I’ve lived through a couple of iterations of the Internet now. When excitement over content was rekindled at the beginning of web 2.0 it seemed like advertising was going to pay for everything, and thus what would otherwise be expensive services would be delivered to users for free. Everything became (just like in the 90s!) about leveraging content. This time around the content was user generated, so it didn’t represent a cost center for the companies serving ads against it. Or at least not an obvious cost center. Turns out hosting all those photos isn’t cheap. It also turns out that the advertisers aren’t quite as full of money as they may have seemed initially. Particularly when the economy is coming down around everyone’s ears.

The whole ad-supported model is starting to feel a little stale. And with it, ad-supported businesses like facebook are starting to feel a little stale if not outright spammy. Mapping the social graph in order to better serve audiences to advertisers seems like pre-crash thinking. The so called attention economy is giving way to the real economy.

It’s no longer going to be about eyeballs, it’s going to be about providing real services and charging for them. The fact that the world’s hottest startup, Twitter isn’t thinking about advertising but about tools in its search for revenue seems to confirm that. The web is growing up, and as it does it is going to start providing more relevant and compelling services than ever before. The next web isn’t the social web, it’s the useful web.