The Seamless Web

Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, recently posted on his blog, A VC, about an OS X issue he was having. I made a comment that I found it funny that he would post an OS X question on his blog, which is primarily focused on venture capital. Actually, in all fairness, Fred posts a variety of topics on A VC, but that's not my point here.

Fred responded in a second post, saying:

Andrew asked why I posted this question on my blog instead of a forum designed for this kind of question. Well first, I figured there were a lot of readers who knew the answer. And I was right. There are some super smart people who read this blog. And second, by posting on my blog, I was able to post a couple screen shots of the problem that made it easier for me to articulate the issue.

This got me thinking about this idea of a seamless web. The idea of destination sites, niche portals, niche social networks, specialty content, etc has gained a lot of momentum and popularity in the past few years. We call it the "long tail," but I think it's a flawed system that facilitates the segregation information.

I would like to see an Internet void of landing pages. The idea is, in Fred's example, if you were someone interested in answering questions about OS X, those questions would naturally gravitate to you. Where it comes from, whether the Apple Support Forums or A VC, shouldn't make any difference. A content agnostic Internet, I suppose you could say, is my vision of Web 3.0.

There are already meaningful steps in this directions. Aggregation is a hot buzz word these days and it's what makes services like Google, PageFlakes and countless other aggregators a success. So, niche information will still exist, but it'll exist for you, not for a landing page or branded service.