Where is the Web Going?

The trend line of the relationship between the percentage of users creating content and users’ ability, plots the history of the web and helps predict what’s next.  It was the graphical user interface, developed by researchers at Xerox PARC and brought to market by Apple and Microsoft, which made hard-to-understand DOS terminals usable and hearkened the PC revolution.  The web browser commercialized by Netscape, took advantage of infrastructure used by academics to help create Web 1.0.  Next, Facebook took technologies like BBS and RSS to the masses by perfecting the Feed.  Smart entrepreneurs, who took a technology mainstream by making it easier to use, spurred each successive phase of the web.  The interface drove innovation by making previously incomprehensible information useful, driving an explosion of new user behavior and creating huge companies along the way.

Welcome to the Curated Web

If you want to know what’s next for the web, look at where the interface is changing.  Listen for where non-technical people say, “There is too much going on!  Who can make sense of it all?”  That’s exactly the cry the founders of companies like Pinterest, Evernote and Tumblr are answering.  These companies mark the dawn of what I call the Curated Web.

The Curated Web is characterized by a fundamentally different value to users than the social web.  Whereas Web 1.0 was characterized by content published from one-to-many and social media was about easily creating and sharing content, from many-to-many, the curated web is about capturing and collecting only the content that matters, from many-to-one.  Like all successive phases, the curated web is a response to the weaknesses of the previous phase. Users inundated with too much content are looking for solutions to help them make sense of it all.  Curated Web companies solve this problem by turning content curation into content creation and, following the predicted trend line, they see unprecedented percentages of user participation.  Each re-pin, re-blog, re-tweet, creates a curated, easy-to-use stream for future information to flow.

By designing new interfaces, and suddenly making information accessible, innovative companies have just begun creating the Curated Web.  By extrapolating the trend line, we can expect new startups to engage even higher numbers of users in creating content by making content creation even easier.  As our ability to create content increases, perhaps one day becoming nearly effortless, we are likely to see new interfaces to help us make sense of all the data, and hearkening the next phase of the web.