We can not fail to notice-with everybody else - Time Magazine’s celebration of the participatory culture of Web 2.0. In their cover story ‘The person of the Year is You’, they underline how 2006 has not only been a year of humiliating US defeat in Iraq (+ a number of other geopolitical misses, like North Korea), but also the year in which the Web emerged not simply as a medium for pushing pay per view (as in the famous Aol-TimeWarner merger in 2000), but as a ‘tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter’. Time goes on to describe the success stories of YouTube and MySpace and propose that these present ‘an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding,not politician to politician, but great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person’ . Cute!

But Time says nothing of what most would consider the three most interesting developments in matters of Web 2.0. The first is 3-D web. The spectacular success of Second Life (and its emergence as a pioneering business field) suggests that the future of the Web might well be in more immersive environments (after all, sci fi writers have argued this for a long time, ever since Startrek began featuring a holodeck). Also, anyone who has tried will have noticed that the interactive environment of Second Life provides a far more engaging experience than what the Virtual Reality masks were able to give in 1995. Maybe the key to virtual reality lies in social interaction rather than neuroscience. (Financial Times has a brief piece on this, alerting investors that 3 D Web might be the next big thing- unfortunately the feature is for subscribers only).
Second, affinity markets. A number of services are arising where users can collect and organize information about goods, services and investment opportunities. This way, it becomes possible to ground economic decisions in other factors than price- like values, sympathies and affinity- in a systematic way. Ad RFID tagging and you can easily scan the wine bottles at your local shop to find out which have been produced by feminist wine growers, or which producers share your views on sustainable agriculture. Of course Actics is part of this. We provide a way for people to access information on the performance of organizations or other actors in relation to their particular values and affinities (see here for more on affinity markets).

Three, people, or at least kids are abandoning MySpace. Once it goes corporate its not fun anymore. This might seem like ordinary teenage trend-obsession, but it actually points to something deeper and more important. When companies rely on the autonomous productivity of users as a source of value, then most attempts to capture and valorize that productivity can also be resisted, or at least evaded. I write more on this below.