As I try to come up with a theme for the first Asian edition of LIFT, I am somehow getting a strong intuition that we are leaving the revolutionary phase of the Web industry, and about to enter a more boring and less innovative period (Bruce Sterling won’t disagree with me). A number of weak signals seem to be announcing the end the cycle of hyper innovation that marked what will one day be remembered as the early days of the web, or the 1994 - 2006 period.

At Kinnernet, I jokingly told Thomas Mygdal that the Silicon Valley is facing Detroit-a-zation. What were once innovative and agile startups are increasingly becoming pachyderms hampered by overgrowth, internal politics and shareholders pressure. The big CEOs - once mavericks celebrated and envied by the whole business community - are becoming bus drivers. Eric Schmid’s days probably look more and more like the ones of Marcel Ospel or Carlos Ghosn, and with each hour passing Google’s organization inches closer to the IBM model rather than the edonistic company proned by the Zentral Intelligenz Agentur. Web companies employees have too much work, need to stay later than their bosses, have to raise their profiles to get good reviews, etc.

While in Korea, I systematically asked my interlocutors what they thought were today’s “hot” topics. Their answers: ubiquitous computing, urban technologies, robotic toys, green technologies, open source objects, etc. The web? “It was interesting seven years ago!”  It is now a commodity, and this has a deep impact on the industry and on its culture. What happened?

• The rise of incremental innovation
  Incremental innovation has replaced fundamental innovation. We are not discovering new territories - like when Friendster, Google, or Hotmail were invented - but are developing the ones that have already been explored by others, bringing smaller improvements like a new interface, a new way to receive an information, a new mix of existing services. A striking example of this is social networks, where entrepreneurs are almost done exploring the different possibilities. It started with networks about the past (classmates, copains d’avant), then about the present (Facebook, MySpace), and now it is about the future (dopplr, mixin). Nothing revolutionary, just a lot of talented people busy not leaving any stone unturned in the same field, exploring a finite space.
• Maturity = less hunger
  The industry is more mature, which means many of us have something to lose. We all have a status, more conflicts of interest then ever (the web 2.0 world is skunk drunk on its own kool-aid), bigger egos. Time goes by, and most industry leaders are fifteen years older and nature made them more risk averse. Sneakers have been replaced by leather shoes, and the Johnny Cash rule (which says you are never as good as when hungry) is now playing against us.
• Early adopters became gatekeepers?
  Where is the new generation? Aren’t they interested, or is it that we don’t listen to them? Have we - the early adopters - become gate keepers? Every time I go to a web conference I am struck by the fact the average age of speakers is always around 40. What happened here? Do we really only have Kevin Rose, Matt Mullenweg and Mark Frauenfeld innovating under 25? Could it be that there is a whole layer of innovation we simply don’t look at?
• Excitement is building in other fields
  If you haven’t watched Bruno Bonnel and Rafi Haladjan’s talks you probably haven’t noticed, but robotic toys have a huge future. Mobile continues to rock Africa and Asia, green technologies are the hot topic in Sand Hill Road, new interfaces are opening up huge possibilities. It seems other fields are offering more exciting opportunities than the web!

I am sure I could come up with more reasons but let’s hear your opinion first. Do you feel like it is the end of a cycle? Why? Is the web just another industry where success depends more on having an MBA than a revolutionary idea and a taste for risk?

Update: ChangeWaves says the Infotech sector is not yet geriatric. We can resume normal breathing.

Loads of amazing ideas are being thrown around at the moment in Monterey and Aspen. TED is now, and as usual they have a flurry of bloggers in the room bringing the debates to the world. Read master Giussani’s reports on lunchoverip.com and let’s start they day with this wonderful quote by Matthieu Ricard:

“Western science is a major response to minor needs. We [Buddhist monks] don’t really believe that you went to the Moon, but you did; you don’t believe that we can achieve enlightenment in a single life, but we do.”

Different perspectives, always enriching.

Every time I do a personality test I end up on the intuitive side of things, not on the sensing side. The MBTIs the former-big-5-consultant that I am had to take were always filing me under “imaginative and conceptual”, not “practical and organized”. So I tend to feel things without really being able to explain why. In the past I would wait until the image would stop being blurred, and write about it after a long maturation process.

