Web 2.0+ in the wild

As I wonder around Wellington lately I started to realise how much Web 2.0+ (2.5, 3.0) concepts and technologies I actually interact with on a day to day basis.

After looking into some of the more formal definitions of these evolutions of the web, 2.0 with the web being used as a platform for social interaction, 2.5 with its “mobile” application of 2.0 ideas and 3.0 looking at being the “semantic” web (web that understands what we are trying to find by providing extra data about our context or preferences).

Here is a few of the more interesting situations and examples that are not the usual Facebook checking or Twitter tweeting.

Breakfast (Pic’s Really Good Peanut Butter)

Ok, so I enjoy breakfast, nothing like a nice hot coffee fresh off the stove-top peculator and some delicious peanut butter on toast… but this particular peanut butter is no ordinary peanut butter. This is Pic’s Really Good Peanut butter made in Nelson and has a great story behind it. What caught my attention one morning while I was about to smear my toast with this peanut butter 2.0 goodness was the QR code directly to their Facebook page right there on the side of the jar. Being the always connected person with a smart phone in my pocket I snapped the QR code, got taken to their Facebook Page and was able to “like” it and start having a conversation with the makers of this fine breakfast spread.  A quick read of some of the comments and posts from Pic’s and fans shows that they are indeed commited to holding a real conversation around their products and even are looking at testing out new versions of their products (a smooth variety of their peanut butter) with consumers to make sure they are delivering the right things to those who want them (on their toast). So while there are some technology enablers involved the real shift is in the social interactions and willingness of businesses to be a bit more human in their dealings.

Coffee Break (Cafe Carbie and Reward Junkie)

For those of you with a caffine addiction this next example is for you. My local coffee shop, Cafe Carbie are again one of those great businesses with a great story (is there a trend appearing here?) they seem to “get” and embrace using Social Media (such as their Facebook Page). However, the technolgoy I want to highlight here is a third party smart phone application and service called Reward Junkie that the cafe uses.  Reward Junkie is utilising the web as its platform in providing a geo-location based, loyalty card style service directly on a customers smart phone which they “snap” a QR code in-store to gain reward points. Let’s face it, we only have so much room in our wallets for these type of cards but leveraging the web to store this data and interacting with it through a device that  a lot of us carry makes a lot of sense. It builds loyalty for the businesses and over time the data collected about customers, demographics and how frequently they visit will be able to play into the idea of the semantic web as mentioned earlier, this type of data helps businesses make more empirical and smarter business decisions.

Getting Around (MetLink Wellington)

My last example is another use of mobile and geo-location based technology to help us get around the city via public transport. Again this service is based on using the web as a platform, so much so that the mobile application is based on web technology. If you visit MetLink’s website from a smart phone it will instantly direct you to a mobile optimised web experience and ask if you would like to use the location services on the phone, no need to download a separate application. I think this really demonstrates the idea that there is no clear cut divider among the 2.0 – 3.0 phases of web evolution in terms of the technology, in this case it is a combinations of good old URI, HTTP request, extra data from the location service on the phone all delivered through the web platform to a mobile device.
I can then simply click one button to find a list of bus stops and times for those near my geographic location or I can interact with the application and enter the bus stop number to get the exact time of departure of the next bus. There are even some stops in the CBD that are using the QR codes as on the Pic’s Peanut Butter jar which makes this process even easier. I make a point of using the QR code when I’m out and about to show others around me how easy it is to use and interact with something that augments your experience in the real world. I just hope someone at MetLink is tracking the use of those QR codes through Web Analytics to build a case for demand/use and to help them drive a decision to deploy them elsewhere. Later on perhaps they could even utilise RFID technology for the same purpose.

This is just a small sampling of some of the Web 2.0 – 3.0 ideas and technologies out there in the wild that I seem to interact with on a daily basis (that is if I have peanut butter toast everyday!)

What are some of your examples?

Consumer Power

There seems to have been a bit of mention of some of my fellow students blogs about the power that the consumer now has toward companies products and the ability to band together and for lack of a better word “complain”, vote with their dollars and win!

Check out this video I just came across from Greenpeace who seem to be one of the few social cause organisations that really “get” and leverage social media.

