Stephen Johnston is a London based senior manager in Nokia's Corporate Strategy group. He joined Nokia in 2003, and has since worked on Internet strategy, global macro and consumer trends, emerging business models, new collaboration tools and corporate innovation. Since 2006 he has been leading a cross-company, bottom-up internet innovation programme that aims to facilitate Nokia's move into Internet consumer services. Before, Stephen worked on trade and ecommerce policy in Brussels, and on eGovernment issues for Siebel Systems. He studied Economics at Cambridge University and has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.
The focal point of his thoughts on Web3.0 is You (like in YouTube or, ehm, You-nicorn).

http://3dpeople.blogspot.com
Stephen Johnston's blog

Artwork for this article by Moni Eckey

Should you find yourself stuck for a topic of conversation at a geek-dominated dinner party (a not-implausible scenario) try this: "What comes next after Web 2.0?" This should capture the attention for a few minutes at least of even the most ADD mobile-IM-ing startup kid on your left. With $850m of VC money pouring into Web 2.0 startups last year, and around $300m already pledged just for companies using Facebook as a platform, there are many asking, where's this heading next?

Many are saying that the next Big Thing – somewhat inevitably termed Web 3.0 – is the arrival of the semantic web. In this way, machines can speak to machines – uniting computers in data networks without getting pesky, error-prone humans involved. As Tim Berners-Lee describes it, "the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize." So far, so Orwellian.

But, don't worry, the use cases are harmless – bank statements or photographs integrated with your calendar, or a bot that can zoom round and find the cheapest television.

As with all technology, it can have good and bad uses, but my quibble is not with the paucity of interesting use cases. Nor do I have a problem with the fact that it is not a very new idea – it's been rather widely discussed since the last millennium, and progress has been achingly slow.

No, my main concern with the semantic web being on the menu for the third course, is that this is a technology-centric vision, at a time when we are only just learning how to be user-centric. Does it not strike anyone else as odd that in the year after Time elevates you, me and us to the lofty heights of person of the year, the chatter about what is next concerns technology, not people? The most successful internet services have great technology, but it is the benefits to individuals that mark them out – Google, eBay, Skype and Amazon. They cut great swathes of inefficiency out of creaky, overweight systems, handing mountains of value back to the users. And the latest darlings, social networking startups, are the essence of user-centricity – they figured out that people care about their friends (duh) and would be keen to have better and richer relationships with them than has been provided so far with deaf, dumb and mute address books. Users in the middle, their friends around them – that is user-centric.

So, rather than just meekly accepting the latest technology buzzword of the moment, what I'd like to see is a frame of reference to help us navigate these shifts. Instead of considering technology for its own sake, let's look at what matters – how it can improve our lives. And here it is – the web has evolved over the past few years to allow us to do increasingly more with our lives. First, it allowed us to access information more easily. Now it is connecting us emotionally and spiritually. And only now, it is starting to allow us to get up and interact with others – out there in the place that matters to us: the real world. So, a super simplistic framework might look something like this:

Web 1.0: Brain & Eyes (=Information)
Web 2.0: Brain, Eyes, Ears, Voice & Heart (=Emotion)
Web 3.0: Brain, Eyes, Ears, Voice, Heart, Arms & Legs (=Freedom)

So from the individual's perspective, the web has progressively been about genuinely empowering them to do more and more with the things they care about.

Information: 1.0 allowed us to use our brain and eyes

Information came first on the web – geeks sharing science info. The web disintermediated – information was the novelty, and most of it happened to be in static text and graphic form. 1.0 allowed you to find a cheaper flight on Expedia than in your local travel agent’s office. Or gave you information about human rights abuses in China. In this view of the world, eBay, Google, Amazon, Expedia and Wikipedia are proudly 1.0 – allowing people to connect to information that matters to them – cheap stuff and tough questions.

Emotion: 2.0 allowed us to use our ears and heart

The arrival of You on the scene is not a passing fad. The web has always been about the individual, the only thing was that the You in 1.0 was deaf, mute and immobile – the passive recipient. In 2.0 the gag came off. We started to sing, shout, dance and generally make a mockery of How Things Should Be Done. Love of cars, exotic fish, or your high school sweetheart could blossom. Whereas 1.0 was left brain, 2.0 engaged the right, and with it much more of the body of the den-dwelling netizen. Bandwidths increased, allowing music, then video to flow (with copyright spinning in the wind). Software and services became easier to use and companies such as mine made it easier for anybody to access cameras, processors and bandwidth to create and distribute content. Social networking sites allowed niches to connect. Individuals started to have more fun, more sex, more life. They could perform for millions – making people famous for 15 seconds.

Colour arrived to the binary, command-line network of networks. My modest suggestion to promote world peace is to play the Kiwi and Mocha videos on a big screen at the beginning of every UN Security Council meeting.

