Peter Rip has an interesting post up today that talks about the changing landscape of what is generally called Web 2.0:

Much of the “easy” innovation seems to have been wrung out of the Web 2.0 wave. Web 2.0 was cheap - thanks to open source, simple - thanks to RSS/REST, and distinctive - thanks to AJAX and Flash. It helped more than a little the Google has continued to entice us all with the abundant profits in Internet advertising.

Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn’t going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn’t exist today.

Source: EarlyStageVC, “Web 2.0 - Over and Out”

As Peter notes, there has been an interesting dip in the level of activity surrounding the beacons of the Web 2.0 world. More importantly, perhaps, is that a “template” has emerged for the Web 2.0 company:

• Users can share any kind of information from files to photos
• Storage isn’t expensive, so we don’t police it today, yet
• Users can invite their friends; that’s how we get new users
• We launched a few months ago and are doubling every month
• We haven’t quite figured out our revenue model, but we think it is freemium (“Let me explain what that means…”)

If our experiences at Blue Whale Labs are any indication, the level of sophistication is definitely on the rise - and we’re pretty excited about that. There are a couple of reasons why this excites us:

First, I never believed the hype that software had devolved into a commodity state. While there are the rare stories like Digg, the reality is that most software projects STILL fail and that they often cost significantly more than a few bucks to get off the ground. If anything, it’s the propagation of the myth that anything can be built for free that’s led to the micro-slicing of verticals we see inside the Internet domain.

Second, we love the challenge. As applications and systems grow more and more complex, the beautiful dance that is application design gets more and more interesting. The ultimate challenge, of course, is leveraging all this new knowledge while bringing forward better usability and simplicity. The user still comes first and that’s not a trend we foresee going anywhere (it never should have gotten away from us quite frankly).

Third, the pace is still hectic but the expectations are getting more realistic. One thing we stress with our clients is releasing “the right set of features” as opposed to simply launching for the sake of launching. This is recently echoed at Ask the Wizard:

The bottom line being that you want to invest pre-launch such that you optimize for innovation post-launch. This is never more true than when it seems like you are racing into a market with multiple competitors and your inclination is to hurry up and launch something! The advantage you have prior to launch is that you don’t yet have customer demands. Set yourself up to be in a position to rapidly iterate and innovate post-launch and you will be in the best position to put the first movers back on their heels if they aren’t in a position to react to market forces as quickly as you.

Source: Ask the Wizard, “Launch Late to Launch Often”

Great advice for sure.

Technorati Tags: bluewhalelabs, greg narain, reputation, trends, web2.0

I hate to add another Twitter post to the increasingly growing pile of Tweets, but it seems like there’s a certain behavior emerging from this new microverse worth commenting on. If you’re not sure what Twitter is, well, I’m not even going to address that problem.

There are basically 3 kinds of posts that are emerging relating to Twitter:

• Twitter sucks
• Twitter rules
• I rule Twitter

So let’s look at some of the commentary out there, it’s interesting, to say the least.

Twitter Sucks
There’s some commentary out there that truly begs the question, “What’s so fascinating about Twitter?” My favorite post on this topic was written by good friend, Chris Heuer. Of course, Chris’ post is not really about how Twitter must die, just that it very well could.

The thing about Twitter, Flickr and other similarly architected services is that we like staying in touch with the people we care about, the people we WANT to have connecttions with. Unfortunately, and as I have been saying a lot lately - Humans Don’t Scale. Dunbar was really right - I am pretty much putting the Dunbar number in the same category as Newton’s laws of gravity. It is important to note that I am not hoping for its demise - far from it. I am however wondering what can be done about those of us that care about such things in thinking about some sort of guideliness to prevent usage patterns from destroying the incredible value we find in staying connected to the people we care about most.

Source: Social Media Club, “Is SxSW going to be the death of Twitter?”

Pete Cashmore’s post is just too good to pass up as well:

To some, it really feels like Twitter has stumbled upon a new blogging paradigm - short, to-the-point messages that let your friends, family and the world know exactly where you are and what you’re doing, every second of the day.

But others are asking: what’s the point? Those people just don’t get it. Clearly, Twitter is an amazing new way to blog about your cat.

Source: Mashable, “The Evolution of Blogging, Cat Version”

And let’s not forget this post tagged “annoying”:

If I ever catch me using Twitter please shoot me on the spot. I feel sick that Twitter has become popular enough that I found a need to even cover the service but the 18-25 crowd (and younger) is embracing Twitter and it is common knowledge that this group can drive sales and trends through the roof.

