Description: Fanpop is a brand-new social networking site that looks to have an impressive growth rate.  Fanpop’s Alexa chart is almost vertical despite having just been launched at the beginning of August, a chart that looks an awful lot like Facebook’s did early on. It’ll be interesting to see if they can keep it up.   The site is squarely aimed at a younger audience interested in fandom subjects of all kinds including celebrities, news, trivia, and much more.  The thing that struck me most positively about Fanpop is that it’s startlingly well designed and easy-to-use.  This is one of the essential ingredients for making a site maximally usable to users from all walks of life.  Ease of use also sustains viral propagation.  The sign up process smoothly walks you through an impressively simple, yet multistep process that makes the effort of signing up and creating your own Fanpop "spot" one of the best examples of the Lazy Registration pattern that I’ve yet seen.  Lots of Web 2.0 best practices abound on Fanpop and its traffic stats show it, including the top 100 posts of the day right on the main page.

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Description: I’ve been tracking last.fm for a while and many of you will be quite familiar with it.  Recently entering the top 500 sites on the entire Internet, last.fm’s product has become progressively slicker and smoother in recent months.  At its core, Last.fm is an online radio station with a compulsive social dimension. Really, to even call it an online radio station is to do it a major disservice. Their music streaming application will "scrobble" up information about the tracks you play in the music player on your PC and then use this information to carefully tailor music selections for you. It’s very Web 2.0-like in that the more you use the service the better it gets.  Like the other sites profiled here, last.fm seems to be growing steadily, its recent growth very likely having to do with some of the social sharing tools they make available to make your personal musical data available on MySpace, LiveJournal, and others.  This of course spreads awareness of last.fm virally on the major social networks.

One things I was surprised to see was the number of fairly well trafficked social networking sites, but a great many of them have fairly static or dropping traffic patterns.  So, in the spirit of Web 2.0, please submit your favorite ones below if you genuinely think they have breakout promise in the next year….

But the truth of the matter is that just about any interaction with the Web at all generates new content of use to someone else (the so-called Database of Intentions ) and so that means frankly, if you're currently using the Web today even just to surf, you've become an integral part of this.  "This" being a new generation of openness, sharing, and community powered by the Web that some think may be recognized in hindsight as breaking down important cultural barriers and institutions in a very similar fashion as what happened in the 1960's.  True, it often doesn't seem like a revolution to us that see it growing bit and bit every day, but taken as a whole, there's now little doubt that the Web has become the most powerful, egalatarian, and knowledge rich platform in human history.  Rapid evolution appears to have accelerated into a sort of revolution.

The Person of the Year cover story appears with the tagline that "in 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. The cover story's lead author Lev Grossman then starts off with some fairly inspired prose after noting that there are still serious problems in the word which aregrowing in conjunction with this apparent technological Utopia, writing:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The cynical among us will find some of Lev's analysis to be starry-eyed and excessively optimistic, but calling out Web 2.0 by name, the Person of the Year cover story makes careful note that the mass participation we're witnessing on a grand scale on the Internet cuts both ways:

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But the lead story is just the beginning and Time has prepared an extravaganza of supporting material and documention in the form of fourteen separate stories that range across the Web 2.0 terrain covering subjects from online virtual worlds such as Second Life to an article titled in near purple prose fashion: "The Beast With a Billion Eyes -  On the Web, anyone with a digital camera has the power to change history."

None of this however is likely to please most of us who have lived through the year of Web 2.0, as 2006 undoubtedly was its big break with the term making the covers of major media properties like Newsweek and The Economist .  In terms of the blogosphere, the self-appointed contributors that are making some of this this happen, the commentary on Time's choice covered the spectrum: Jeff Jarvis agreed with most of what they wrote, just requested that they turn down the volume a bit.  Nick Carr took it surprisingly easy on the article, though he's long since posted his opinions of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.  Paul Kedrosky came in as one of harshest critics of the story series and accused it of being a blatent cop-out, what with more important issues existing elsewhere in the world needing to be highlighted. With this altter bit I would suggest that the printing press didn't get much credit at the time but it's impact was practically profound and beneficial when looking back several hundred years.