So, while we are all grateful to the geeks for giving us the cheap flights and the rare knowledge enabled by 1.0, we were really grateful to them for giving us what we all crave – love, laughs and attention. This is where we are today – today's big web stories deliver information and emotion. But what about tomorrow's? Just as we're getting excited, thinking what could possibly be better than sex (and laughter and meaning) along comes an old-fashioned committee and tells us that the future will be about resource description frameworks, web ontology language and, of course, XML. A let down? You bet.

Semantics is to Web 3.0 what horseshoes are to a unicorn

Sure, getting data to talk to data is a vital and important step but this seems to be the plumbing. If I turned up for beers in the pub on a beautiful, white-winged stallion instead of my aging bicycle, my friends' reaction would hopefully be, "WOW, you've got a flying horse, that's absolutely freaking, bloody amazing, I love it!!" I wouldn't like to hear, "A-ha, look at these nice, roughly circular, sturdy iron protective elements on the feet of the horse, I bet they're useful when it lands". Semantics may well be part of Web 3.0, but it, like horseshoes, can be considered an input. What I want to know is what the next great leap forward in the web will do for me.

(pic source: http://www.unicorncentre.co.uk/Picture---UnicornFlying-for.jpg)

There is nobody on the planet that I think more deserving of unlimited wealth, happiness and a serenade by a chorus of angels than Tim Berners-Lee (despite him turning down our invitation to the Nokia Speaker Series when he collected his $1m cheque). However, this necessary plumbing is not a sexy vision that will sell to our respective parents and kids. We in the tech industry seem to be slipping back, like incurable alcoholics, into the bad habits of focusing on the technology and not the benefits of what is coming next. Of course, we know that it'd be great if microformats actually worked, and people could get more joined-up services, but frankly, most of the benefits seem rather marginal compared to what we're able to do now. It's hard to package and sell it to Average Joe. For example, Wikipedia suggests as a use case that "a computer might be instructed to list the prices of flat screen HDTVs larger than 40 inches with 1080p resolution at shops in the nearest town that are open until 8pm on Tuesday evenings". Hmmm, anybody spot a geek in the vicinity? This would probably be to Joe just an incremental improvement in Google's already fabulous problem-solving offering. As we have been told, incrementalism sucks. And also, it neglects the fact that people would probably still trust the recommendation of their friend over any semantic goodness. Digitizing relationships and reputations has proven to be particularly challenging.

Freedom: 3.0 will be about finding your legs, and your wings

So, 3.0 is about taking what we have so far and extending our limits – both physically in terms of another spatial dimension, but also in terms of imagination. Letting you do what you do today on the web but when you're mobile is the first necessary step – table stakes – for this, and for that we have browsers, widg/sets and AJAX integration. Good to have indeed, but not mind-blowing. What I'm looking for in 3.0 is the truly breakthrough user experiences that hit you in the stomach, the way that using Google (and Google Earth) did the first time you used it, or the way that Mocha's little legs (see above video) wiggle in a furry flurry of happiness.

Gut-wrenchingly good experiences will not result from shrinking today's internet service du jour, emasculating features and serving it up cold, slow and expensive on a small screen. They will come from using the vast amounts of newly available data sources in innovative ways to create as yet unimagined experiences. Data and its liberation will be the key – first, give me access to my own data, and then let me do cool things with it. I don't want my data 'captured' and stored in a bristling warehouse in Utah to be sold to Viagra-pushers, I want it under my control. For example, when I'm filling in my tax forms online, I'm confronted with the tedious task of listing which countries I've been in for each of the past 365 days, and precisely what time of day I arrived and left each one. Being disorganized, I never do this manually as I go, but spend hours with my Outlook archives, trying to remember what trip happened when. Why can't I just ask my phone – it knows full well which country – city even – I was in, because I took it with me? Similarly, a smart phone could, and should, make it super easy for me to discover cool new bars, that people I trust with similar (or different) profiles to me rated highly (insert here infinite other use cases from people smarter and younger than me). Much of this is possible online, but we're still struggling to include the assumption of mobility in the white heat of innovation of web services.

Unfortunately, still the telco industry fares badly compared to the internet industry in allowing the speed and scope of innovation required, so it will be provided in due time by others, many of whom are both willing and able.

So to conclude, let's create a vision that politicians, business people, academics, relatives and the guy next door can get behind. Sure, the €100bn orgy of 3G excess was painful, but just because an entire industry collectively overpaid, overpromised and underdelivered on a set of mistaken assumptions doesn't mean we can't do it right now. The mobile device plus the internet has the potential to revolutionize our lives in ways that most of us can't even imagine. This probably deserves significantly more attention from our entrepreneurs and thought leaders who are striving to build new new things, whether it comes wrapped up in a number or not.

This article was adapted for receiver from a post on Stephen Johnston's personal blog (http://3dpeople.blogspot.com). It does not represent official Nokia policy.

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