Web 2.0 this and that -- blah, blah, blah...
I’ve been mildly amused by all the recent rantings about “Web 2.0” in the blogosphere. Many people, whose opinions I respect, don’t like the term (and Richard MacManus has a good summary) while a few, like Alex Barnett, still do. My own take on what’s going on with the Web right now is that it has finally reached the “MyWeb” era of maturation, where the individual user is empowered by tools and services to use the Web how, when, and where ever one likes. For instance, the “how” by MSN Spaces and Start.com which provide individualistic ways of publishing and aggregating content, respectively, the “when” by NewsGator Email Edition and RSSBandit which support offline access to RSS subscriptions, and the “where” by Google SMS which enables searching with any SMS enabled mobile device. From my perspective, of the many companies out there with a Web centric business model, the ones at the forefront of providing a comprehensive set of “My Web” tools and services are Newsgator and Yahoo. I have a glimmer of hope for MSN (and Microsoft), especially given the rapid evolution of Start.com and the fact that I’ve been very happily using it as my browser’s default Home Page for a few months now. The team even initially named their current version “myw3b” by giving it the url: http://www.start.com/myw3b. That was extremely heartening to me because it showed that they really do understand the “My Web” concept, which I seriously doubt that most of the “Web 2.0” crowd would appreciate.
The next big challenge in the “My Web” era is to actually make a decent profit while providing viable tools and services for free or for cheap. Google has done this by subsidizing GMail with profits from Search (or more specifically, AdWords and AdSense). Yahoo and MSN have provided similar subsidies with their profits from other businesses. However, ultimately, these companies will have to figure out how to earn more of a direct profit from “My Web” centric tools and services in order for them to be sustainable. It won’t be easy, which is why the most popular exit strategy of Web centric startup companies these days is to be acquired rather than to make a sustainable profit and stay independent.