In reality, the Web as it exists today with sites like MySpace and YouTube which eagerly offer anyone who wants it an essentially permanent, scalable "channel" of their very own on the Internet, makes it possible for anyone with great — or at least interesting — ideas to reach the over 1 billion users that presently comprise the Web.  Never before in history has access to the largest audience of users in the world been essentially free other than the personal time it takes to contribute.  The long-term of effects of this will no doubt be as unpredictable as they will be significant as the control over information and content becomes relentlessly decentralized.  The Web is essentially a system without an owner, a platform that is under no one's control, though anyone is free to built a new platform on top of that.  Companies have had varying success in doing just that but the design patterns and business models for making the Web work best are at least beginning to be understood (aka Web 2.0).  But in the end, control is shifting to the edge of the Internet instead of the center and it's not likely to shift direction without extremely potent motivation.

The aftershocks of all this (the shift of control, pervasive ability of anyone to trigger inflection points, etc) have sometimes been called Social Computing, and it will be long in unfolding.  Companies and organizations that continually hand over more non-essential control to their employees, customers, and suppliers will almost certain be the big winners here.  We have plenty of examples to cite already.  The sudden pervasiveness of the two-way, participatory sites and tools powered by network effects and feedback loops have quickly remade the online landscape and Time has decided it is as big an event at least as it famously did in the 1980s by making the personal computer Person of the Year.  I would wager however, the Web 2.0 is probably a more significant event by a good margin that even the PC was.  Although the precise definition of Web 2.0continues to evolve, the fundamental effect, the harnessing of collective intelligence is the one that has the genuine potential to fundamentally remake our cultures, societies, businesses and even, as Lev Grossman states, "change the way we change the world.

What do you think?  Is Web 2.0 evolution or revolution?  Why?

Of course, creating participatory, two-way political communities on the Web is nothing new to politcs. In fact, as the 2008 presidential campaign ramps up, expect to see more of this as partisan and non-partisan political groups attempt to get people to participate and self-organize in local and national election processes.  Yet influential folks in the world of social software, like Clay Shirky, seem to think that things like Deanspace, one of the success stories of the last election cycle, ultimately didn’t have any real effect.  With online communities and the tools to support them getting better, this time might be different however.  It will be interesting to see how well Wales does with Campaigns Wikia, particularly since he does have the track record for creating successful audiences around his wiki creations.

In fact, in my recent explorations of why certain Web 2.0 sites grow so quickly, I talk about how they exploit the incredible power of network effects by harnessing ther users’ collective intelligence.  My concern primarily with Campaigns Wikia is that wikis generally do not have a sufficient positive feedback loop to create the kind of viral growth that will make much difference on the national stage.  It’ll be intriguing to see what Campaigns Wikia does to trigger the necessary audience ramp up and sustained participation.

What will also be fascinating to track is whether Web 2.0’s infamous inversion of control, known increasingly for its ability to upend traditional hierarchical power structures by handing control to users, will have much actual effect in the gritty, hard nosed world of vote getting and election politics.  Online discussion, community, and self-organizing political groups are wonderful things, but may not matter much to the traditional, enclosed command-and-control campaign processes, particularly at the presidential election level.  This is what Deanspace apparently ran into ("support isn’t votes") and this isn’t likely a solved problem yet.

That’s not to say I’m not a big believer in the effectiveness of grassroots use of Web 2.0 techniques to ultimately change reality for the better.  My favorite anecdote about self-organizing efforts to achieve real world change using Web 2.0 is still the incredible story of Katrinalist and the PeopleFinder project.  I also covered another Web 2.0-in-politics story, Democracy 2.0, in my popular Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005, and there are many more similar examples.  There truly is vast upside potential here and, like Enterprise Web 2.0, those that figure out how to exploit it have the potential to reap huge rewards. But I certainly think the ball is up in the air for exactly who will make it happen next in the political arena.

I wish Wales the best of luck with Campaign Wikia and I do suspect he’ll have a good measure of success.  But my bet is that we’ve not yet seen the online source of political disruption and success in the next election cycle.  Web 2.0 can be a very disruptive force and will potentially be a significant one in the 2008 political story.