Category: Technology

Jeneane Sessum is writing on Web 2.0 stuff. To her I say Blog! Oh, geez that felt so good! But I digress.

Jeneane writes about Web 1.0 and 2.0 terminology and says you can’t have consensus on the web. That’s an excellent point. We had agreement about the web. We agreed on the tech, the naming schema, the hardware, the protocols, and the languages–but that’s primarily because a couple of big players Pushed Their Weight Around at Strategic Times. But web and consensus–would this be the same consensus that rules at the Wikipedia? There is none. When there is, you’ll know because the Wikipedia will look like one great big Power Point presentation. Same with the web, only much bigger.

As for Web 2.0, I don’t care much now about what people use. After recent events including the disappointment about the SxSW panel, I lost a lot of my pugnaciousness when it comes to tilting at windmills. (More on this, later, in a separate post.)

No, the only thing I have against Web 2.0 is some of your crappy Web 2.0 code is getting mixed up in my web page, and I want you to stop. This all isn’t a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup: I’m not peanut butter, and your misuse, abuse, and over use of technology just cuz is not chocolate; these do not work great together. Pretend for a moment that you want people to use your code, and for goodness sake, beta is not a permanent state: release something!

Speaking of releasing, Jeneane also writes about being able to Shuffle our bits about; by this she means being able to grab her Blogger entries and move them elsewhere, or as Doc Searls mentions, being able to upload photos to many places. (Question: why?)

When Jeneane had asked my opinion of BubbleShare, I replied that a drawback I saw to the service is it doesn’t have an API. Without an API, tools can’t interface to it, photos can’t be moved from other services, and we can’t move photos from outside this service. I would never add or upload to a centralized service that doesn’t give me an out.

But to focus: this is about Web 2.0. This is about a vote on not using this term anymore–which is about the most silly ass thing I’ve heard all month, even if the purpose for the vote is introducing yet another piece of ‘code’ to clutter our pages. We need our terms, Stowe–if we don’t have our terms, how will we separate the cool kids from the hacks with money? So, if Web 2.0 is now contaminated with all the ‘built to flip’ nonsense about, what about another name?

What about Web^2.0? The Web, squared. Or even Web^3.14159265–the Web, raised to the power of Pi? Maybe Web₀, for Web, Sub-Zero. Too much like a superhero? Wait, don’t go! I have a million names! There’s…

update

Dare Obasanjo wrote a post about flipping your Web 2.0 startup and gave three reasons why a bigger company would gobble up a startup: users, technology, and people. Paul Kedrosky replied that Dare was wrong, wrong, wrong and that building companies to flip is also wrong, wrong, wrong.

I happen to agree (agree, agree) somewhat with Mr. Kedrosky, in that I wish technologies weren’t being built for the express purposes of flipping (i.e. quickly going from VC funding to purchase by a Player), but, as Dare writes, it does happen. Where I disagree with Dare is in his list of reasons why a company would buy a Web 2.0 startup. He left an important one off the list: image.

One week the web is full of talk about Google, the next Yahoo, the week after that might be MSN (though it is falling far behind the other two–Ozzie just doesn’t have the 2.0 stink; maybe it can buy wordpress.com); then the cycle continues anew. How these companies make money is as much image as software provided. It’s important to all three search engine companies to be seen as the company that’s the leader into a whole new version of the web. However, this doesn’t mean that each company is going to change the way it does business.

Google bought Blogger years ago, and I remember we talked about how this would change Google searches, and we discussed what this purchase meant. Now we can see that it didn’t mean anything, other than Google bought into the hip 2.0 kid at the time–weblogging. Blogger hasn’t changed all that much, other than new features to keep up with other tools; Google didn’t change at all.

When Yahoo bought Del.icio.us, I read comments here and there to the effect that this is going to change search dynamics and the old algorithmic approaches will soon give way to new tagging ones. Yet the statistics don’t support this. Delicious has, what, 300,000 users? Out of how many billions of web users? The number of people who tag–which is really what the Del.icio.us tech is all about, tagging and storage–compared to those who don’t is so skewed as to make tagging a non-starter.

(Not to mention that no one has effectively explained how tagging is going to make for more accurate searches.)

But Yahoo’s buying of Del.icio.us put it into the front page of many publications. It kept it even, or barely even, in the fight with Google for being the ‘hip’ company — the one that people will use for their searches. The site where advertisers should place their ads; the place to connect for other companies pushing themselves as Web 2.0.

Both Yahoo and Google made a lot of money selling space for ads; enough so that they can afford to invest a few millions in small startups that could add to their web 2.0 goodness. Heck, Google just plunked a billion or so into AOL, and we all know that’s an elephant bound for the graveyard. Until it ambles its rattly bones in that direction, though, it still brings an immense number of eyeballs to Google–eyeballs that Google would rather have then concede to Microsoft (it’s competitor in this deal).

Besides: investing money is a good corporate move at tax time. And it doesn’t hurt when investors see these companies seem to diversify — there’s been a lot of talk about bursting bubbles this year.

As for the technology, most of the Web 2.0 startups are based on copious amounts of data stored, accessible via search and subscription, tagged, and wrapped in an API. None of the companies are based on what I would call revolutionary uses of technology. Much of the early popularity of the companies is because the services each offered was free. Oh, and the fact that we have, personally, come to know the folks behind the companies. This then leads to the question: do companies benefit from bringing in the people behind these acquisitions?

Of course they do. After all, the folks behind Flickr and Del.icio.us and Bloglines and so on were the originators of ideas that took off –if I were Google and Yahoo, (eBay, Microsoft, and so on) I’d rather have these people on my team then on the competitor’s. But as we’ve seen with Google/Blogger and Yahoo/Flickr, the startup seems to benefit more from the new association than the other way around. Storage costs money, scaling isn’t cheap. Or easy. (Maybe Microsoft can buy TypePad.)

Before we make an assumption that Google and Yahoo, in particular, are going to throw out their web 1.0 cash cows in favor of shiny new web 2.0 branded calves, the evidence of our eyes does not support the what ifs generated by our fevered imaginations. Disappointing, true; but it is fun to watch each company take a turn on the hamster wheel each week. (Saaayyy, that’s who Microsoft can buy….)

More on Google and AOL.

More on Yahoo and Del.icio.us.