Changes Is Good

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)

According to a great post by Sramana Mitra this formula is the future of the web. The four C’s in this formula are content, community, and commerce with a fourth C representing context. The P is for personalization and the VS is for vertical search. Sramana believes that Web 1.0 was all about commerce and Web 2.0 is being built on community but Web 3.0 will evole into a personalized, vertically searchable, contextualized tool for accessing commerce, content and community. I’m not convinced.

While I love the thinking Sramana has put into the formula I cant help but think its wrong. Not in the elements she has put together, but in how she has combined them. Like any good recipe its not enough to have the right ingredients you also have to combine them in the right order and proportion. Sramana provides the shopping list but its left to entrepreneurs to figure out of to make a killer dish.

Its not the model its the math
I wish I had the skills to come p with a more realistic formula but my math skills are rudimentary at best. So a leave a more accurate representation of the formula to those better suited and instead simply offer the recipes description.

Communities form around pieces of content. The by-products of these communities is even more content and some commerce. Which in tern, leads to greater community and commerce in a virtuous cycle that has spawned everything from Hip-Hop to eBay. In addition, all communities are based on value exchanges (time, capital, resources, etc…) and an exchange of value is by definition commerce. So the relationship between the 3c is neither linear nor equivalent.

(Commerce * Community)^Content

Context (what is my intent) is the catalyst that drives a user to seek out any one of the C’s and so has to have a primary roll in any formulation of Web 3.0. Context isnt a factor of the 3C’, it is more of its root or the base of the decision to seek out any of the 3C’s.

Personalization (who am I) is the method through which any number of tools can be applied to matching the context to the 3C’s. It is one way in which the question “what is my intent” can be communicated by the user and/or learned by the system. Personalization is the information needed in order to begin to under stand the context. Vertical search is one tool through through which this link might occur.

Now how do you get all of this into a workable formula? No idea. But thanks to Sramana at least I’m thinking about it