What will die tomorrow

While Web 2.0 as a movement has improved the collective experience of the Internet, there are also some red flags that developers and users alike are raising today. For example, how many times have you set up relationships with the same people in Plaxo, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, MyTopFriends, Spock, Friendster or another social networking site?

Let's examine a few things that are likely not going to last the next five years (or even three):

1. Duplication:
As users, we are asked to enter the same information over and over again. Whether it is identification, personal details, or declarations of relationships, we should not have to re-enter it over and over again. Why should we have to re-declare the same business contacts in both LinkedIn.com and Plaxo.com? Wouldn't it make more sense if we could simply export them from one and then import them into the other? Or better yet, let us declare them once in a large scale open framework and have both Plaxo and LinkedIn pull that information out.

Many companies resist such a solution because they fear losing users to their competitors. There is currently a movement underway to promote data portability that seeks to enable users to share the data with whomever they choose.

As policy discussions continue there has been progress on the technology side. OpenID has the potential to become a universal identity and OAuth is an emerging standard that lets sites share data safely and under user control.

In time someone will take the lead and first build an ontology (a shared conceptualization) of the human-to-human relationship types, then use it to architect an open framework that individuals can use to manage their relationships once and federate that content to other social systems where applicable – all while maintaining control of their own information.

2. Lack of openness:
Walled gardens are starting to crumble today as more and more people migrate from web sites and portals to platforms. When one studies the architecture of Facebook, it is easy to see that it is a platform rather than a walled garden. The leaders of Facebook have learned from the mistakes of previous attempts and have allowed developers to extend the core platform. What is the win? Those same developers go out and promote the platform as they try to monetize their extensions.

3. Simplistic approaches to semantics:
The idea of the semantic web is a grossly underappreciated issue and the kindergarten efforts to build it using tags are not going to scale. The semantic web is a nirvana in which rich metadata allows both human and machine agents to locate resource much more accurately. Semantics without the guidance and framework of an upper logic (ontology) are doomed in many ways. The current approach assumes that if we tag something, others can understand the semantics. Some have even labeled this "Web 3.0", which only demonstrates they have not grasped the fundamental concepts of Web 2.0. What is required? A framework whereby the first order of logic can be used as the guiding principle for the semantics domain. The effort has to scale to be a multilingual, shared conceptualization of the Web and the information on it that is grounded in references to reality. Think about this for a second. Can anyone really understand what "spicy food" is without actually tasting it?

4. The forking of the Web:
Standards still matter. Web designers do not want to have to develop six AJAX applications for two different versions of three browsers because there is no agreement on how to implement a standard (or standards). This happens when the people who implement standards no longer care to design and implement them in ways that achieve true interoperability; it results in forking the web.