My 2.0pence
I’ve been struggling for a while with the fact that no one outside our rather close knit group of very Internet savvy friends and colleagues has heard of Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, digg or any of the other web 2.0 “revolutionaries”. I heard Joshua Schachter speak at Carson’s Future of Web apps and he referred to his lead users as The Priesthood. I’m honestly starting to wonder whether there is anyone in the choir for these priests to preach to, let alone anyone in the congregation.
While mulling this over in the shower this morning I got to thinking specifically about writely. In many ways writely more than any of the other services can be seen to sum up web 2.0. It suddenly appeared with huge fanfare and was almost immediately acquired by no less than Google (at least that’s how it looked to the external observer). At the time there was vast amounts of blog and media hype around the service - literally all the way from “Why writely matters” to “Why writely doesn’t matter”. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype… Yes ODF is exciting, as is a neat Javascript interface providing a WYSIWYG editor, but it’s also worth noting that writely could actually be deployed in about 15 minutes with one of kupu, FCKeditor or Tiny MCE and some storage on Amazon’s S3 platform.
This article on the current situation from a Venture Capitalist’s point of view sums it up perfectly for me. 25,000 beta users means you got a good review on Techcrunch. It doesn’t mean you’re going to change the world. The list of all things web 2.0 from March this year is a sobering thing. There’s too many to count, but just look how long it takes to load and how small your scrollbar gets for an idea.
Don’t get me wrong. I strongly believe there is space out there for new and fantastic applications, but then there always has been. Doug and I were part of the team that wrote the UK’s first online supermarket (for Sainsbury). Back then it was absolutely bleeding edge to connect a web server to a database. The technologies that make up Web 2.0 might be bleeding edge now, but they won’t be for long and it certainly doesn’t mean the particular application will make it. Ours didn’t (Tesco beat the living daylights out of us) and by today’s standards we were built on solid foundations - first mover into an easily identifiable market with the backing of one of the largest brands in that sector and some very strong tech.
Two final thoughts… It’s worth remembering that Flickr isn’t even Yahoo!’s largest photo sharing service, let alone the largest on the Internet. It’s also worth remembering that despite what we often think Google does not own the Internet.