Web 2.0 != a check

It’s great people are reading my blog before sending me a business plan. I’ve gotten a bunch of business plans, podcasts, etc, that I would have otherwise never had a shot at.  I’ve had over 50 ‘no harm, no foul’ meetings, participated in over 25 meetings with angels, start up groups, and various bar mitzvahs.  Love that blogging, it’s great for business.

So with that in mind and seeing that it hasn’t made Fred Wilson’s cliche of the week yet, here goes.

Don’t put “Web 2.0” in your presentation. Don’t quote me Tim O’Reilly, Bill O’Reilly, or anybody else talking about Web 2.0.  Don’t tell me in your email that you are on the leading edge of Web 2.0.

First these kind words: Tim O’Reilly is my hero. I worship the ground he walks on. I met Tim many, many years ago while doing my thing for Microsoft. Tim’s a very polite person. He asked about me. I mentioned that I had daughters. He said, get em horses, trust me, keeps them out of trouble. The money you spend now, will be saved against what you will be spending rolling through the teenage years.  I did and my daughters are amazing individuals. Between the girls having a brilliant mother and Microsoft stock options feeding the horses, I made it as a Dad, whew! So, Tim can do no wrong in my book.

Having said that, enough already with this Web 2.0 nonsense. We are doing the same thing we always do when “new” has “newer” come along. We hype the snot out of it and crap all over the ‘old stuff’.

The modern version of a Tired vs. Wired chart is currently floating around the web. This attempt to categorize stuff as Web 1.0 vs. 2.0. is, well, interesting.

For example: Content Management is Web 1.0 while Wikis are Web 2.0. Gimmie a break. Wikis ARE content management dressed up a web service on top of a database engine that tracks content and, wait for it, changes to that content, in other words: Content management. 

Do not get caught up in all this stuff. Right now, if you are working on solving a problem and looking to make money from the solution,  focus on the customer and take advantage of what your ancestors, those Web 1.0 old farts, have done for you.

Lots of Bandwidth = You can do it on the web as a service

Lots of Storage = You can give people rich content because they can get it quickly

Lots of users = “Everybody” can get to an Internet connection

Free is good = You can do a lot, code a lot, market a lot, without spending tons of money (This is bad for my profession. We need VC 2.0)

So, while I’d wash Tim’s car with a toothbrush (or muck out the O’Reilly barn), I’m not going to Web 2.0 conferences and am going to take a very dim view of start ups who think a Web 2.0 badge is a waiver for actually doing the fundamentals of a business, those being: Solving a problem with a solution customers love and will pay for. Don’t look for the buzz words to get you into the game or get you a check.

Note: The “!=” thing is geek speak for does not equal. Somebody else used it recently, I saw Dr. Scoble explain it and I can’t remember the original place where I first saw it, so I apologize in advance to that person.

Comments

[Eric Griffin]

LOL!

[Kevin]

Double LOL!

Nice to see someone else out there who likens many of the Internet buzzs to the "Emporer's new clothes."

The bigger question is Web 1.0 going to make a comeback. "AJAX" did, I hate that term but is easier to spell, oh I mean DHTML.

Is it just me or is this web thing trending like fashions. We need Karl Lagerfeld to coin a phrase for use, because developers are just sooo lame at it.

Thanks for the post

[Dennis Forbes]

Great stuff, and so very true.

!=, as an aside, has been around for decades. In C instead of the more common <>, != is the logical not-equal comparison operator.

As an aside, where can I pick up my check?

[Dennis Forbes]

Great stuff, and so very true.

!=, as an aside, has been around for decades. In C instead of the more common <>, != is the logical not-equal comparison operator.

As an aside, where can I pick up my check?

[Dennis Forbes]

Great stuff, and so very true.

!=, as an aside, has been around for decades. In C instead of the more common <>, != is the logical not-equal comparison operator.

As an aside, where can I pick up my check?

[Dennis Forbes]

Great stuff, and so very true.

