Posts Tagged ‘Web 2.0’
All posts tagged Web 2.0.
If you’ve checked out my FriendFeed stream in the last few weeks, you may have noticed the emergence of a glaring theme in my online activity. Its name is Facebook and it has commandeered my life. There are pages upon pages of Facebook status updates in my FriendFeed and not much else. (Excepting the glut of old YouTube favorites that just popped up yesterday. That’s an odd bug.) Though I can’t pinpoint precisely when this shift occurred – some time over the last month my time on FriendFeed has dwindled to zero while Facebook has become an always-open tab – I can tell you precisely why. My friends are on Facebook. My real-world, send-Christmas-cards friends. For the most part, they’re people with which I share history. I want to see pictures of their kids and reminisce over embarrassing high school pictures. While it can be fun to argue politics with strangers on FriendFeed, at the end of the day it’s simply more fulfilling to connect further with people I’m personally invested in. And I’m reasonably sure I’m not alone in this sentiment, particularly among mass consumers.
What’s more interesting, though, is that no one on FriendFeed comments or likes my Facebook entries. They sit forlornly on the FriendFeed page, a sure sign that my attention and energies have moved elsewhere. It’s like a tacit acknowledgment among FriendFeed users that Facebook is an entirely separate world unto itself. Or perhaps my status updates are just boring. The point is that these two worlds, so similar in so many ways, seem to be at war with each other. To FriendFeeders, Facebook is a sheep-filled home of tech noobs and FriendFeed is, well, no one on Facebook seems to understand the point of FriendFeed. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m excited to see so many new faces at DEMOfall this week. In fact, this is the biggest DEMOfall event we’ve ever had. Most importantly, it’s just the size we like it: Lots of great people to meet without overwhelming crowds and noise. Seventy-two amazing companies and products from across a very broad spectrum of the information technology market, with plenty of time to hear from each one of them and get up close in the pavilion.
Let’s make these next two days all about them. They have been working tremendously hard to get their products ready for market and to introduce them to you today. The products and the companies: they deserve our respect and focus. If we give them that focus, they will tell us a tremendous amount about where the technology markets are going.
While the 72 products coming to market at DEMOfall represent a wide range of capabilities and impacts, without question the most obvious take away is that the tech market is moving into a new cycle. To understand this new cycle, though, let’s look at its historical context. Read the rest of this entry »
It is entirely possible that I have tried every bookmarking service invented. It is the top tech headache on my list that has never been adequately solved. I promise you, if it exists, I’ve tried it. Some last longer than others – Yoono hung around for a bit, Del.icio.us went out the door very quickly, and NetRocket got me briefly excited – but none has exhibited staying power. Generally speaking, these services put too much focus on the social aspect and neglect to solve the basic problem – helping me find and work with my bookmarks quickly and easily. Will the recently upgraded Diigo, which initially launched at DEMOfall 07, prove to be the answer to my bookmarking headaches? Time will tell. One thing is for sure: with a slate of features that covers most every issue in the bookmarking/sharing/highlighting game, this service is sure to have something for everyone.
At first glance, Diigo seems all over the map. The service offers bookmarking, highlighting of text within a page, commenting on a site for others to see, sending options, groups for networking and much more. To label it as a simple bookmark service would be unfair; it’s much more than that and could very well emerge as an oft-used research tool in my browser (that would be Tech Headache #2 on my list.) There’s much I like about the service and a few things I dislike. Though initially overwhelming, Diigo has been made as user friendly as possible by its developers. The multitude of features could easily kludge up a site but the Diigo team has made quick work of them. It’s design and UI are top-notch – so much so that I recommended Diigo to another company as an excellent example of creating elegance out of chaos. I do wish the search function was a bit deeper and more robust; if a bookmark isn’t explicitly tagged, search doesn’t find it. For a bookmarking service to truly work its way into my heart, I need a better search. For more detailed reviews of the product itself, check out Web Worker Daily and Webware.
What I find most interesting about Diigo is precisely what turns some off: the scope. This is one of the most full-featured and in-depth Web 2.0 products I’ve seen in a long time. Rather than focus on one headache of the social Web, the company is aiming to solve seemingly all of them. Ironically, one of my bugaboos in startups is a company who casts too wide a net. Pick a target market or two and laser in, I always say. When it comes to this space though – the collecting of online content for future use – I think some aggregation is overdue. The myriad services dedicated to this purpose all have their upsides, but in general only end up adding to the noise. If I can depend on one site for all my bookmarking and clipping needs, that will significantly reduce the clutter in my tool bar. From my experience so far, it’s looking like that site will be Diigo.
By gum, I think I’ve got it. My post yesterday on breaking out of our insular tech bubble to evangelize to the mass consumer spurred a good discussion on FriendFeed. There was much agreement around the idea that sharing all these neat Internet tools with mass consumers is needed. But how to do that? There were a couple of angles to the conversation: one, how to share our general insider knowledge with consumers and two, how to get people involved in FriendFeed specifically. Clare Dibble made a good point regarding the latter; that non-techies don’t have to sign up for the myriad services on FriendFeed to delve into the site. Simply by adding the FriendFeed share button to their browsers, they can start submitting interesting articles and watch the conversations ensue.
It was then that the light bulb went off. FriendFeed is the gateway to Web 2.0 for mass consumers. Read the rest of this entry »
In a post yesterday, Graeme Thickens reminds the blogeratti that they (I’m not yet sure I should include myself in that category, but I’m certainly guilty, too) “missed the point” in the debate about Alltop, Guy Kawasaki’s new blog aggregation site. While journalists, analysts, and bloggers argued about the value, audience, and innovation in this site, few if any of us talked about how Alltop makes money.
I put that question to Guy, as I always do with new entrepreneurs, when I first talked with him about the site. And I failed to mention it in my initial post. Not surprisingly, the business plan is simple and common: attract a lot of users, then deliver targeted advertising based on the content visitors read. Because of the broad base of topics covered at Alltop, the site has potential to connect a much broader range of advertisers and consumers. That content range allows Alltop to play in very niche markets without the expense of developing niche audiences. In affect, the breadth of coverage at Alltop appeals to the niches within us all. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the aspects I love most about DEMO is the conversations. Unlike most technology conferences, DEMO has a casual, family-reunion-like feel to it. The single-track format allows attendees to relax and enjoy themselves. I think Chris’ gracious, laid-back attitude sets a precedent, one that filters down to every attendee. And just for the record, I had that opinion of Chris long before she started paying me.
So the conversations. Last night, I attended the NVCA dinner here at DEMO. The key theme of the evening was green tech and Chris and I had fascinating discussions with several attendees on ethanol, algae as a biofuel and the end of the world as we know it. (A good time was had by all.) Read the rest of this entry »
It’s Friday morning and you finally got a date with the woman from your spinning class. Too bad it’s too late to book a table at one of the City’s better restaurants. Across town, Mark just got dumped, leaving him with a table reservation but no date.
That scenario is the founding premise of TableXchange, a marketplace to buy and sell restaurant reservations. The NYC-based startup is the brainchild of bankers turned Web entrepreneurs Gabriel Erbst and William Geronimo. The two teamed up with developer Dwight Lee and launched the site late last summer. The initial site covered New York City and The Hamptons; San Francisco was added just this month.
The TableXchange marketplace lets individuals post the restaurant reservations they can’t use, selling them to people who need last-minute reservations at hard-to-get-into dining establishments. Read the rest of this entry »
