Web 3.0 is a lane, not a highway

Facebook was not the first web 2.0 company, but it was the one that took it mainstream to a global audience. Consumers’ digital lives would never be the same again. Whereas web 1.0 had enabled them to visit and read websites, much like a digital evolution of newspapers and magazines, Facebook enabled consumers to participate, to comment, upload photos, converse, etc. It was a total transformation of the internet and enabled much of the digital world in which we live now. But it did not mean the end of web 1.0. Indeed, 18 years after Facebook’s launch, web 1.0 is alive and well, with websites being an integral part of our everyday digital lives. Sure, many of those have adopted web 2.0 components, such as comment fields, but they are still fundamentally web 1.0. With all the hype, or even, post-hype of web 3.0, it is tempting to think that our entire future digital lives will be lived in VR glasses and on the blockchain. But the actual future will be more prosaic, with web 3.0 being another lane to the internet’s highway, rather than an entirely new road to replace the old one. And that is no bad thing, nor does it undermine the vast potential that web 3.0 has. Nonetheless, it does warrant a reassessment of just what role web 3.0 will play.

Image credit: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg

Many of you will be familiar with Gartner’s iconic hype cycle. The premise is brilliantly simple. When a new technology arrives, the world becomes obsessed with its transformative potential. The tech press builds it up, investors pour in money, and the world is awash with innovative new start-ups, from one-person passion projects to heavily funded companies with lavish booths at tech trade fairs and conferences. This is the peak of inflated expectations. Then, inevitably, the technology’s progress cannot keep pace with those elevated expectations. The tech press starts to turn, with stories emerging at an accelerating rate about failing start-ups and how they have overpromised and underdelivered. The image of well-funded Magic Leap’s AR prototype being the size of a backpack is a perfect example. As the hype turns into derision and doubt, the technology slips into the trough of disillusionment (which I always think sounds like a Radiohead album title). Sometimes this is the graveyard of new tech, but, most often, it is simply a recalibration. With the fierce gaze of the tech world no longer there, the new tech sector can start to grow at a more sustainable, organic pace. Eventually it will start to fulfil its true potential and steadily build up the slope of enlightenment, before fulfilling its original promise. 

This is the path that most new tech is destined to follow. This is because, when thinking about new technology, it is easy to underestimate the near-term potential but overestimate the long-term potential. And this is due to humans adopting new tech in depressingly predictable ways. The early adopters (who are most often also the ones who first make the new tech) can see the potential and adopt immediately, despite all of its bugs and teething problems. It is only when the tech is ready for primetime that early followers come on board, eventually opening up adoption from the mainstream and even the tech-hesitant laggards.

Web 3.0 is now shifting from the inflated peak to the trough. Just look at all of the stories about undersold NFT auctions, falling crypto prices, etc. But we have been here before, many times, even in recent years. Just think about how VR and 3D printers were hyped to change the world. Once the hype subsided, both sectors started to build sustainable futures.

With this considered there are four major factors that will define the future of web 3.0:

• Recalibration: Web 3.0 is neither dead nor dying – it is recalibrating. Will there be a wave of failed start-ups and investors losing money? Yes. But that is part of a long-proven pattern.
• Realism: We need to be realistic about what web 3.0 will be when it does finally reach the slope of enlightenment. Yes, it will change our digital lives, but it will not be all of our digital lives. Just like web 2.0, it will run alongside the rest of the internet. Will it replace some of it? Yes – but not all of it. Instead, the internet highway will have a third, new lane.
• User interface: Web 3.0 is still missing a crucial component: a user interface. Facebook succeeded not because it was a set of revolutionary protocols, but because it was a transformative user experience, allowing consumers to create, share and participate. Web 3.0 needs its interface. We have the building materials for web 3.0 but we do not have the building. Heck, you could argue that we do not yet even have the architectural plans.
• Focus: Web 3.0’s scope and remit are so vast that, in truth, it represents a collection of entirely different propositions that may have an underlying technology link but, to consumers, are entirely separate. Fortnite and Ethereum are as far apart as consumer experiences as a football and a credit card are. An overdependence on reaching for commonality may help get investors on board, but it makes it harder to build the necessarily diverse consumer messages if widespread adoption is to ever happen.