But I am out of time these days, and after all it’s fun, so here are the things I think I think (but can’t really tell you why):

1. Celebrity will soon be perceived as a disease. Young stars will receive government funded psychological treatment, and governments will have to create services dedicated to teach celebs how to deal with things like the loss of privacy or control of their identity.
2. Google rank will become a political argument. Instead of saying “this is why I am right” political leaders will say “type ‘Iraq war’ in google and look at how my speech comes up first”. Google will be perceived as the ultimate organizer of relevance, and as nobody can control it it will provide the needed crowdibility (that’s a new word I just made up) politicians have lost. If you are on top of google you are right, and you are right because the population put you there.
3. Strikes will follow wars and happen online. It makes so much sense. Web War I proved that you can impair a government with online activities, and unions will need to stop bothering clients who have more and more tools to hit them back and influence public opinion with blogs and cell phone cameras.
4. Work will be an socially accepted reason for divorce. “I am leaving you for my job”. Work is becoming so intensive and personal, private and professional lives are merging so much, so more and more people will find the level of socialization they need at work, a much easier to control and therefore tempting environment.
5. Our whole economic system will be reinvented around the correct assumption that people do not create for money but for fun. That day copyright and intellectual property will stop making sense, and the 99% of the inhabitants of this planet who create for pleasure and not for business will finally be treated fairly.
6. Somebody will get stabbed for speaking too loud with his mobile phone in a public place. Every time I am in a situation where somebody disrespects an entire bus to say hi to his grandmother, I find the general hate level is becoming higher and higher.
7. Entrepreneurs will equal adventurers. Where is the excitement these days? Crossing the Atlantic is so twentieth century. Entrepreneurs will be among the cool dudes, hit the Jay Leno show and get coverage in tabloids.
8. Presence applications will impact sociality in a negative way. Twitter users will stop talking about their life to others, not knowing if the person received updates he or she sent over Twitter or Facebook. Presence applications will create a fear to send the same signal twice. (this one I write to make sure you guys comment on this post ;)

I had a recent discussion with a Skype exec who was telling me how bad the integration with eBay was going, as eBay was such a hierarchical and procedural organization. Hierarchical and procedural? Not something you would expect from a young company like eBay right?

But it is not 2000 anymore. Time has passed. Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, Google, these organizations are now mammoth struggling with big companies problems like inertia, internal politics, miscommunication, etc…

This Cory Doctorow article on Amazon’s problems with understanding the logic of the download market further confirmed my intuition that we entered a new era: the bus drivers era.

The internet industry is not driven by young hot mavericks anymore. It is now headed by big time CEOs with shareholders, middle managers and a focus on quarterly reports. Their job is to keep their user base satisfied via incremental innovation, not to change the world anymore. The CEOs of the internet industry are now like the CEOs of any industry : they are bus drivers.

Ebay looks more and more like Microsoft. Yahoo currently seems to be as exciting a company as AT&T or GM. Google is slowly cutting itself from users every day. Growth has a price as it forces you to manage a very different set of non value-adding things.

And the web industry is certainly less fun than it used to be.

Answering a question he was asked at LIFT Evening Seoul, Adam Greenfield wrote a long answer detailing what his perfect city would be like. Very inspiring thoughts, and an idea for a new book after Everyware?

My urban utopia would assemble these traits, kaleidoscopically:

- A setting as gemlike and as accessible to ocean, mountain, forest and desert as San Francisco’s, with winters no worse than that city’s, and summers like Helsinki;
- Lots of oxygenating green space;
- A zone or zones with the density, skyscraping verticality and walkability of Manhattan, or maybe central Hong Kong, for identity, legibility, and let’s face it, excitement;
- Boulevards with the leafy slope and generous broadness of Barcelona’s Ramblas or Tokyo’s Omotesando (at least as the latter existed up until 2003, i.e. prior to the destruction of the Dojunkai Apartments and their replacement with Ando’s jumped-up, pompous mall);
- Flabbergasting ethnolinguistic diversity, with all that implies for the eating experience;
- Lots of mixed-use close in to the core, and lower-density, more purely residential outlying districts with the easygoingness, human scale and hardy housing stock I remember from my adolescence in West Philadelphia;
- These connected to the downtown(s) and to each other by something like the vividly multimodal transitscape of central Amsterdam, where a road, a sidewalk and a bustling bikepath will all converge in crossing over a canal (and I’d thrown in Portland’s light-rail network);
- Enough cheap housing so that everyone who wants one has a room to call their own - and enough cheap warehouse/event space to support an arts community like Berlin’s;
- The 24-hour bustle and ad-hoc spirit of Seoul - where a vacant lot plus a grill plus a tent equals a nightspot, and in nice weather you don’t even need the tent;
- Something in the lay of the streets that recalls Daikanyama, or the winding backways between Shibuya and Ebisu;
- It’s undeniably haute-bourgeous, and titled perilously toward consumerism, but if you’re going to have commercial zones I’ve always felt that something works about Berkeley’s Fourth Street;
- Thousands of idiosyncratic small bookshops, cafés, bars and other service establishments;
- Moments of sudden, unexpected grace - a planted nook, a shaded arcade or courtyard, a humble bench;
- London cabs, Amsterdam bikes, old Saigon cyclos, Yamanote-sen trains - and while we’re at it, why not make it safe for motorcyclists so I can ride my SV once more;
- All of this undergirded by a thoughtfully-designed informatic infrastructure that sutures all these experiences together, that lets them speak themselves, that does what it needs to and then goes