Twitter is yet one more example of a world obsessed with information and a constant need to be instantly gratified. I think it perfectly characterizes the excesses that American’s have come to expect in everyday life. I prefer old technologies like Caller-ID because it is actually useful — I can decided who I allow into my life.

Source: jemmille.com, “What the F*%k is Twitter?”

Emerging Thoughts: Quite a bit of Twitter seems to be very extraneous - more noise than signal. Of course, we’re increasingly able to distill value from social noise but Twitter still lacks some of the required controls to serve us best.

Twitter Rules
Naturally, good and evil must be seemingly balanced in the universe which is why we have a league of supporters for Twitter. Interestingly, many of the people who are supporting it don’t necessarily rationalize the success of the system either.

Tara Hunt “defends” her initial love and use of Twitter:

There are many more reasons why I love Twitter and Twittering. I love the common language emerging from this less than 140 character medium. That people come up with clever words to describe Twitter phenomenon, which become a shared language between us.

I feel so strongly about it that it upsets me to see people reduce it to another friend collecting service or hype. It is compelling, interesting and captures the imagination of alot of people. Tell me other web apps these days that can say the same. It goes to show you, once again, that simple tools that disrupt are what we need to be concentrating on…not more ‘me too’ and ‘this will make me $$’. Sure, it’s human nature to dismiss something (or someone) gaining in popularity. Is it jealousy? Fear? I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t self-reflective.

Source: HorsePigCow, “Twits Twittering for the sake of Tweets: or that’s not why I twitter”

Steve Rubel gives an interesting take on this - drawing comparisons to Moore’s Law, amongst other things:

That brings me back to Twitter. Despite it’s lack of management/search features, Twitter is downright addicting. I love it. It’s brevity lets me blog more actively and at the same time engage in real-time conversations with my “followers” (as they call it). If things have seemed a little quieter over here, it’s because I have been busier over there. (Here’s my Twitter feed)

Source: MicroPersuasion, “Twitter, Human Attention and Moore’s Law”

Scott Karp adds in his usual, considered post - carrying the torch from Steve’s post:

I think Twitter is a well-executed application, which, like all technologies, is only good or bad in how it is used. What strikes me about Twitter is that it appears to be accentuating the natural exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies of avid blog writers and readers. While blog posts have traditionally been short, Twitter pushes this trend to the extreme, accentuating the attention deficit disorder that the web naturally fosters.

Source: The Blog Herald, “Twitter Lowers The Bar For Blogging”

Emerging Thoughts: Twitter fills an important gap in our lifestyle and behavior. As more and more people are drawn to the power of personal publishing, Twitter is creating a more gradual onramp for newcomers while keeping otherwise established participants engaged.

I Rule Twitter
This last category, I’m not going to link to. Sam Sethi has a good rundown on just what’s happening. However, there is a recent rage, especially in light of the newest gizmo, Twitterholic.com. It seems there is outright competition to see who can get the most followers, friends, tweets and everything else in between.

The more and more I thought about this, the more and more it reminded me of MySpace. In that world, we’re mere mortals, in Twitter, we’re gods - at least for now ;) Turns out that I am not alone in this thinking. Min Jung Kim chimes in with a quite funny Haiku:

twitter defined as
turning bunches of geeks to
14 year old girls.

danah boyd also adds her observations as well:

I think it’s funny to watch my tech geek friends adopt a social tech. They can’t imagine life without their fingers attached to a keyboard or where they didn’t have all-you-can-eat phone plans. More importantly, the vast majority of their friends are tech geeks too. And their social world is relatively structurally continuous. For most 20/30-somethings, this isn’t so. Work and social are generally separated and there are different friend groups that must be balanced in different ways.

Source: apophenia, “Tweet Tweet (some thoughts on Twitter)”

Emerging Thoughts: I think that it’s all interesting. The point I was trying to make is that all new and exciting tools often require context to grasp their impact on things. At this point in time, we’re not quite sure what Twitter will become - if anything more than a passing fad. For sure, many people are asking great questions, participating in the change, and adjusting their goggles.

