Trust Won, Trust Lost :: The End of Web 2.0 (From Vision to Reality)

What Actually Happened?

When the bubble burst in 2000/2001, a large number of Internet start-ups burst, leaving either carcasses or perhaps just plain nothing behind. At some point in time, the phrase “Web 2.0″ was coined to refer to those companies that survived.

However, after the phenomenal losses had devastated so much wealth and so much of the early promise of a world changed by the web, there was actually another phenomenon going on besides mere “survival”…

Trust Me

I will never forget one of my early thoughts about 9/11 (and the first days that followed) — it was that after so much devastation, it looked like the western civilization (and western media) were headed down a very slippery slope that would lead directly to war (and that was based on fear-mongering and similar psychological tactics used in broad strokes in order to mesmerize the population of the United States to blindly follow the CEO). It seems ironic that such blind faith in the leader did not completely translate into all realms of public life (remember the “whistle blower” meme?).

Likewise, a similar development was occurring online.

Google, the company that had applied methods previously referred to as “citation analysis” to the web, had over the preceding years become somewhat of the web’s “measuring stick” of trust. A user who typed “cheap flights” into Google’s search engine could be somewhat assured that among the top 10 results would be some of the more reputable organizations operating in this “space”. That is no longer the case — simply because today, there are far far many more organizations offering such services. The current top result, cheapflights.com, is an indication that Google’s search algorithm currently has little clue about which of these are “better” than the other (because there are hundreds, thousands or maybe tens of thousands — or more? — companies that are, according to Google’s algorithmic view, equally reputable).

Nonetheless: the algorithm seemed to “work” in 2001. And in 2002, and  in 2003 also (which is strange, considering — as I indicated above — such citation algorithms had been in use for close to half a century already… and it had become widely recognized that they are actually follies: they do not provide any information about relevance, and it was widely experienced — for several decades already — how such results had been “manipulated” in academic circles). When Google started its IPO plans in 2004, it became clear to me that they had apparently fooled enough people into thinking they had discovered the “wisdom algorithm” — even though in academia these methods had been scoffed at and held in disdain for many years already. In other words: Google was cashing out “while the getting was good”.

I do admit that I was amazed at the level of naiveté among the investor community — the number of people who were willing to bid up the price of a share of Google stock (much like I was flabbergasted how people could vote for a leaders who had not only duped the citizens but who had also led their country so far astray).

At any rate, it seems that today many people across the globe believe that Google’s slogan is plausible — that the company can do no evil — and that despite cases of blatant censorship (e.g. the “miserable failure” case).

Your Guess is as Good as Mine

The grave situation is that currently, Google is treated like the Bible — and by analogy: The leaders of the company are comparable to the Pope. In fact, compared to Google, the Catholic Church seems very transparent. If that doesn’t shock you, then please read it again. Why? Because Google can (and does) change (”manipulate”) the code to return differing results over time — think of it this way: What if a democratic government changed its constitution daily, like you or I might put on a new pair of socks every day — is that a reliable basis on which to build a society? What if our clocks worked differently every day? Apparently, that is what Google is offering: An algorithm that works differently day by day.

In What We Trust

The problem is: trusting in one leader, one guide, one algorithm: that is simply too parochial — it’s not a strong foundation upon which to build an entire society. let alone many societies, each with multi-faceted subsets of those societies. And therefore users of the Internet have begun to branch out. One such “alternative guide” took form at digg.com (though in many ways slashdot.org was a predecessor to such a “voting” approach).  Another approach has been to build “friendships”, and consider the “most connected” to be the “thought leaders” (for example, the profiles on twitter.com with the most followers might be considered “authorities”).

But the question of authority (or authoritative information sources) begs the question: “authority — related to what?!? ” A couple years ago, you would hear alot of talk around the notion of “the wisdom of the crowds” or “the wisdom of the mobs”. But such undifferentiated “mass market” wisdom may be very superficial — surely I would not want a crowd of people to treat me if I had a heart attack: instead I would want a trained professional. Since such experts have acquired knowledge in their field of expertise, and since each such expertise has its own technical terminology (it’s own jargon), I think of communities of such experts in terms of the language they use (and also in terms of the language we use to refer to the problems / issues they attempt to solve. So, taking the example above. these are “doctors” (in particular “cardiologists”) and the issues they are concerned with include topics such as “heart attacks” (or “cardiac arrests” or something like that). This is what I refer to as the “wisdom of the language” — namely that we trust that when we say “happy” we mean happy; when we say “funny”, we mean funny (and so on)… and communities focused on “happy” or “funny” or “jokes” (or whatever) will tend to include “experts” on such topics (whether the topic is “jokes” or “heart bypass”).

Indeed, such communities are now forming across the Internet. Indeed: Digg.COM is one such community (though digg is not, “strictly speaking”, a natural language term — even if it is now used that way). But other such communities are also forming / have formed over the past several years. There are “books” communities, “pizza” communities, “movies” communities, “news” communities (remember the term “newsgroups”? — they’re closely related)….

How to Build Trust

With many such communities developing, how do we know which ones to trust? In the past, link-based search engines used to focus primarily on citation analysis of individual pages, but more and more, they are moving towards also using the “wisdom of the language” approach (as we saw above in the “cheap flights” example).

But what if the trust which people had in the traditional search engines is lost — what would the general population do? Would they stop using the Internet altogether? If so, what or who would they trust instead?

In my “humble” opinion, the currently most popular search engines — insofar as they are relying more and more on the “wisdom of the language” — are currently training the users of these engines in the basic principles of “wisdom of the language“… and as users learn to trust sites based on the significance of the name of the site (as the search engines do — that is, after all,  the basic principle of the “wisdom of the language“), will the traditional search engines eventually make themselves obsolete?

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How to Build Trust in an Online World that is Crumbling Apart