Link

Could the Chinese - who seem to be building cities around utopias these days - start working on that?

There isn’t one Web anymore. Many different webs are emerging around cultural boundaries. Welcome to a multipolar online world!

Back in 1994, Internet was a village. You could know all the streets names, all the habitants addresses and habits. English was the one and only language, and the whole ecosystem’s map could still be fitted on a homepage. Internet experts were people able to understand the intricacies of HTML and to remember unsexy URLs (yahoo.stanford.edu) gathered through random surfing.

Then the village became a country, organized around a few poles like Ebay or Amazon. The maps became obsolete with the birth of effective search engines like Webcrawler, Altavista or Hotbot. Internet was still very homogeneous, full of common rules and codes (the netiquette), hampered by various technical limitations (browser compatibility, 28k modems, 640*480 screens). English was still the ultra dominant language. Kings had mastered the secrets of clever searches, able to find the right way to navigate the 50 first results to find the best resources.

Then the city became a continent. Millions and millions of people, Google emerging out of the newly messy network, organizing pages in a way that was gaming the gamers who couldn’t simply repeat a word a million times to sit on top of the rankings. French started to emerge, Japanese and Spanish too. Cultural differences blossomed, and local players were gaining traction and respectable audiences. Technology was getting its acts together, finally providing ways to reach multiple languages, devices, and cultures. Leaders were those able to cope with an increasing amount of information, who managed to filter the relevant from the irrelevant and were able to repackage multiple sources in an easy to understand and adapted way.

Internet is now a planet with different continents, each having a different culture, a different structure, a different set of players. See this list of dominant communities per country gathered on a recent BBC article:

MySpace (United States, Australia, Mexico, and Italy), Bebo (Ireland and New Zealand) , Cyworld (South Korea), Friendster (Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore) , Fotolog (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay), Hi5 (Colombia, Ecuador, and Thailand), Mixi (Japan), Orkut (Brazil, India, and Paraguay) , Skyblog (France, Belgium, Senegal), Studiverzeichnis (Germany, Austria) and Vkontakte (Russia).

Social networking sites are exposing a formerly hidden reality: the fact that the web now matured into a network of distinct ecosystems.

Does that mean the end of global sites? Probably not. But just like in politics, where the emergence of China and India will end the West’s unilateral dominance, multi polarity is brewing on the Internet. We expected it to happen because of technology, money and innovation (Yahoo and Microsoft to counter-balance Google). Instead it’s the world’s oldest frontiers - language and culture - showing up to balance things out.

PS: I thought about that when I read Bruno’s post about William Gibson, a famous science fiction novelist who has “given up on trying to imagine the future” because we have “hit a speed and complexity that make the future inscrutable”. Things grow and become more complex with time. Internet is a good example.

Links:
Lunch over IP: William “cyberspace” Gibson gives up on the future
BBC: Pull down the walled gardens

It’s a stupid question but I always wondered if that was the case. Because even if you fully reinstall an old laptop with the original system after a crash, it feels much slower than when you took it out of the box.

Is it some kind of mental Moore’s law, where our brains become more demanding with each day passing? Or are computers really getting slower and less effective with time?

Something made of electricity and non-moving parts (mostly) getting old sounds a bit weird. That’s why the question came up.