akashic-rik:

Just posted to Facebook:
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#1 Reason Twitter will win you over:

= Full Facebook functionality

with fully customizable third-party interfaces. =

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In fact, “Hey web-designers!”—that’s Web 3.0 right there, starting right now:

• Dynamic Twitter clients

(Old school “passive web browsers” are on their way out. Standardize for anytime/anywhere dynamic embedding of photos/YouTube etc, and the next wave is here. No more URLs - just drag and drop.)
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What I mean in plain language:

Many Facebook users don’t understand what Twitter has to offer them in terms of a pleasant social networking experience. Really they just have no idea what Twitter is.

They can’t see from the outside what we twitterers know… that “Twitter.com” is not “the Twitter experience”. Though you have to start somewhere, you don’t get the Twitter-experience staring at your little stream of unclever friends hoping it will get interesting. Twitter is about the connections you make. The twitter experience comes from knowing who to follow, who to block, and following their links to more interesting people and their stuff. More recently, we see Twitter becoming even more about sharing thoughts and media through Twitpics, Twitwalls, Tumblrs, etc… And the biggest aid to the Twitter experience is your Twitter client.

So far, Twitter clients (TweetDeck, Tweetie, iTweet, etc.) are hardly more than customizations of “the feed”. But it’s in the evolution of these clients where I see the emergence of Web 3.0.

“Web 2.0” was the move to the XML/CSS paradigm that empowered web consumers with the ability to easily customize their own web presence. It was the end of “hard coded” web content, and the move towards using newsfeeds to dynamically update web content. With Web 2.0, anyone could quickly customize their web presence to their liking, and easily update their content. Would-be netizens are no longer excluded based on their programming skills. While helpful, it’s no longer essential.

As I start looking around at the kinds of things my new Twitter pals are posting… I’m seeing “Evolution of the Twitter experience” as the next great tidal wave. Facebook is the warm-up. Now that everyone is sucked in and gotten used to the no-frills “status update” meme, Twitter and its cohort lead us into the realm of massively-participatory social computing.

As I said before, those who haven’t immersed themselves in the Twitter experience don’t realize that it’s much more than a stream of text. But I bet many twitterers have never considered that with a few tweaks, the Twittersphere is just like Facebook — but radically decentralized!

Facebook has always annoyed me that it locks you into this very boring interface. For that matter, it locks you into a lot of things. But behind the scenes, it’s just like Twitter — it’s just a stream of status updates, some of which include links to photos and videos. Because Facebook controls the interface, it can give you a nice experience with photos and videos embedded right into the updates. But it often comes with the annoyance of having to track down the URLs and embed codes, which of course sometimes don’t work, so this feature always seems be in beta. And as for music — which was and still is a huge attraction for MySpace users — No-can-do in Facebook.

What if your Twitter client could automatically display all those videos, photos, songs, blog entries, and other external links right in the client interface….? How quickly do you think Facebook users will make the switch? With interface programmers competing, imagine all the varieties of “Facebook-like” experiences you could have… even running at the same time like I do with iTweet, Tweetie, and Twitter.com.

For all I know, this is already happening. It’s not hard to strip a Twitpic link from a tweet and display it, so if it’s not already happening, it can’t be more than a few months away.

But the real leap to Web 3.0 will come from dynamic auto-embedding. Embedding videos and photos and URLs into your blog post is still a hard-coded affair, that still often involves 20 year-old HTML-style code to embed a long-ass old-school URL. But as Twitter users well know, that process is shifting.

Twitterers don’t use long-ass URLs. They use a URL compresser like Bit.ly to turn a long URL into a short form like http://bit.ly/kqR7D. But can we do better? If a site can do that, why not hide the URL altogether?

Imagine this: A button on your client/browser pulls up YouTube. You browse the videos, and when you find one you want, you click “Post”. Not “Post to Facebook”, “Post to Twitter”, etc… just “Post”. You add your message, submit, and it automatically shows up in your friends’ video feeds with your caption attached. Goodbye URLs!

I believe this can be done right now, if YouTube wanted to do it. This is exactly what sites like Bit.ly or Digg already allow you to do with their “browser bookmarklet”, and existing Twitter clients are making this process more transparent as we speak.

We’re so very close, but not “Web 3.0”… yet. The switch I believe is this: When posting an embedded YouTube video no longer depends on YouTube having a “Post” button. The new wave will begin officially when a standard emerges to grab any web content whatsoever — posts, photos, videos, even pieces of text, cropped photos, clipped videos, and snipped music — and simply drop them into your “one stream to rule them all” as you see fit, within the browser, without ever turning a page, and without ever seeing “http” or “www”.

At that point, I believe a radical paradigm shift in the idea of web presence will emerge. The “home page” meme will be done and over. You’ll less-and-less be going to a single static page. Instead, you’ll be “tuning into” (in Twitter-parlance, “following”) multi-media streams, which you filter by the moment for topics of interest, within your filtered network of knowledgable trusted non-spammy “friends”. Instead of poking around a company’s help library for information, or going to Google to search for the bit of information you need, you’ll tune into and interact with a dynamic stream of pre-filtered consumers who are at this moment searching for the same thing… and go to their links… the ones that have already been voted as most helpful by people whose judgement you trust.

So as I see it, the next wave of web-programmers will, on one hand, be the public-at-large themselves, as they review and sort their incoming content into personally-satisfying text/media streams to share with friends. On the other hand, it’ll be an exciting time for behind-the-scenes programmers to perfect the open standards and protocols for sharing and tracking permissions/licensing, while improving the client-interfaces for quickly sorting and grabbing our favorite clips, and immediately re-sharing them into our ad-hoc “pick & tweet” personalized multimedia broadcasts.

“Ad-hoc” is a key word there, by the way. As Twitter users already know, these are not crazy futuristic ideas. We’re doing this right now. If we need to say something longer than 140 characters, we sign into a third-party ad-hoc account (with our Twitter password) and post it. Need to post a pic? Sign in with Twitter and post it. Of course once signed in to all of them… Just post whatever the heck you want. The only thing keeping it from being a seamless Infinitely-Better-than-Facebook experience is the interfaces. But honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if a dozen of them showed up for free download next week! Definitely looking forward to it.

-Rik Akashian