Pretty cheesey but as well as the content being relevant to the above point… the video itself is a good example of the idea of something that can go viral and would also be considered a “mashup” or “remix” taking video and audio in popular culture and repurposing it to tell a new story and part of the idea of User Generated Content (UGC).

Wow your like sooo… 2.0 right now!

I have been lucky enough to have been invoved in the web industry through what would be termed the shift from web 1.0 to web 2.0 but well before the term was coined by Tim O’Riley in 2004, myself and fellow web geeks simply were just trying to push the boundaries as to what we could do with the emerging technology, new scripting languages, techniques and processes with out a thought as to giving it a shiney marketable buzzword name such as the now often mis-used term “Web 2.0”.

For those of us in the in-crowd the term quickly became a colloquial term for anything that did anything remotely inteactive on a website or even someone trying something new and different outside of the web development scene. Cries of “that is sooo 2.0” would often come from my good friend, fellow web & music geek and online trendspotter Dr Hitchcock for anything removely new and socially awesome (he ran indie music gigs and was a radio presenter for years and now runs his own online radio station). At least he knew what it meant… a change in attitude, more than a change in technology.

Web 2.0 is really about allowing conversations and spaces to collaborate and communicate online together (2-way) rather than the Web 1.0 way of some authoritarian source publishing what they want you to read. While there are many technologies and programming techniques that help facilite these services, it is not about the technology at all. Many of the technologies used are the same that have been around since the world wide web’s conception, HTTP, URI, TCP/IP the list of acroynoms goes on.

I think that some of the reason behind all the misconceptions of what “Web 2.0” is from a businesses adoption point of view comes from this: the technologies and interaction is the most visible part of this paradigm shift and so this is what people wanting to adopt “Web 2.0” see and then think that it is… the whizbang, the design and asthetic of it rather than the social change.

Perhaps making the mind shift to being more open to conversation with customers is percieved as either too hard or or too risky and left out of the equation when thinking about going enterprise 2.0? Having dealt with this first hand, I have lost count of the number of times a potential client has asked “…the internet is great… can I have some web 2.0 please?”, like it is something they can order from a takeaway menu to give them an edge in online business… do you want fries with that?

To give a quick breakdown of the various iterations that the web has been through (and will maybe go through) consider this “version numbering” way of framing it borrowed from the software development process.
Keep in mind that while this breaks the development up into neat segments and time spaces in reality as I mentioned the technologies overlap and many of the ideas have grown organically, blending and merging over time… the process has been anything but neat, tidy or orderly!.

Listen to your customers (or gamers) conversations… they have some good ideas.

One thing is for certain, there has been a social media explosion in recent years with many big businesses jumping on the bandwagon and being extremely successful in various campaigns. It seems to me that the businesses that get the most out of social media are the ones that are not afraid to open their company culture up to embracing the tools and letting staff autonomously interact with the conversions that are taking place outside the organisation.

I read one article recently that talked about using Twitter as “eyes and ears” on the internet to discover what people are saying about your products or services and letting you know where you need to improve or to discover valuable information. Focusing on the customer is key in business today and these tools allow us to hold a 2 way conversation with our customers, broadcast mass media is a sure fire way to annoy customers and lose business.

The idea of there being two conversations going on is not a new one, a book “The Cluetrain Manifesto” which I read many years ago pointed this out (at I think got it right!) and another, Hugh Macleod, a cartoonist and social commentator came up with his “model” of what is going on called the “Porous Membrane”. Where by 2 concentric circles represent the conversations taking place, inside the inner most circle is the conversations taking place inside your business with the circles line boundary being the barriers to communicating with the outer most circle or the conversations taking place outside your business i.e. your customers.
The more open or porous the membrane between these two circles the more conversations start to flow between customers and businesses. Definitely a good thing.

Take this example from the stuff.co.nz new website the other day, http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/games/6486431/Massive-effort-for-tailored-gameplay.

A games company that produces a game series called “Mass Effect” has the 3rd installment of their game coming out very soon. Reading further through the article you’ll see that they solicited feedback from the fans of the game through their Facebook page. The feedback (that of being able to play the game as a female character) was picked up by the production team and implemented into the game.

They leveraged social media channels and were open to real conversations from real gamers which improved their product and in turn gave the customer what they wanted… you can’t get a better outcome from Social media use than that!