ItTakes 2.0 to Tango!!

There was this one time, that someone invented a typewriter. It was a revolution of sorts, as you didn’t have to write anymore…although, the effort in writing still looked slim compared to learning the QWERTY layout and ensuring head-hand motor co-ordination to actually type in something coherent without suffering from a wrist malfunction. But a revolution it was still, and continues to be.

It took different avatars; first came the electronic typewriter (Eureka! Auto Correct!), and when the old stenographers complained that the screen was too small, too blurry and too green, someone decided that it was a good time to take those ENIACS, pack ‘em in a box, attach a TV screen and plug in the trusty old key-cranker to it…say hello to the PC! Incidentally, it also led to the advent of younger stenographers as the old ones just couldn’t help knocking the big screens to change channels…evolution is a good thing after all!

But essentially, the revolution changed the way God had expected us to evolve…we started using our hands differently and slowly kinda forgot to write. You & I still learnt the art of scale-book writing, but look at the kids today! Now, evolution is a funny thing. It pushes us to keep innovating…we are laziest mammal you see. The box guy realized that he couldn’t watch Joe DeMaggio hit a home run properly. So he came up with the “screen resolution” idea and the box started getting better (although Mr. Gates still can’t decide just what resolution is perfect for Vista..1024, 800, 600 or 300? Some people are just slow but never mind that!)

To cut the long story short, evolution brought in Internet…hence, interactive; and suddenly, vistas (no pun intended) of possibilities emerged. Wires turned into fibres and it went down our systems pretty well! The big 1.0 emerged and took over the world, changing it completely… I can’t begin to imagine what all could have I done had the 1.0 (do I see a Matrix/Nero connect here? Hmmm…interesting.) been there when I was in the 6th grade and saw an XT for the first time.

It also led to the growth of another species of mankind…the CODERS! Now, they ruled, all right? They are the ones who scrunched and fitted enormous amounts of lines into a CD that became the OS to rule the world…Wizards of OS literally, although it reminds me of the poor moon astronauts sitting on a Petronas Tower full of fuel. Incidentally, they say that the computing power of XP is more that all computing that went into sending man on the moon (although the moon mission seems smarter…there was just one Apollo 13, and even that got back! So much for the Gates intelligence!)

Now, the coders were a hardworking lot. They typed & typed and complied & compiled. But they spent so much time listening to trance while they were at it, that even trance became monotonous (now you know why!). And they got sick of the matrix screensaver. Evolution reared its monstrous head again and then came in the 2.0. Not very imaginative a name...well, coders you see.

Ahem, it just took me one page of incessant rambling to come to the point! I must be in marketing!
Diggs aside (See how 2.0 affects me?!), 2.0 heralded another era of evolution. If the 1.0 had made us forget writing, this one was intent on liquefying all human spectrums of physical activity!

But that actually is not a bad thing. You see, for eons, evolution has always made things simpler. But when you trust the future of mankind to one man, things tend to go wrong…or at least tend to go his way…now you can’t disagree with both these points! Computer technology, as a whole, has mostly complicated things in the past. Where you could write, you started hunting for keys, suffered from carpal whatever syndrome, companies sank without a trace because an organization didn’t upgrade on time, dot com bust liquefied an entire industry generation etc etc…I can even remember this cartoon of a panicky pilot with his aircraft screen showing the “Fatal Blue Screen Error” just when he needs to save the aircraft from crashing! IMHO, we started with bad logic, covered it with more lines of codes to patch it, did it over & over again and ended trusting the world as we know it to programs that would have failed the first level exams. So essentially, the 1.0 packed all of us into this little capsule perched on top of a Petronas tower worth of highly inflammable liquid fuel and promised us the moon. Scary.

2.0 took a different perspective altogether. It said, enough of what we can develop, why don’t you, the user, decide what you want and then create it? For the first time, coders created platforms for development instead of developing platforms. And it is a revolution indeed to realize that finally collective wisdom is considered better than one man’s insanity.

Instead of replacing writing with typing (how smart was that?!), someone decided that it’s a better idea if technology worked along the lines of how we “thought”, “felt”, “imagined” and even “smelt”. Now that liberated humankind. It gave us a freedom to express (Blogs), “tag” our favorites, “network” with similar brains and “feed” on what we want instead of what others want to feed us!

A central principle of Web 2.0, is that information is capable of being attracted to us. It comes to us, and we keep it coming to us as we move from place to place. Users are increasingly started working across devices (laptop to desktop to wi-fi), formats (open APIs, no longer proprietary formats), and saved locations. Web 2.0 is finally delivering some of the real promise of the information era, now that we really need them! You can actually have a rough cloud of meaningful information to follow you so that it is available when you need it! This happens when we leverage all the information "out there" with reuse/better-use capabilities across media and tools, both mobile and applications. Think tags again. Think RSS again. Think blogs!

Then there is alternate humanity. Look at Second Life. Earlier they thought Doom II shootouts were as real as it gets & then somebody opened a completely new world. This world did not force upon the user a Duke NukeEm persona that they hoped to be like. It simply asked – what is it that you wanna be? Become that. And then meet others who are being their real selves in this world just like you are. Ah..and as a bonus, you can even fly! Now that is pushing evolution a bit..but again, its freedom of thought so I’d take it with a pinch of salt and enjoy the ride! Just how relevant is this alternate, supposedly the real “real” persona? P&G has bought an island…they will showcase their products there. Reuters has deputed a full-time correspondent to keep track and U2 held their first virtual rock show. I think they are serious folks!

So, do we trash our age old understanding of consumer behavior and look at it afresh just for this 2.0? Unrealistic and impossible as it may seem, the answer seems to be a “Yes”.

Call it the 2.0nd chance to get it right…

Just the way the keyboard fooled us for a long time, we, the consumers have only shown the marketers what we want them to see, or what is socially accepted to be seen as. I bought my Mach 3 Razor because it was the cool thing to have and all my friends had it. That’s what P&G communicated & exploited through their advertisements as well! Now considering that I have a goatee on second life (as in real life incidentally!), I may be led to believe that an expensive trimmer along with a cheap razor will give me better ROI considering the two different surfaces on my face. This honesty can come in real life as well, but is difficult to accept when faced with a hot chick in a space shuttle rubbing your jaw. Suddenly, P&G will not see me as one of the TG, hence shoved with a group-targeted product, but meet me personally in alternate reality and be more honest with me. BTL Utopia…but possible!

The benefits of Web 2.0 real-world integration are obvious. More topics that people can relate to, means more interest in the web and specialized services that it has to offer – that in turn are connected to real life. This, in turn means more eyeballs, more business opportunities, and a higher-level of globalisation and connectivity. Oh, and the dishwasher will also eventually put the dishes away once cleaning is complete. Bosch DishWashr BETA complete with reality alarm…

By the way, that last one wasn’t a whimsical statement…the 3.0 is en route and that’s all about intuitive computing. Imagine googling “I wanna go to Switzerland in a 100K budget, stay in a lake facing room in Interlaken district and oh, I have an 11-year old kid too” and getting just one or maybe few “absolutely relevant & to-the-point” results instead of 39,400 results! Start saving for that Dish Washer.

A word of caution though. The real “real” means that we are finally exposing ourselves in the truest possible manner. So it’s good to understand the story above, as long as you realize that your privacy is also now “truly” at stake.

To sum it all up, its here and it’s real. It has become a part of our fabric of life and damn! It’s hot! And if the sentence as usual sounded clichéd, believe you me, this time it isn’t.

Someone once said: “You can’t stop an idea whose time has come.” So, Brace yourself for the ride!