Four years ago, I was one of the many who thought RSS feeds were going to transform the web. I believed in a future where few users would venture past their personalized home pages. Web sites would visit users, not vice versa.
I was half right. It wasn’t the RSS feed, though, it was the activity feed and that personalized home page millions never leave is Facebook, not iGoogle. My lesson: the information that matters most to most users is other people.
While Facebook is an immensely popular walled garden, it’s built on the ruins of similar services like Friendster and MySpace. The same architecture that makes it easy for a user to pass on a link to a few hundred friends (and so forth) can make a mass migration to a new service relatively painless.
The free flow of information has always been the promise of the web. No matter where you are in the world or what kind of computer you’re using, as a web user you have almost identical access to the same data. eBay is eBay from Poughkeepsie to Peking. So is Wikipedia.
The logical extension of that access to information is being able to do things with it.
Television audiences are breaking networks apart with cheap and easy-to-use hard drives, hammering away at prime time and brand loyalty one time-shifted show at a time. Newspaper readers have brought newspapers to the brink of collapse with RSS readers and search engines. We all know what happened to the music industry when songs became portable thanks to the mp3 format.
And all of this may have been a warm-up.
For the last 16 years, the world wide web of computers has promised to be everywhere, but in reality, it’s been restricted primarily to offices, coffee shops and bedrooms. The mobile web is finally delivering on that promise.
The creative forces that have been tearing apart media companies are now beginning to restructure the rest of the world; from restaurants to retail, from nightclubs to sports arena. No place within signal range will escape digitization. After years of the world coming to the web, the web is now coming to the world.