Web 2.0 Reactions

What was a budding movement three years ago, at the dawn of the revival in technology, internet, and silicon valley, has become a full blown mania.

Everyone is on this game.  That goes for both entrepreneurs, who seem to be hatching new businesses at as rapid a rate as we saw at the height of the web 1.0 bubble, and VCs, who are quickly remaking themselves from enterprise software investors to consumer internet investors.

Last year at this time we were talking about interesting companies like Skype, Flickr, MySpace, etc.

Many of them are gone, gobbled up by the web 1.0 giants or the mainstream media companies.

In their places we are seeing second derivatives.  I heard one business described as Google Maps meets delicious, and another described as Skype meets MySpace.  When the first derivative hasn't fully figured its long term business model (other than getting bought), the second derivatives are pretty scary.

I am a contrarian at heart.  This situation bothers me.

It doesn't mean we are going to stop investing.  But it does mean we are going to be more careful.

We have to raise our hurdles when others are lowering them.

Comments

[eric goldstien]

hate to say it, as we'll likely be looking to raise some money soon, but i totally agree with you.

[steve]

in bubble1.0 business models and cash flows didnt matter -- or didnt appear to matter anyway

is it that way now?

[David Gibbons]

...& what's with Barry Diller? ;-)

Surely you should have to "get" Web1.0 before opening the 2.0 conference? Or are we already at the place where $'s beat sense?

Some of us who learned from 1.0 now know better than to take the silly-money; stick around Fred.

[P-Air]

This might have been good advice to heed before making your recent del.icio.us investment, unless you know of a biz model emerging there that we're not yet seeing ;-)

Good to see you at breakfast this morning. Cheers.

[Gopi]

>> unless you know of a biz model emerging

Sponsored links naturally fits into the del.icio.us model. But IMO the service will be never mass adopted.

So in the end they will become a small profitable site serving the niche geek community :)

[TechTrader]

Agreed. The hype is overwhelming and the VCs are piling in. However, there are lessons to be learned, just as there were with B1.0. I think this time around there is a focus on simplicity, which is good. Interconnectability, which I'm not sure about, but makes for good entertainment. And open APIs.
But, yes the business models are being ignored and 21 yo's are being funded as CEOs.
Kibu.com anyone?

[Steve Citron-Pousty]

Posted this over in Om's blog before I realized he linked to your blog.

The part on product pitching reminds me of the consistent line in “The Player” …
Think of Pretty Woman meets Out of Africa
or
Basically, it’s The Gods Must Be Crazy minus the Coke bottle and plus a TV actress

and every movie has to have Julia Roberts.

Go ahead and swap terms like folksonomy or tagging or ajax and Products like MySpace and Skype

[eric goldstien]

wow, amazing how synical the buzz is. once again, i hate to say it because it likely hurt us, but i totally agree with it.

[charlie crystle]

Text. We're talking about text, folks, not so much technology or business models, and the business model seems to be eyeballs (sound familiar?). Computing has become about moving, storing, retrieving, rendering, and displaying text. Sure, binaries matter somewhere in there, but web 2.0 is about making it easy and uniform to handle text.

The applications of easily and uniformly handling text are very similar to the applications of client server before web 1.0 and screenscrapers before that. The abstraction moves closer to the user, binary guys become less important, maybe, and we're talking about text. Lots of text.

Syndication has been around for a long time. I wrote my first blog in vbscript in 1999 when I left ChiliSoft. It sucked but it worked for me. Now blogs are being used for CMS (we're going to take a shot at blog as support/KB), but web 2.o doesn't make workers daily work that much easier. Not yet. The enterprise application of this loose concept of web 2.0 is going to be much more about context and process than moving data around more easily. unstructured web evolves into structured web. the platform becomes more and more text based with generic objects built by anyone handling the processing at whatever stage. But it's all just noise right now--until people will pay for specific applications/usage beyond lending their eyeballs. I'm in SF, too, Fred, btw. Interesting vibe here...wasn't at the conference, but have met with a lot of interesting companies doing interesting things. Not text, though. :)

[David Gibbons]

Charlie - it's not just about text anymore - search on "structured blogging" ... all micromedia are moving to the blogs ...

[Basil Ma]

Raise the bar? We don't need no stinkin' VCs.

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/less_as_a_competitive_advantage_my_10_minutes_at_web_20.php

[Reichard]

what last two posts meant?

[Rui]

Outstanding article, really approaches many of the core problems with the whole Web 2.0 thing...

People forget to easy...I look at some of these new startups and cant seem to stop seeing "failure" written all over it..

OBS: somebody delete the spamming posts above me ;)