Internet came to town a decade ago and change our lives forever. Not only did it change the way we did business but it changed the way we lived life. Email became our primary communication tool and web URL became the primary way to disseminate information. It was OK if you did not have a physical office address but is was not OK if your business card did not carry a URL.
Web 2.0 is once again re-defining our lives. It promises to be bigger and have a more significant impact on us than Web 1.0. If Web1.0 was driven largely by Internet connectivity and PCs, Web 2.0 will be driven by the mobile telephony and Social Networking Sites( SNS).
To give an example of the power of this lethal combination of SNS and mobile phone savour the following examples
- Imagine you area at a conference where there are another 100 delegates like yourself. May be there are some people you know, but there is a larger number of people you don’t know. You pull out your cell phone, take up a position at a vantage point and take a picture of the audience. Your cell phone software very quickly connects to servers to leading SNS sites, does image mapping , and in just about no time, the picture reappears on your cell phone, except that this time it has been tagged by names of the all the people in the audience with their designations and company names. You click on a name, and that persons profile is right there before you. Now you the faces that you need to catch up with during the tea break!
Each one of us are now fully “identifiable” at any point of time. It is almost like having a name tag pinned to your Tshirt pocket at all times. Even if one wants to remain anonymous, this combination of a cell phone + SNS sites, ensures that there is no place to hide….not anymore
Let us look at another example of how this cell phone +SNS combination is going to transform our decision making process
- Imagine I am tourist who has come to Mumbai from Delhi. Here I am, at the Hanging Garden, enjoying the sight of Chowpatty. Now I wish to proceed for lunch. Once a time I would need to depend on a tourist guide book or the taxiwalla to guide me. Now, no more! I flash my cell phone, switch on the camera and hold it against a view of the Chowpatty landscape. I click a button asking for a listing of restaurants. Promptly all restaurants that are in focus in the camera appear tagged on the camera. Now I know that there is Pizza Hut and a Rajdhani and a Copper Chimney in my view. I click on a particular restaurant and I can see the menu card and the price list. I click on yet another button and I can see recommendations. Best of all, I can specifically see recommendations made by people who are known to me. Technology needs to connect the restaurant website to the website that carries recommendations to my Facebook page…and I can see exactly which of my friends have made what recommendations for a particular restaurant. So then who decides where I eat ? No longer the tourist guide book and no longer the taxiwalla. It is my friends who are helping me decide where I eat.