The Bitcoin currency has even been created to allow the online exchange of goods and services with a higher level of privacy and anonymity.

Backlash

If the growing demand for these new services is an indication of a backlash, it is seemingly being driven largely by a new generation of online consumer who, oddly enough have lived their entire online lives in the public and are not old enough to remember a time when every detail of our personal lives was not shared online.

Sarah Perez at Techcrunch wrote an interesting article titled “The Rise Of The Ephemeralnet” where she proposes that “Web 3.0” will be defined by the trend toward anonymity and secrecy. She suggests that while Web 2.0 caused a major shift in behavior by enabling user generated content to be easily shared, posted and embedded, the next major and disruptive shift may be a rebellion against the unintended violation of privacy it caused. For the current generation it was new and adventurous to share more and more details with an ever growing online network of friends. However, for the next, who has grown up with their lives plastered across their parents’ Facebook page, the new and rebellious act may be to undo all of the posts and remove all of the photos, wiping the slate clean in an effort to live more private lives.

My Take

I agree that the growth in ephemeral services is a trend. However I don’t agree that this is a trend that will define Web 3.0. I think that’s going a bit far, especially with an Internet of 50 billion connected things looming on the horizon.

I think that these services represent a growing niche accompanied by an increasingly sophisticated segmentation of online behavior where consumers switch to services that are private when they are doing something that they want to remain private.

As much as one might like to believe that users will rebel against services like Gmail that read private emails in a never-ending quest to improve ad targeting, that just hasn’t happened. Depending on whose numbers you believe Gmail became the most widely adopted email service in 2012 and public social networks like Facebook and Linked continue to show strong growth. Google even announced yesterday that it will now let anyone who finds you on Google+ email you, even if they don't have your email address.

That’s because consumers get enormous value from services that enable you to discover lost friends, get directions to your next appointment or promote your services and have largely accepted the exchange of privacy for convenience and cost. Perhaps we will see a huge backlash that will undermine the very economic foundation that supports Web 2.0, but it's more likely that we'll just see segmentation into (at least) three categories of services that will be used depending on what you are trying to do:

Public -Linkedin, Twitter, Website and Blogs will continue to be used for hanging your shingle, building networks and promoting your business.

-Linkedin, Twitter, Website and Blogs will continue to be used for hanging your shingle, building networks and promoting your business. Private (or Semi Private) - Sites like Path, Flickr and even Facebook will continue to enable you to limit sharing of more personal updates with friends, family and social groups.

- Sites like Path, Flickr and even Facebook will continue to enable you to limit sharing of more personal updates with friends, family and social groups. Anonymous – Services like Whisper, Burner, and Gryphn, among others, will be used for more private and “sensitive” communications.

The idea of anonymous online social networking isn’t new. For years, chat rooms, virtual worlds and MMOGs like World of Warcraft have allowed users to assume anonymous and even imaginary personalities to interact online. What we are seeing now is a mainstreaming of these types of applications into easier to use web and mobile applications.

I suppose the real question to ask is really whether ephemeral services can really be trusted to protect your privacy or whether security breaches like the one recently experienced by SnapChat will erode the trust needed them to continue to thrive.