Jason Calacanis, Nick Carr, Microsoft, Google, and the most prized currency of Web 3.0: Trust

Lampooning Jason Calacanis' attempt to define Web 3.0, Nicholas Carr metaphorically cites Yeat's Couplet (Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!; A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot) before concluding:

Both beggars, though, labor under romantic misconceptions. For one, the web is freeing us from the shackles of the past, when our malignant media overlords stifled our creativity and force-fed us gruel. For the other, the web is returning us to a purified past, when our benign media overlords nurtured the most talented and delivered their fine works to us all. Both visions simplify the past and distort the future. The so-called new media is just old media with a different cost structure; the overlords will not be overthrown but neither will they be redeemed, and the same goes for the prosuming crowd.

Gruel?

In his treatise that points to the ever-evolving and increasingly more Britannica-like editorial process at the Wikipedia, Jason Calacanis implies that the elite will (as it did before) get to dictate and control the majority of the dialog consumed (or is that "prosumed" as Carr states) by others. Wrote Calacanis in an attempt at defining Web 3.0:

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.

Of course the first question anybody reading this will probably have (Nick, face it, you thought it too) is "Am I one of those gifted individuals?" While we leave that question to be answered another day, I'm (also?) a bit confused by Jason's definition of Web 3.0. First of all, I'm not sure I ever got the definition of Web 2.0 (especially since the current standard for the Web's protocol -- HTTP -- is still at version 1.1 and has been since the turn of the century). But, if there is a Web 2.0, if you ask me, one of its most defining characteristics is that you don't have to be nearly as gifted --- in fact, not very gifted at all -- to not only join the dialog, but create your own (and organize a community around it).

Fifth graders are using Andrew Bidochko's mapbuilder.net to mashup the database of birthplaces of the world's most famous explorers with Google Maps. Aunt Sally can clone Internet software built with Ning, change some text, and call that software her own.

Today, Zude.com -- a site I called the Switzerland of the social Web because of the way you can stay loyal to your social networks of choice (MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, Wordpress, etc.) but drag pages from them (in their entirety, without loss of functionality) right into your "Zudescape" -- launched its general access to the public. Its claim is that its drag and drop interface is so easy that it's one of the few social networking sites that grandma can use. One of the benefits of this form of open aggregation is that you can hand out one URL instead of 20 in order for people to see all your different social presences on the Web. This dragging and dropping (which, in addition to Web sites, works with stand alone images, text, videos, software widgets, etc.) is so simple that no "gift" is required. My sister-in-law is 9.5 parts mother and .5 parts blogger for a specific community She's on the long tail, probably always will be, but she has a very loyal following. Not that she isn't gifted. She's just not included in the gifted I think Jason is referring to. Who is?

In a slightly different way though, there may be some truth to Jason's predictions. If there ever really is a Web 3.0, its most valued currency will be trust. My colleague Dan Farber and I just got done taping this week's episode of the Dan & David Show and one of the topics was Microsoft's new health initiative. Talk about lobs. Over the last decade, people have made hobbies and livings out of explaining why Microsoft can't be trusted. So, when the Redmond-based company comes along with a repository for what is probably the most sensitive of all personal information there is about you and says "let us hold it for you," it should come as no surprise that the critics are already asking who will trust Microsoft's HealthVault. It's not that Microsoft can't be trusted. Personally, I think it can be. It's just that there's a bit of irony in the idea of entrusting such confidential information to the custody of the one technology company whose trustworthiness has been the most questioned.

During the show, Dan talked about how Microsoft beat Google to the punch. I argued that being first-to-market is not that big of a deal when it comes to a service like this. Trust is the big deal. It was no doubt the biggest deal when banks first marketed the idea of holding people's money (does the word "Trust" not appear in the names of many banks?). Our money is a pretty big deal when it comes to things we don't want others to put their paws on. Coming in a close second is probably our health records.

To win the hearts and minds of customers, Microsoft, Google and other Internet players will have to sell trust before they sell anything else. Perhaps Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin knew this early on when "Do no evil" became a company motto. These days, it's impossible for Google or any company of its size to do something that isn't perceived as evil by somebody. But underlying that motto was an emphasis on trust. Long term, the Google brand, like Microsoft and others, will have to stand for the gold standard in trust if they hope to succeed in the areas such as healthcare that they're expanding into.

Consider this. Back in mid-2005, when the US Justice Department subpoenaed AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo for search data, Google was the only one of the four that dug its heels in and as a result, ended up handing a much more limited set of data than the DOJ had originally pressed for (and got from the other search giants). Regardless of the gory details, Google came across as being a champion of its users' privacy while AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo came away appearing far less concerned about it. On the basis of that incident alone, it's not hard to imagine Google winning the perception war as being the most trustworthy of the four brands. It was a clear signal from Google to the marketplace that it was prepared to do whatever it takes to protect the privacy of its users: a move that engendered more trust in a digital brand than probably any case study to come before it. Today, the company faces new questions about trust (a topic for another blog) and, all I can say is that when you call Google about a trust related issue as I have, the response is more immediate and more full of conviction than when you call Google about any other issue.

Circling back to Jason Calacanis and Web 3.0, trust (or, at least perceived trust) will also be the currency of the information trade. This is a very familiar battleground for big media. They've been in the business of trust -- albeit a clearly oft-twisted version of trust -- for almost as long as banks have been in the business of trust. If, over the course of time, the big media got lazy, corrupt, or twisted and ended up feeding us gruel, the blogosphere could not have come along at a better time. Almost immediately, the established media responded to the blogosphere by questioning its trustworthiness and any time any one plays the trust card, you know they're feeling threatened. But now that the trust card has been played in what has turned out to be a failed hand, there really is only one way that the established media, with all of its resources, can respond: improve.

If, in the end, the established media maintains its grip on the dialog, it will be because the rest of us who are not as gifted used those so-called Web 2.0 tools in a way that spotlighted trust as the key differentiator between sources of information. If, as Calacanis says, some elite class of gifted communicators rises (or remains at the top), it will be because the rest of us gave them the greatest gift of all: we kept them honest.