Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 01:18PM by Charlie O'Donnell
- The finger pointing culture of fear will always dominate a culture of openness. Media
thrives on taking people down and creating a general fear of the worst
possible outcome. Whether it's trying enact anti-MySpace laws or
firing everyone who says a dirty word or two, until we hold our noses
and fully embrace freedom of expression in this country, we're going to
hold back the real potential of the internet as a medium of
conversation and open exchange. Everyone will be too scared to publish
anything thought provoking for fear of being stoned by glass house
dwellers.
- The thinking, not just the building, has gotten small and
lightweight... Too many people building features, not applications,
or, gasp, companies. People are confusing design with innovation. Just because you add AJAX and rounded boxes to something does mean you have innovated. - Web 2.0 hasn't even come close to breaking open the carrier choked mobile world. E-mail and WAP? That's what I'm paying unlimited data for? Come on. We can do better than this.
- Web 2.0 is a conversational vacuum. I'll prove it. Unless you live in the Valley, walk outside your door and try to find a Twitter user... You've got six hours. Go. Trust me, we're talking to ourselves. (Don't get me wrong... I really like Twitter... We just need to remind ourselves about how close to the edge we all are out here.)
- Spelling and grammr (beta) have gone to hell in a handbasket. I'm in ur domainz, droppin' ur vowelz.
- M&A Wack-a-mole stopping innovation in its tracks... Dodgeball, del.icio.us, MyBlogLog... Some of the most innovative startups have been swallowed into the black holes of big companies, abruptly halting their innovation paths. Unless we get some more robust business models, some more risk seeking entrepreneurs, maybe a real IPO market, most of Web 2.0 is going to wind up becoming the corporate walking dead of long forgotten or poorly understood acquisitions. Consumers suffer when entrepreneurs won't make a go of it on their own and make a bigger impact on their online experience. (Pleasant exceptions being the Office-like apps at Google...)
- Content licensing is still a bottleneck. Web 2.0 is all about people and sharing, two things that music and video content owners don't seem to be big fans of. For now, much of what we share is illegal or user generated. Freely shareable stuff probably makes up about 2% of the millions of hours of content ever created professionally. I'd like to blog a clip from the A-Team... Not only can I not access it easily, I can't clip it easily, and I sure as hell can't publish it legally. Yet, no one current monetizes it on the web, so it just sits and collects digital dust.
- The really juicy data will always remain locked up... I'd very much like to be able to share my purchases, particularly restaurants, at my own discretion. Of course, that data is at Mastercard, and I think I'll start wearing "I love the RIAA" shirts before Mastercard starts creating personal RSS feeds or APIs for users to take their own financial data to various applications. The same with my credit history. I need to sign up for lots of junk mail to get a credit report... and don't even get me started on my own medical history.
- A lot of powerful people don't participate. How many VC's out there fund widget companies without having a blog or a MySpace profile? Any Sony bloggers out there? What about brand managers that want to do Second Life campaigns without ever having been inside. How about my elected representatives? They get out there and kiss babies during election time, but how many blogging elected officials are there? (And not watered down campaign blogs... actual blogs written by the actual people.) We could do great things if we weren't so segregated into a small group of people punch drunk on Kool Aid and a great deal of people who've never even heard of Kool Aid.
- MySpace is the most popular social network. Seriously, is this the best we can do? Spam, hacking, viruses, one song at a time, and no developer network or API? Facebook is such a better product, but it's really pretty limited as a self expression tool. Plus, neither really comes close to being able to be my digital home on the web as much as my blog is.
Reader Comments (34)
Like Twitter. If they sold it to Fox to be a status update add-on to MySpace, that would kill me, but if they really got some biz dev going and wanted to be a text driven mobile app platform, that could be very big.
Angel investing and incubators does not necessarily imply small. Naval could wind up finding some very big businesses through this. It's all a matter of how high your goals are, not how low you start.
here's another way of looking at it - what would have happened if they had passed youtube through this filter with it's first failure as a dating site?
I guess I will have to take a sip of the kool aid and quote tim o'reilly from the web2expo conference and say that we are just at the beginning of web 2.0.
with that said i believe that the people that are doing web2 stuff are in the process of doing it so you dont hear from them just yet. (well at least i hope)
In re: to juicy data i think we have the power to unlock the data but its just tedious but if you want to collect your spending habits you can. i guess tedious=sucks.
www.mapmyname.com
and then tell us why this site sucks
:)
Great post. I think I found you via Scoble's link blog.
And an even better post. Very entertaining, and dead on.
So, now I want to hear about what IS your ideal list of checkboxes for a social platform on the net, if it ain't myspace or facebook, or out there buried somewhere.
They seem to think that if they kinda go about it in some kinda a'la carte method, then they can "control" something: their message, their products, etc.
To the point where I recently began an online video campaign for a politician. The campaign was all for posting videos, but was hesitate to create and maintain a blog. This particular politician told me, "We don't want to be controlled by the blogosphere."
Wishful thinking, eh?!
Most Twitterers aren't in the valley, or even in California.
I didn't mean to say that literally all the twitterers were in the Valley...I'm well aware of that. It was a metaphor... But if you don't think there's an echo chamber problem, I vehemently disagree.
I mean, hard as it may seem to believe, for example, I don't think any of my non-tech friends know who you are. :)
cc'd on post (I really hate the way I can't just hit reply and have my response get e-mailed and posted to comments at the same time)
Thanks for the link, btw.
http://www.mysaki.com
And I wonder if you can characterize the 100 million MySpace (shudder) members as "close to the edge" - or the millions on Facebook who do exactly the same thing as Twitter.
On the other hand, most of your points are very nice. In particular I appreciate your calling attention to the vast amount of personal data that a few corporations control with iron grips. When you put it that way, it makes Google seem like a saint as far as privacy is concerned.
Great post and carries lots of weight for me coming from you, given your sense of enthusiasm and openmindedness. No. 4 and No. 6 resonated with me in particular!
I know what web 2.0 is but I'm keeping it to myself :-)
Sure, its useful for us to be talking to ourselves, which is why I started nextNY (www.nextNY.org)...helps to hear about best practices, get inspired, etc... but I think there are far too many instances, particularly among bloggers, where we lose sight of the middle part of the bell curve.
iPhone for example... how many bloggers ripped it for being "closed" and not allowing 3rd party apps, when the reaction of most mainstream users was "Wow, cool!"
Oh and don't start me on Digg. Grrrr....
(ok, so maybe one of my startups hits it big and i'll change my tune on that one).
oh, and while we're at it, here's 10 reasons it DOESN'T suck one bit:http://www.rev2.org/2007/04/14/10-most-successful-web-20-startups-to-date/
- dave mcclurehttp://500hats.typepad.com/