Fred Wilson (A_VC) Is writing about the "implicit web", where everything we do on the web is tracked and we have access to all of our historical information to improve our future actions. You can read his article here or see the section below, but I'll say this for why the concept is significant to me. A lot of the Web 2.0 world revolves around social communities and information sharing. Something like 30Boxes is great as a social calendar, Digg is great, Del.icio.us is great, but since I'm basically the only person I know using most of these things, and I don't tap in often to the community at large, I'm not generating a great deal of benefit from them. Fred Wilson's concept of the explicit web generates benefit from the actions I take myself, and can generate value from. It's about aggregating information that it takes in when I listen to music in ten different ways, look at pictures on ten different sides, read news in millions of places, and utilizes my information pool overall to enhance my experiences. This would be a huge benefit to someone who utilizes the web heavily but doesn't do it in a large communal sense.
Fred Wilson: "the explicit web is all about the value that will accrue to an
Internet user when their every action is tracked, recorded, and used to
provide value back to that user. There is also a second order play when
that clickstream activity is shared with the user's permission with
everyone else.
Fred Wilson: "the explicit web is all about the value that will accrue to an
Internet user when their every action is tracked, recorded, and used to
provide value back to that user. There is also a second order play when
that clickstream activity is shared with the user's permission with
everyone else.
My favorite example, which I used in that original myware post, is
last.fm. I give last.fm the permission to capture all my iTunes
listens. I publish that data on my blog (left sidebar) and the data is
also published on my last.fm profile page.
I can go back and look at the what I listened to most last week, month,
year, etc. But more importantly, I can use the data about what I am
listening to currently to surface new recommendations via musical
neighbors. And because I share all that data with the entire network,
my listens inform others in their search for new music."
