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Ready for an upgrade?

Anne 2.0 said some nice things about me the other day, so I thought I’d give her some props, too. She’s definitely one of the more refreshing reads on the web right now, so you should check out what she’s got to say.

Anyway, TechCrunch (“Tracking Web 2.0”) provides a critique of a new Ajax homepage. Richard McManus has a piece about Microsoft’s Live.com. James Governor has a particularly insightful piece about how Web 2.0-type services could lead to all new legal battles (“Litigation 2.0?”). Assuming the old joke about MS applies and that we don’t get it right until version 3.0, what’s Web 3.0 going to offer? Is it Ajax-like interfaces on your phone or truly desktop-like experiences on the Web? No offense meant to those folks who are making that happen more and more today. But let’s face it, what does Web 2.0 offer yet. Web 2.0 still lacks its killer app. There are some folks (del.icio.us, Flickr, Google, etc.) who have moved the needle. There are bunches more of us out here whispering into the din. Clearly, one advantage of Web 2.0 is it gives an increasing number of us “quiet voices” the opportunity to attract a handful of listeners via aggregation and distribution. We all know spreadsheets provided the killer app for computers themselves and email provided the killer app for the Internet. Will 2.0 ever get its killer app, or will the killer app be the start of Web 3.0?

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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  1. Thanks, James. I think. Anne is one of the best. With regard to the rest, I stand by my original point. Clearly, we’re all into the future of the web and really starting to explore the concept of a more semantic web. However, it doesn’t change the question: where is the killer app? The closest things I’ve seen are MySpace and Netopia, which seem to draw my kids in deeper and deeper every day and don’t even use most Web 2.0 features. They do emphasize the concept of social software. Still, I don’t see most folks running out and getting online in once fell swoop solely to get a MySpace account.

    Mobile phones do a somewhat better job with texting, but you can’t tell me ringback tones represent the future of the online experience.

  2. […] So, James Governor’s recent comment (though I’m not sure this was his point) got me thinking some more about killer apps and Web 2.0. There seems to be a fair bit of buzz around the blogosphere in this regard today, too. The question that Marnie Webb at Netsquared asked Robert Scoble is a pretty good place to start: “is Web 2.0 merely hype?” Marshall Kirkpatrick asks a similar thing on his blog, too. […]

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