Back in the day when the newly emerging Internet marketing environment was rumored, there were many theories on what all would be involved. We heard about ‘social networking’ rather than forums and ‘interactive’ sites rather than just blogs. Sounded like more chat clients with live responses for consumers and more online advertising mediums with ‘feeds’, ‘hubs’ and ‘lenses’ rather than just article marketing directories.
Sure PCs were getting bigger and faster all along so there didn’t seem to be any difference one could attribute to ‘Web 2.0’, although there were stories about ‘web PCs’ – and then we got the ‘clouds’ which fit together nicely with PCs that don’t do anything but connect to the Internet and hence do not need storage capacity.
At the same time, increasingly everybody walking down the street was talking on the phone; people shouldn’t but did start texting while driving. (and they had thought applying mascara while driving was dangerous) – look out for both the phone talkers and the texters when you are driving. Give them another minute to react since they are busy and often appear to be elsewhere.
Lots of new ‘toys’ like ipods, ipads, tablets, etc. At first it seemed like people would use them for personal business like banking, shopping and playing games. However, it never occurred to many of us that it was all related to that new world Internet marketers were calling ‘Web 2.0’and way before we found out that as far as the Internet and the future, that it would obviously lie in those little electronic gadgets, which would be the computers of choice today.
Ironic we started learning there would be an HTML version 5 emerging, and knew there were going to be big changes coming down that road too. HTML and PHP are the languages that most websites are built with and not sure if ironic or not but HTML 5 appears that it will lend itself well to the new ‘mobile’ formats used on the new e-gadgets. Obviously scaling everything down from the giant screens to the really personal size screens on phones, ipads and tablets.
So this Web 2.0 phenomenon was far greater and far reaching than most people imagined. So much so that PC sales have taken a nose dive and already in just a short time, the gadgets are in the majority as far as the method that people use to surf the net! There is much work to be done for most Internet marketing businesses and they will be forced to make their sites more friendly to this new mass of traffic if they want to stay in business. Who would ever dream only your Grandma would use the ‘old fashioned’ computer PC before the end of the first few decades of the new millennium Y2K?
It’s a bit shocking – we all knew technology was moving us fast into the future, but it appears to have picked up momentum quite a bit and has gone into overdrive. Internet marketers need to get in gear and figure out the best way to get mobilized – literally!
