All Things Digital

If the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 are “groundbreaking” Facebook widgets, easy access to dumb capital and haughty start-ups dangerously over-leveraged on other companies’ assets what (or who) will define the Web 3.0 epoch?

The answer’s obvious isn’t it? Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

Why? Because he says so, that’s why.

Speaking at the company’s DreamForce Europe event, Benioff said that Web 3.0 will be the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) era. A fascinating definition–convenient too, since this is precisely the sort of business Salesforce.com (CRM) is in. “We think Web 3.0 is now upon us. It’s the era of platforms,” said Benioff. “New platforms are coming right out of the cloud. It’s time to make a choice. You can continue to build your applications in the software model or you can move your applications to the new model of cloud computing. There is a new way to build your applications.”

So Web 3.0 is not, as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, once suggested, the semantic Web–”day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives handled by machines talking to machines.” Rather, it’s Web 2.0 with another 1.0’s worth of marketing BS. The “Whatever-I-Say-It-Is Web”–the “Al Franken Decade” of the Internet age.

Well, the “me” decade is almost over, and good riddance, and far as I’m concerned. … That’s right. I believe we’re entering what I like to call the Al Franken Decade. Oh, for me, Al Franken, the ’80s will be pretty much the same as the ’70s. I’ll still be thinking of me, Al Franken. But for you, you’ll be thinking more about how things affect me, Al Franken. When you see a news report, you’ll be thinking, ‘I wonder what Al Franken thinks about this thing?’, ‘I wonder how this inflation thing is hurting Al Franken?’ And you women will be thinking, ‘What can I wear that will please Al Franken?’, or ‘What can I not wear?’ You know, I know a lot of you out there are thinking, ‘Why Al Franken?’ Well, because I thought of it, and I’m on TV, so I’ve already gotten the jump on you.”

LinkedIn, Facebook’s dour older brother, joined Google’s OpenSocial development platform today, announcing the Intelligent Application Platform–a service that will open the social-networking site to third-party software developers.

Like the Facebook Platform, “InApps” allows developers to create productivity applications for LinkedIn or to port some of the site’s features to outside Web sites. But unlike Facebook, these widgets must be approved by LinkedIn before they’re deployed.

Clearly, the company has no intention of offering users the chance to send electronic hamburgers to each other, or pop their zits. “What we are trying to do is make professionals more productive by making them able to find one another, learn more about each other and communicate efficiently with each other,” LinkedIn Chief Executive Dan Nye told Reuters. “It’s not a place where you waste two hours of your time trying to find a date.”

Launching in concert with InApps are a new look and a number of new features designed to make the site more interactive. Among them: a news feed customized by the company and the industry in which a user works and an interesting BusinessWeek application that lets you see how you’re connected through LinkedIn to people and companies mentioned in its articles. With such upgrades, LinkedIn–which claims 17 million registered users globally and about 5 million unique per month–hopes to dominate the business of business networking. Personal networking and self-expression, it seems to be saying, are best left to others.

But is it reasonable to think that people will continue to maintain two social-networking profiles–one for their personal life and another for their professional life? LinkedIn CEO Nye says it is, especially given the value proposition LinkedIn offers its users. “…People have profiles on both services,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But on LinkedIn, you’re not going to get poked, there’s no zombies and you’re not going to share your music list. … Now when someone says, ‘Hey, let’s go down and meet at Starbucks,’ you don’t have to ask five people if they’re Tom.”

Apparently the vainglory from which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to suffer is communicable and spreading rapidly throughout the social network’s developer community.

Encouraged by reports that Microsoft is considering a $500 million investment that would value Facebook at up to $15 billion, some software engineers are assigning hyperbolic valuations to the Facebook widgets they’ve developed, though the business models on which they’re based are even more unproven than those of Facebook itself.

To wit, RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda, who’s convinced his Super Wall widget, an enhanced version of Facebook’s Wall bulletin board, is guaranteed a not-at-all-widget-sized financial windfall. “If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million, I’d say, ‘Forget it,’ ” Tokuda told the New York Times of his asking price for Super Wall. “This is a completely new channel of delivering content to users and letting them communicate. Owning that over the long stretch can be worth a lot.”

No. Owning the “users” over the long stretch might be worth something. That’s why Facebook is being given these frothy valuations. Owning a widget easily replicated by the company that owns those users? If you get $10 million for that, you’re luckier than Zuckerberg.

In its latest attempt to organize the world’s information and make it universally AdSensible (har-de-har-har), Google is introducing a rich-media, dynamic ad widget. Google Gadgets, as the company calls them, are essentially content-heavy interactive ads tricked out with the contextual targeting capabilities of Google’s AdSense network. “Web sites within Web sites,” as Google explains.

Or rather promotional Web sites within Web sites. Imagine Facebook’s “Top Friends” widget if it were instead filled with a list of, say, Clorox products. “Consumers are pulling in content from multiple sources,” said Christian Oestlien, the Google product manager overseeing the Gadgets program. “It is what we are calling the componentization of the Web. The Web is sort of breaking apart into smaller pieces.”

The announcement of this new ad avail is a timely one. According to online measurement company comScore, more than 48% of Internet users in the United States–over 87 million people–use widgets. That’s the sort of audience metric marketers swoon over. And Google knows this all too well, although apparently it’s a proconsumer initiative and not a money-making one when viewed through its “don’t-be-evil” lens. Said Oestlien, “We’re not trying to monetize every single event that happens in a creative, [we want advertisers] to make rich creative ads that are really useful to the end user.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say today was May 25, 1999. Yesterday, the social-networking outfit introduced Facebook Platform, a new means for developers to build on top of Facebook’s APIs, at the Facebook f8 developer event in San Francisco. And looking over press coverage of the announcement today, you’d think it was the late ’90s and Six Degrees had made Flooz its official currency and offered free Kozmo.com deliveries to all its members.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls this latest version of the service a “social utility.” “Until now, social networks have been closed platforms,” Zuckerberg said in his event keynote. “Today, we’re going to end that. With this evolution of Facebook Platform, any developer worldwide can build full social applications on top of the social graph, inside of Facebook. The social graph is changing the way the world works. We are at a time in history when more information is available and people are more connected than they ever have been before, and the social graph is at the center of that.”

Social applications. The social graph. Sounds damn impressive, doesn’t it? But essentially, what Zuckerberg’s talking about is widgets. That’s right, Facebook has partnered with a bunch of other companies that are going to make widgets. Now, to be fair, that is interesting. As Gigaom’s Liz Gannes explains, Facebook seems to be attempting to become the online social operating system.

Which is all well and good, but will developers really want to use it? “What any entrepreneur contemplating building apps on Facebook’s new so-called ‘operating system’ needs to realize [is] that the evil genius of Zuckerberg’s Facebook-OS plan is that, well, it leaves him owning the operating system,” Owen Thomas writes in Business 2.0. “Is anyone here old enough to remember Microsoft in the 1990s? If you create a genuinely compelling service, why should you have to rent space on Facebook for it? That’s the question coders should ask themselves before they trip over themselves to start building apps for Zuckerberg’s social-network empire. As I’ve pointed out, distribution is a real challenge for Web start-ups–but I’m not sure that handing your users over to Facebook is such a smart shortcut.”