The Death of the Web 2.0 Company?

I recently attended a talk by a Yahoo! executive on "Socially Immersive Media". That's the term they use for the phenomenon of user-generated content and other Web 2.0 elements. He was rather gung-ho about the prospects of these new Social Media companies, and how traditional media was finding it difficult to compete.

And then it hit me right in the middle of the talk. These "Web 2.0 companies" will be going the traditional way very soon. Their victory is a short victory.

Let's take a look at the web as being composed of "content", "applications" and "infrastructure". Early on, all these three components were supplied by one central, logical entity, not unlike how "old media" does it. And then came these new media companies, the "social media" companies, who ceded control over creation of content to the masses. They just provided the application (like Blogger, Flickr, etc.) and the infrastructure, but content was by the masses, of the masses and for the masses.

Of course, it's not written anywhere that applications or infrastructure are the exclusive domain of these social media companies. Open source applications, community-owned, have existed for a very long time now. Indeed, many users are already constructing applications (or "mashups") using APIs provided by some of these companies. These companies are the lucky ones. They'll go, but slower. It's not difficult to surmise that a few years on, these companies will be relegated to just providing infrastructure on which the masses write and run their applications.

But to truly democratize the web, we must own the infrastructure too. Now, this is a difficult problem. Can we set up a masses-owned Google, for instance, that meets similar standards of quality and performance and even exceeds them? Peer-to-Peer applications have already demonstrated that infrastructure can be owned by the masses, but how long is it before these protocols go "mainstream"?

Pipe-dream? Science fiction? Thanks to the Democracy TV/Player, it's not. This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The content for this Wired Magazine's "future of Net TV" application is all user-generated. It's a Free Software application written by the community. And it uses BitTorrent to get around the nasty problem of hosting video broadcast infrastructure. And it works!

Me doth think these companies rejoice too soon.