Saturday, December 15, 2007

Shouting Out a Web 4.0 Prediction

So here we are in the world of "Web 2.0"-- or maybe it's Web 3.0 by now, I don't even know. The main concept being that the internet has grown from a series of static sites to robust, interactive tools. Feedback, from a marketer's perspective, is probably the biggest thing going. You can see customer reviews, people talking about products on blogs, pay-per-click ads producing instant results, and many other web intricacies that show that customers can have an instant and widespread effect on how products are marketed.

My prediction now is that the web will become increasingly more sophisticated in how customers can affect performance of a site, sale of a product, and so on. I realized this just moments ago, in fact.

I was in my Yahoo Mail account. My cursor was at the top of the screen and I dragged it down to the middle to click on a message. But during the course of my drag, it crossed a banner ad that automatically expanded when rolled-over, thus blocking the message I was trying to click on. I inadvertently did this three times in a row. After the third instance, I yelled a loud, profanity-laced statement that was directed simultaneously at Yahoo, my computer, and the marketing industry in general for being so annoying at that moment.

And thus sprung the idea that yelling at your computer will, someday in the future, help deliver instant feedback to Yahoo and the advertiser, to let them both know that these kinds of ads are obnoxious to me, the consumer. It will be a beautiful combination of instant gratification on my part and a helpful tool to advertisers to understand what works in reaching consumers and what doesn't.

I look forward to that day when voice-interaction will be able to do all the work for me. That way I won't have to write a blog post about it and hope for a change... instead I'll just have to yell and I'll get what I want right away.

F- YEAH BABY!!!! WOOOHOOOO!!!!

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