Having introduced the first criteria of 4+1 to measure 2.0 I would like to continue this series today with the second part. The essence of the second criteria is the following:
The Future-Arrived´ness describes extreme differences in the structures of distribution of the future. It describes the fact that the future is often already out there but not yet distributed evenly (only some Geeks know it = small peak somewhere)
What does this mean? If we want to evaluate the freshness of a new application popping up on the horizon, we need to ask ourselves, how much people already know about this thing? Especially who knows about this new thing? If our answer is something like: „Wow!“, it seems as if nobody else then me knows about this, whoever I ask, than the knowledge about this new application is not yet widespread available – a sure sign that you belong to the ones who’ve seen it first. You gained a glimpse on the future and this future is far from having arrived everywhere.
Future-arrived’ness is a strong sign for a possible 2.0 impact. Often these unknown applications are just the rising stars of tomorrow and the less people had the chance to evaluate the idea of this new app, the higher the chance that this application will have an impact on the web-culture.
This idea of future-arrived’ness is not very new though. Other industries like e.g. Music- & Fashion-Business have their well known Trendscouts which are just on the road out there to get a glimpse on the next hot beats and dance moves or the latest fresh and unknown fashion style. To evaluate some new application or service we need some trendscout-abilities. At least we need to know some people which we could ask if they know about this new webservice or application we’ve just discovered five minutes ago. The less of your peers know anything about it, the higher the probability of some direct hit for a candidate who has not yet arrived in the future.
Why do I blog this? I just want to continue my series and then I had one day off from work which gave me some time to write this new entry. And it made a lot of fun to me. The criteria takes btw a huge share of a quote which is attributed to William Gibson and which i found to be in the original :“The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.“ Perhaps e.g. teensintech.com will become such a new Trendscout who knows…
Actually, Yahoo has bought del.icio.us as a kind of geekish Trendscout-Community. They use the service to monitor trends and to improve the search results of their search engine. Mining the data from some collaborative bookmarking and social news services (Digg would be another obvious choice) could give you a good quantitative approximation of the FA-value. Throw in a few leading edge bloggers and data from technorati in the data mimx for each area you want to monitor and there you go.
When they bought delicious in December 2005 they sure were in need for some trendscout – or just yahoo.licious. Simply buying a trendscout is one solution. Having bought flickr and delicious yahoo has a vast amount of access on „tagged content“ or one huge function for measuring future-arrived’ness actually. But as far as I know (afaik) google is already experimenting with digg.com-like features.