Web 3.0 will change the internet, but it will need to change itself first.

Facebook is about to disrupt itself out of existence…again

Facebook’s rebranding to Meta can be interpreted in many ways. It can be seen as: following Google / Alphabet’s lead in communicating a new chapter in its business; putting distance between the company and its most well-known app, ahead of it beginning to decline; shifting the story away from whistleblower and ethics narratives; signalling a major strategic reboot. It is, of course, a combination of all of the above. In fact, Facebook is perhaps the most successful example of a global tech company that is embracing Clayton Christensen’s disruption innovation theory. Namely, that in order to compete in a new market, you have to radically change what you do, how you do it, and, crucially, your values. Facebook already went through this entire cycle when it pivoted towards messaging apps, and now it is about to do it all over again.

Strategy repeating itself?

Facebook’s Meta shift has a neat symmetry with its messaging app strategy – coming nearly ten years to the day after the app store launch of Facebook Messenger. When Facebook launched in 2004, the social media world was dominated by highly linear, desktop experiences, like MySpace and GeoCities. Facebook moved the needle, but it was a product of its time and generation. By the turn of the following decade, the world was changing, and with it cane a new generation of mobile-centric consumers – an opportunity that Evan Spiegel and Co seized, with the launch of Snapchat in 2011. As the dominant social platform, Facebook could easily have played it safe, developing a series of ‘good enough’, sustaining innovations to try to keep one step ahead of the noisy, but comparatively tiny, mobile-centric competition. Instead, it did something that big established companies rarely do – it decided to compete head on with it itself. Facebook decided to disrupt itself before the competition did.

Textbook Christensen

Facebook’s messaging app strategy was textbook Christensen. To really drive transformative change, you need to change your entire company and values, which is almost always best achieved by either acquiring companies or launching new divisions, so that you can learn to think and behave differently. After all, as a company, you have to respond to dramatic change in a dramatic fashion, because, up until now, your established way of doing things has resulted in you falling behind. So, in 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion (to initially be run as a separate entity), and then WhatsApp in 2014 for $19.3 billion. Facebook is now the biggest messaging app company on the planet, though the world has changed so much, these apps are often not even called messaging apps anymore. They are simply social apps. That is the scale of the transformation that Facebook achieved, and the metaverse is next.

Ramifications

If Facebook Meta follows a similar path for its metaverse strategy as it did for messaging apps, then a couple of major acquisitions will follow. It would be the wise move to do so, and hopefully Meta’s commitment to spending $10 billion on the metaverse does not reflect the hubris of a company that now thinks it is so good that it can do everything itself. If it is, then the odds are that Meta will not be the key metaverse player. But, if Meta does follow the Christensen playbook and become the central force of the metaverse, then there some major permutations, and even responsibilities, for Meta:

• If the metaverse becomes the future of social then, unless there is some kind of cultural reset, all of the negative, dark sides of social will simply migrate over and become magnified. Imagine how psychologically damaging getting trolled and abused in virtual reality could be, especially for impressionable, younger people
  
• The filter bubbles formed in two-dimensional social media already enable false narratives, like QAnon, to feel entirely real. Imagine just how much more real false narratives could feel in immersive environments

The immersive web

Societal risks and responsibilities aside, the shift to the metaverse represents a broader paradigm shift in digital entertainment and connectivity. MIDiA terms this as the Immersive Web, and, in fact, Facebook’s Meta announcement is a neat validation of the title of our 2021 Predictions report: ‘The Year of the Immersive Web’. Whether lightening can strike twice for Meta remains to be seen, but if it follows its 2011-2014 blueprint, then it has to be in with a shout of being the dominant metaverse player. Metaverses, though, are still heavily rooted in games, and while Meta is making a big bet on their future existing outside of games, there is no doubt that some gaming dynamics and experiences will still be part of what the future of metaverses are. The question is whether that means that the addressable audience is going to be narrower than it was for messaging apps, at least within a meaningful time frame (e.g., 5-10 years)? If not, then the risk is that Meta could end up winning the wrong war and building the future of games, instead of the future of social.