Technorati Tags: chris+heuer, minjungkim, puppy, scott+karp, social+networking, steve+rubel, twitter

Back when I was wading through the underbelly of the conference business, I had the opportunity to meet so many different individuals from walks of life generally foreign to the likes of people like me. These people were all supporters of the actual events we attended - from the sales people to the support staff, an entire ecosystem exists.

One of the more interesting finds - though not entirely surprising - was the belief that the content was the driving force behind attendance. In some circles, this stripped down even further into direct “buyer-seller” events where people literally did the speed dating thing to find sales and opportunities - but I digress. My point then, and still now, is that conferences are more about the contacts than the content. By my gross estimation, I peg it at an 80-20 split (good round numbers).

It’s referred to as many different things: the hallway track, the backchannel, or, if you like the old-fashioned lingo, “networking”. Kathy Sierra today makes a wonderful post regarding this very phenomena:

The point is, face-to-face still matters. And in fact all our globally-connecting-social-networking tools are making face-to-face more, not less desirable. Thanks to the tools y’all are building, we now have more far-flung friends–including people we’ve never met f2f–than ever before. We now have more people we want to connect with in the human world, often after years of electronic-only contact.

Source: Creating Passionate Users, “Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video…”

Technorati Tags: conferences, kathy+sierra, events, syncpeople

I thought this line was almost comical:

Adoption of social marketing tactics stems from the discovery “30 percent of frequent social networkers trust their peers’ opinions when making a major purchase decision, but only 10 percent trust an advertisement,” said Emily Riley, JupiterResearch analyst and lead author of the report.

Source: ClickZ, “Marketers Increasingly Use Social Networking Sites”

This article discusses a recent JupiterResearch report on the uptake of marketing as a channel for brand marketers (48% to be precise).

What surprises me is that this revelation should not be new. Since the beginning of commerce, we’ve relied on our relationships as the primary filter for transactions of all sorts. As we increasingly use technology as a filter, it’s amazing how simple facts can seem to get buried - like the fact that we trust our friends.

Of course, what I do find more interesting is the shift in mindset. I doubt that most companies have gotten “edgier” in recent months, spawning their interest in using these sites. Instead, it might be more likely that the undeniable fact that these sites have become destinations for many different types of individuals and that the messaging and culture within that micro-community is indeed normalized. Put another way, perhaps it’s not so scary down in the muck.

Technorati Tags: brand+marketing, jupiter+research, reputation, social+networking

There’s some interesting chatter today regarding the future business models of the blogosphere - and other forms of social media - around the water fountain today. As usual, Scott Karp provides an interesting canvas for conversation. Over at The Blog Herald, he points to some analysis done by Sahar Sarid:

Sahar’s historical analysis is certainly compelling. If other media ultimately adopted a paid content model, why not blogging? I agree that there is fairly strong case that some blogs may ultimately be able to adopt a paid model, but there is an equally strong case why most blogs will not.

The case for paid subscription blogs is the same as the case for any other paid content:
1. Must have
2. Not available elsewhere or better than what you can get for free
3. No ads (although not necessarily)

Source: The Blog Herald, “Could Blogging Adopt A Paid Content Business Model?”

Of course, Scott is referring the public notion of scarcity. The reason that works are able to accrue value stems from the belief of others that there is unique value to the content created. The second part of his rules limits the nodes of creation in the network.

The difficulty with scarcity models in the domain of social media is that, well, there is no scarcity. The more important aspect of this market value is the distance between “good enough” and “not quite good enough”. On January 27th, I wrote about the Vanishing Point Theory of News. At that time, I proposed that there is a diminishing returns on my investment in media creation and consumption based on my ever-changing interests.

In the blogosphere, there is no shortage of individuals covering a specific topic. Let’s pretend that Engadget shut down - what do you anticipate might happen? Likely, there would be some moaning (where I don’t know) but millions of people are not going to give up their interest in technology and gadgetry. The built in social network will kick in and spit out another candidate for the go-to site for technology news. Further, some or several enterprising folks will make quick work of aggregating an experience in kind. What are the odds they would charge a fee up front?

This cycle seems impossible to break considering the economics at play today. The appeal of the Freemium model seems to fit much better in our current thinking. I’m willing to pay for that extra edge, for that extra shot of espresso. If I’m paying for content, doesn’t the promise of exclusivity get brought to the table? If I’m paying for gadgets, gizmos, networks or people - suddenly, the value is measure in other ways.

Give me my damn accessories!

Technorati Tags: freemium, longtail, paid content, scott karp, vanishing point theory of news