I hate it when things we invest a lot of mental energy turn out to be relatively insignificant in the end. So, in some way it bothers me that there are people ready to pronounce certain products or services as worthy of a “3.0″ label. Semantically speaking, who cares. But this is about (as are many things in the realm of social science) really more about philosophy.

Andy pointed to VoIP News’s comments about the 2.0 monicre (I disagree with VoIP News’s definition of 2.0). And he expanded on the definition of the various phases of IP-tel and social telephony applications. Andy categorizes them into 4 groups: 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 3.0. 1.0 being POTS and the PSTN. 1.5 being Vonage and others like it. 2.0 being Skype and its ilk. And 3.0 being something which bridges the gap between 1.0 and 2.0.

But I’ve always looked at 2.0 as a standard-bearer for two things that have little to do with grouping service providers based upon their chronology and similarity of features. Those two things are (1) the user gains more freedom and (2) the community gains more content. So, when I do my break down of “who’s a 1.0 and who’s a 2.0″ I come up with basically the same answer as Andy does, but perhaps using a slightly different formula. Rather than basing it on which startup did what when, I look at which startup empowered users and emboldened some form of community content creation. If they did both with their project, I call it a 2.0 product/service. If they didn’t, I don’t. Skype and Sightspeed are probably the absolute shining examples of 2.0 stuff when you define it in this way. By the way, so is Gabcast. iTunes, conversely, is not.

Notice how the definition has nothing necessarily to do with telephony. That’s because telephony is one cog in the philisophical machine driving the thought behind the whole 2.0 idea–and not its endgame. (Note the parallel with Ken Camp’s recent comment about the realization the VoIP isn’t the end, but just a means to it.)
Problem is, all this labeling doesn’t amount to jack squat if it doesn’t mean anything to the majority of the users whom we’d all love to sweep away with our fascinating converged solutions. Unfortunately, on the eve of 2007, we’re still at that point. To businesspeople, perhaps 2.0 means something. To the readers of this blog, it probably means quite a bit. To the vast majority of my clientelle, the challenge with 2.0 has been getting it to WORK, because the underlying technologies are still developing virgins. That’s been a frustration for many of my clients. The old phrase, “when it works, it works well” certainly applies. To go back to the chronological/features formula for a minute, Andy’s 1.0s are masters of their technologies because the standards have been in place for decades, even as far back as the late nineteenth century in some applications of the PSTN. Andy’s 1.5s have done a damn good job mimicking the 1.0s’ functionality as a means of ciphoning revenue by using the Internet as an alternative transport to reach the consumer. Andy’s 2.0s are a straight-up gamble, and just about none of them are in the black.
So to make the leap to 3.0 at this point seems a bit premature. I’m not suggesting anybody has labeled any particular service a 3.0 service, but I am cautioning against it. And my reason is this: looking at 2.0 in an objective way, what have we really accomplished for Joe Six Pack and Jane Doe?  Sure, Phoneboy and Andy Abramson and Ken Camp and Alecs (sorry Alec!) all dig these services and use ‘em plenty, but these are guys on the leading edge. I use them myself, but am I going to be alone in saying that 2.0 has NOT revolutionized my telecomm habits?  Either I’m hopelessly out of sync with my associates or I’m a pretty good empath of Joe Consumer’s worldview.

The point is, and my reason for cautioning against jumping the 3.0 gun is, we really haven’t DONE anything with 2.0 yet. The whole philosophy of 2.0 is to draw in the collective community to create new content, be it accessibility or knowledge, and to empower individual consumer freedom. Can anybody truly say we’ve accomplished that yet?  We’ve only just started to chip away at what we all know is REALLY possible.

The current philosophy in applications and networking is the RIGHT ONE. User freedom + community = 2.0.  We haven’t finishing APPLYING our work in Voice 2.0, and we have a long way to go–politically, technically, evangelically. And perhaps that is what’s meant by 3.0: making 2.0 concepts work in a 1.0 world.  But can they? Can the freedom/community philosophy be truly expressed in a 1.0 world (driven by a dictator/isolation philosophy), or will it just simmer under the profit surface watching startups come and go with new version numbers?