PhoCusWright FYI

Social Technology Ushers in New Era of Web

by Cathy Schetzina and Bob Offutt

The World Wide Web of the 1990s gave rise to a number of familiar "big brands" that kicked off the e-commerce revolution and made purchasing merchandise online -- from a new pair of shoes, to a complex, multi-component vacation -- commonplace. But the Internet has now entered a new phase of change, enabled by emerging technologies and collaborative social forces that are beginning to rival the big brand commercialization of the Internet.

The challenge and opportunity is to build business value with the best of both worlds, blending commercial and social networks to leverage the new technologies while providing the best end-user experience. The brave among travel companies have already begun implementing some of the new tools that will bring Travel 2.0 -- our industry's robust version of Web 2.0 -- to fruition.

Travel companies have been trying their luck at really simple syndication (RSS), user-generated content, community creation, off-the-browser tools, bots and gadgets, and even, with the beta launch of TripAdvisor's Inside Pages, wikis. Experimentation is still in its early stages, and much remains to be learned about how best to exploit the interaction with customers that these new technologies makes possible. Each traveler who posts or rates a trip itinerary, tags a photo or bookmarks a page is offering up invaluable information about his personal interests and travel styles. In concert, the choices of groups of Web users have much to teach about travelers' intuitive preferences for organizing and identifying information that is important to them.

In fact, the aspect of social networks that is most relevant to the commercial enterprise is the power they provide for participants to identify information -- and ultimately products -- of interest to them. Social surfers must be enabled to dictate and shape the content of their Web experience and be provided with tools that, based on their unique choices and associations, quickly draw the most relevant content out of the informational chaos of the existing Web. If Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a Semantic Web is in fact realized (years from now), these grassroots efforts to organize information may become obsolete -- but the social impulse that has inspired such efforts will remain. And, in the meantime, travel companies should be finding ways to harvest the power of social networks to fuel the next step in the evolution of online travel -- the Web itself.

Below are three areas of development to consider:

Folksonomies: In an ideal world, we would have a complete ontology of the information to be retrieved or searched online. Unfortunately, to date there has been no set of agreed-upon global standards for structuring the metadata that describes social network sites. Instead, the user community has developed a form of democratization in the development of metadata around social networking sites. Authors and readers tag content with descriptive keywords, creating a taxonomy of content dubbed folksonomies to reflect their associative, semi-structured nature.

Two examples of sites that leverage user-generated tags are delicious.com and flickr.com. Notably, both were acquired by Yahoo! in an acquisition sweep that has left the company well-positioned to become a major player in Travel 2.0.

Del.icio.us, a social bookmarks manager, allows users to organize and share collections of Web links and uses user-generated keywords as an organizational contruct. Flickr applies a similar approach to photo management and sharing, with users tagging photos as they are added to the site.

Tags provide a simple method of organizing information and, when incorporated into social networks, can play a powerful role in helping users identify relevant information -- a crucial element of the travel-planning process.

Online data transformation: An example of online data transformation is found at eurekster.com, which is a community-powered search engine that learns from its users what is most important. In this context, Eurekster looks like a social network search engine. It is in reality a bridge between the two commercial and social worlds.

The Eurekster search becomes refined over time as more users click relevant content -- in effect; it is a "learning" search engine that can be added to a local site using its "learned" behavior to bridge the metadata gap.

Visualization: Taking search one step further is the Touchgraph/Google visual browser (touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html), which presents an interesting view of potential interlinking between Web sites. Given a URL, the tool graphically shows the requested site and associated sites based on a Google search of the requested URL. It then expands to show the Google relationships of these sites. A more useful visual search engine that visually links sites and with related tags is Kartoo (kartoo.com). Kartoo returns visual search results and suggests related tags to help users refine their search.

These early efforts at search visualization are suggestive of the potential power of the convergence of social networks, user-generated tags and search. In travel, the potential power of social, user-directed search is immense.

While these more forward-looking social networking applications should be exploited in the long term, in the short term, travel companies should be laying the groundwork for building strong online communities of travelers and continuing to experiment broadly with the range of emerging tools available to them.

This next generation Web is being enabled by a plethora of new technologies and trends. The current evolutionary phase is characterized by a continual process of sorting out the winners from the losers, and travel companies must be equally zealous about launching novel Travel 2.0 efforts and evaluating them. Ultimately, the technologies that survive will do so because they generate business value, have strong social network support or both.

Let the games begin!

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