliable blogs, they're extremely useful.

On the other hand, Facebook and Twitter, to name two examples, are entertaining and fun -- but what are they for? I have almost 1,000 followers on Twitter and almost 400 Facebook friends (more than most people, not as many as some). I enjoy both services, but I can't really point to anything I've done with them that I couldn't have done -- often more efficiently -- with some other tool. They're fun.

That points to the next generation of the Internet, which Shipley calls the "distributed Web." The Web is getting out of our PCs, off our desktops, and into mobile devices. And the social Web is being put to work, for business collaboration, to achieve personal goals, and to create market value.

And, as the social Web becomes useful, more people will use it. Right now, it has tens of millions of users -- pretty big, but dwarfed by the billions who use the flat Internet. As the social Web gets more useful, it will be used by hundreds of millions of people, Shipley said.

Examples of this new generation of the social Web were among the most interesting demos at DEMOfall.

For example: What's more practical than losing weight? WebDiet is a service to help people on the go find healthy meals. The iPhone application uses the device's built-in location services to find nearby restaurants, and narrows the search based on the user-specified calorie count of the meal they're looking to have, as well as user-specified dietary conditions: Kosher, vegetarian, diabetic, etc. The service even lets people input their food preferences: If you hate broccoli but love avocados, you can let WebDiet know, and it will select your restaurants accordingly.

Two of my favorite examples of these new, practical, social Web applications are kind of dumb, actually. Dumb, but useful. Two different services add social networking features to digital picture frames -- the kind of device you stick in the living room to display electronic family photos. The services, YouGotPhoto and gloop, automate sharing digital photos across wireless networks, with digital picture frames (and their owners) who might be thousands of miles away. That's practical: You want to share photos with friends and family members, some of whom are computer illiterate. These services can help.

More seriously, Crowdspring lets businesses post a creative project, solicit ideas from the general public, and then pay the people who submit the best ideas to buy their work. It's like eBay for creative professionals. Right now, the service is limited to graphic designers -- people who create corporate logos and images for ad campaigns -- but they plan to branch out to writers and videographers. It's an exciting project, potentially world changing -- and more than a little scary to those of us who are creative professionals.

In a period of economic doom and gloom, it's refreshing to see optimism and creativity at the DEMOfall conference.

What do you think? What are the most interesting emerging Web businesses? Let us know.

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