The Second Web: Google Wave's New Generation of Collaborative Communications

The first Web isn't dead. But long live the Second Web.

The first Web is without a doubt one of humankind's greatest inventions. Marrying easy-to-use graphical browsing of hyperlinked content on Web servers, simplified publishing tools and powerful search engines, the World Wide Web revolutionized our ability to communicate through electronic publishing with audiences of virtually any scale. Billions of people use the Web every day, and many of those people are in turn Web publishers themselves through the use of social media services and tools. How could we have it better than the Web?

Well, we could.

What the Web Never Did Well

One of the things that the first Web never really dealt with was email. It was a largely outdated technology when the Web was invented and in most ways it has become only worse as a communications medium, in spite of our daily reliance upon it.

The Web also never dealt very well with programming and editing content. This lead to the rise of additional and often proprietary technologies for supporting complex Web content displays. Web 2.0 publishing tools have  improved our ability to publish and collaborate simply on the Web, but they fail to provide a unified and open standard that allows everyday people, enterprises and online publishers to edit and interact with content and people efficiently.

Finally, the Web was invented in an era in which the phrase "real-time" was applied mostly to things like stock quote feeds and scientific research. Today the Web supports real-time services such as Twitter messages, phone calls, videoconferencing and a wealth of mobile applications triggered by Web-supplied updates. The Web manages to deliver these services, but in truth it was never well-designed for real-time. Can you say, "Fail-whale?"

What The Second Web Does Better

As exemplified by the introduction of Google Wave, there is a better way to deal with the problems that the original Web never dealt with particularly well. Those better ways build on the strengths of Web technologies but are not limited by some of its inherent weaknesses. We can call these better ways The Second Web. Like a new car in the driveway sitting next to our "old reliable" car, The Second Web takes us many of the same places that the original Web has taken us, but with a new generation of technology and a new focus on its purpose.

What defines The Second Web? Looking at Google Wave and related Web technology and service developments, I believe that The Second Web incorporates a number of key attributes:

• The Second Web is conversational. At the heart of Google Wave is an open source protocol that is designed to support simultaneous two-way exchanges between groups of people - or, to put it more simply, conversations. The original Web was never designed to deal with conversations at all: it was simply a technology to make it easier to retrieve information stored remotely. Google Wave "documents" are often used as records of conversations - and, often enough, host multiple simultaneous conversations. While you can store documents in Google Wave as attachments, The Second Web is not a just a place that you go to get content to use elsewhere. It's a place where content is born, grown and consumed all in one spot by groups of people, often in real-time. Once audio is integrated into The Second Web more efficiently, the full power of its ability to support conversations amongst groups will become more clear.
  
  
• The Second Web is easy for anyone to edit and program. While tools such as blogging servers and social networking portals make it easy for people to create content online, once it's there, well, it's there, pretty much. The Second Web is based on the premise that any of its content could be edited and programmed by anyone as easily as writing an email, attaching a file or making a comment on a Web site. Just click, type, drag and drop - and it's there for the world to see and interact with. If you want to change a published document, go ahead - it's all the same method, whether it's just a note to your friend or a page for all the world to see. The Second Web will crash through publishing technology barriers and enable billions more people around the world to publish efficiently and effectively.
  
  
• The Second Web makes collaboration a default, not an exception. Unless you happen to be visiting a relative handful of Web sites that use (typically) techie-oriented wiki software, it's really hard to collaborate on most kinds of Web content. This makes collaboration a special sort of behavior on the original Web, an exception to a "me first" rule that dominates most publishing. In The Second Web, the ability to any number of people collaborate on any section of a published document is a given - and is accomplished using the same tools common to all documents on The Second Web. Making collaboration a default behavior for publishing, and giving people several ways in which they can collaborate, will change the development of content on The Second Web far more than we can probably imagine today.
  
  
• The Second Web is easy to share with specific groups. The original Web had two basic modes for publishing: show content to one very specific group, or to the world. Email gave us some hints as to how we could have overlapping audiences for content, but it was a poor technology at best for sharing content with groups. The Second Web makes it easy for a document or conversation to transition from one person's private content to a small conversation to broader groups or to the world as a whole. This will make it far easier for people on The Second Web to reach and to address very specific kinds of audiences with very specific kinds of messages. The Second Web will become, in effect, millions of specific and overlapping Webs, each with their own particular flavor of conversations and collaborations.
  
  
• The Second Web has history. When we look at a Web page, we see a document that has no inherent history: it is whatever the latest image of that document has become. Web archiving services can give us a hint as to how things used to look on the Web, but they lack comprehensiveness. Wikis have some ability to play back specific Web pages, but again this is only available for specific types of content. The Second Web assumes that all of its content has history that needs to be easily accessed and understood, regardless of how it came into being. A personal note can become a conversation which in turn can become a collaboration on a major information source. The Second Web makes it easy to see the history of these progressions - and to understand exactly who did what at which points in that history. This will have a major impact over time on our understanding of history.
  
  
• The Second Web fits both personal and professional needs. On the first Web, technologies that supported enterprises were rarely the same as those that were used on the public Web. Oftentimes the only common point of reference was the Web browser: most all of the other underpinnings were separate. This makes it particularly hard for enterprises to integrate their operations efficiently with the original Web. By basing its technologies on a protocol that can serve as a replacement for email-style communications amongst any group of people, The Second Web opens the door to content development that can span both enterprises and the worlds outside of their network firewalls much more easily. More content will be in a similar format with similar ability to be shared and edited collaboratively on any mobile, desktop or household platform with specific groups securely. This may help to fuel new gains in productivity that the original Web promised but sometimes failed to deliver.

Where The Second Web Goes From Here

Right now, we're experiencing the first developing example of The Second Web via the Google Wave preview application. But this is, after all, just one early example of an HTML 5-based application built on top of the Google Wave protocol and API. Others are already being developed by third party software houses, and there will be more to come as the Wave protocol begins to power other platforms on the Web. We can also expect that there will be technologies competitive to Google Wave that will adopt Second Web concepts and probably interconnect with Wave. For example, if the Twitter or Facebook platform were to open up its server engine as an open -source platform with HTML 5 - compliant APIs, then this might further amplify the landscape of The Second Web, though perhaps with a more limited range of potential uses than available to Google Wave.

Whatever the specific product landscape that may evolve in The Second Web, Google Wave has established its basic landmarks and byways. The Second Web will be a publishing environment that makes it far easier to access, share and organize content in ways that lead to productive and rewarding relationships in any number of groups. We will continue to use and to enjoy the Web as we know it today, even as our homes, vehicles and mobile devices offer us a range of publishing options separate from the Web. It may take several years before The Second Web becomes a major factor in influencing how content markets develop, just as the original Web's introduction was not viewed seriously by many people until it gained some scale in consumer and enterprise markets. But at the frenetic pace of development already established by Google in rolling out the Google Wave preview, it's likely that the tipping point for The Second Wave may arrive far earlier than many believe today.

What does this mean to you? Take a deep breath, all of you who have lived through more than a decade of change courtesy of the World Wide Web. As I said recently at an event, it's not that everything that you know is wrong, but we have a lot to learn about what is going to be right in The Second Web. Human communications are about to enter yet another level of universality and immediacy, one that will begin to absorb billions of people who never even had an email account. For these people, they may ask, "What's a Web page?" the same way that people are asking today, "What's a wave?" The "Hello, world" universe of the tiny community now on Google Wave is about to get larger. Much larger. When it does, the speed at which The Second Web becomes THE Web might be staggering.