With the people old enough to remember Web 2.0 now dying off because of old age, and with Web 8.0 now beginning to kick in, I am still amazed by how much has changed since then:
1. We take for granted that we don’t have to work for a living. But for our grandfathers, life wasn’t so easy. Believe it or not, back in the bad old days you actually had to make something, and then find a “buyer”, and “sell” it at a “profit”. No longer. Thanks to the “Long Tail”, paying customers now magically spring out of nowhere and give you money, even if you don’t have a product or service.
2. In Web 2.0, owning slaves was still considered a bad thing, and was illegal. Imagine! It wasn’t really till Web 4.0 and 5.0 came along that everybody [i.e. not just the folk living around Silicon Valley] finally wised up about living in a “Startup Economy”.
3. In Web 2.0, producers had to advertise to customers. Then along came the “Intention Economy” where customers now must advertise to producers. Or else. We know where you live.
4. In Web 2.0, you actually met people and had sex with their… BODIES. Flabby, wrinkly, smelly, fleshy things, not one bit like their avatars. Yuck. Disgusting. Foul.
5. In Web 2.0, people didn’t serve long prison sentences for not reading Techmeme. Barbaric!
6. In Web 2.0 they had these things called newspapers. Not only were they read by an unbelievably tiny audience [e.g. a few hundred thousand people!], they employed vast, expensive armies of people to create non-user generated content. Yes, people were actually paid MONEY to create content! Can you believe it? This is so VASTLY different to what happens today, where even the smallest, humblest, modest of “Mommy Blogs” is read by tens of millions of people on a daily basis, ever since the immortal Technorati first managed to fix their bugs.
