Digital Vertigo by Andrew Keen - Chapter 1

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ANDREW KEEN

of dollars of investment and revenue, and countless new apps incorporating all the personal data of the hundreds of millions of people on the social web. This personal data, what Google’s Bradley Horowitz euphemistically calls putting “people first,” is the core ingredient, the revolutionary fuel, powering the Web 3.0 economy. But the Internet is radically changing too, its architecture reflecting the new social dial tone for the twenty-first century. Everything on the Web—from its infrastructure to its navigation to its entertainment to its commerce to its communications—is going social. John Doerr is right. Today’s Web 3.0 revolution, this Internet of people, is indeed the third great wave of technological innovation, as profound as the invention of both the personal computer and the Worldwide Web itself. The Internet’s business infrastructure, its core architecture, is getting a major social overhaul—so that every technology platform and ser vice is shifting from a Web 2.0 to the Web 3.0 model. Internet browsers, search engines and email services—the trinity of technologies that shape our daily Internet use—are becoming social. Everyone in Silicon Valley, it seems, is going into the business of eliminating loneliness. To compete with Google’s SPYW, there are now Facebook-powered “liked results” from Microsoft’s Bing search engine,114 as well as the Greplin and Blekko search engines and a “people” search engine from PeekYou that has already indexed the records of over 250 million people. There are social Internet browsers from Rockmelt and Firefox, and social updating from Meebo’s increasingly ubiquitous MiniBar messenger. There is social email from Gmail’s People Widget, Microsoft Outlook’s Social Connector and from start-ups like Xobni and Rapportive for old fogies like myself who are still relying on archaic email.115 It’s not just email. All online communications—from video to audio to text messaging to microblogging—is going social. There are real-time social -1—

video platforms from Socialcam, Showyou, SocialEyes, Tout and from Air-

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time, a start-up founded by the real Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, the co-

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