!=, as an aside, has been around for decades. In C instead of the more common <>, != is the logical not-equal comparison operator.

As an aside, where can I pick up my check?

[Dennis Forbes]

Sorry about the duplicate posts. I could claim that it was some sort of satirical commentary about the lack of, err, Web 2.0 SOA on here, but in reality either my connection or typepad was extremely slow, and it seemed to not be going through.

[Sam]

Wired: waxing nostalgic on Web 1.0
Tired: hatin' on Web 2.0
Expired: Lovin' on Web 2.0

[J. Shirley]

While I agree that I think the semantics of all the "new technology" coming about is ridiculous. Really, it's the same old innovation that has been happening. However, what I do think is the driving factor in all the new developments is that the way the systems were built encourages a fully realized concept, where as now it can be brought down into a more atomic level.

I'm going to shamelessly plug my site, www.toeat.com, and use it as an example. Several years ago (before the proliferation of broadband, and even stable dial-up systems), even if the software at hand were sufficiently mature to handle this type of application the bandwidth just wasn't there. Offloading work onto the client side was just an irrational thing to do, as the client can't be trusted (I'm sure anybody in this developer space can recall hearing that.)

Trusted how? Trusted to display the right data? Trusted to give back a sensible response? To me it is just laziness on the part of the backend to enforce data integrity in the intermiediate layer (between the client and the backend, usually the CGI layer).

So, now that we have good broadband and computers with enough beef to run these applications sufficiently, what now?

For me, I just keep hacking on my site ... maybe it makes money, maybe it doesn't. At any rate, I agree with you; A sustainable business model doesn't require buzzwords. If you can do the same thing without the technology it isn't innovative. It's innovative to make it work with that new technology in a way that is more efficient than what was there before. Too many people think that just doing it is the innovation...

Sorry for the long rant, I enjoyed the read.

-J

[Tom Gordon]

A real world comment from someone in small business: "[T]he fundamentals of a business, those being: Solving a problem with a solution customers love and will pay for."

So...
Solve a problem: Yes.
Customers love it: Yes.
Customers will pay for it: Yes. (and have been for 3 years)
Managed to get funding: No.

I've been reading a lot about VC funds, business angels startups etc over the past few years (ironically I've even written a fairly well regarded consumer guide to raising VC funding), and everyone seems to make it seem so simple. Follow the rules, raise the funds - easy, right?

Well, I have a product that meets all the above requirements, and in addition is globally facing, unique, profitable and proven in the marketplace. And I have never been able to arrange a meeting with a VC.

Any more tips? :)

[Vaibhav]

Very true!

This is one of several Web2.0 bashing blog posts I have read in just the last one week. I really hope people open their eyes and look beyond the fancy things (RSS, Tags, Ajax, Pastal colors, larger fonts etc.) to really see the potential of a new service. The fancy things are awesome, but they do not deliver success if the pain point is non-existent, if the pain point is barely address and most important if anyone can re-produce the same solution in weeks. The re-production is so true with most so-called Web2.0 startups.

I support the !=Web2.0 rally.

[Dave]

Uh.... "Dr." Scoble? Okay....

[Rick Segal]

Attn: Tom Gordon
Call me or email me directly and, poof, there's your VC meeting.. Nothing to it..

[Richard]

hmm, ajax eh? that name conjures up ill feelings about a soccerteam from Amsterdam.. ugh.. anyhoo, i agree with the theory that web 2.0 is a hype, but then again isn't everything IT these days?

[Matt]

It's a shame, how that happens...every useful idea ("Web 2.0" being a good example) gets turned into useless hype.

Don't talk about how you're Web 2.0...anybody can do that, and now that it's become cliche everybody has. Talk about what you learned from Web 1.0, and just how you're going to do better. (Indeed, needing to have that explained to you makes me suspect that you actually _didn't learn anything_ from Web 1.0.)

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're right. But, damn, I was hoping you'd go so I could finally meet you. That's the real reason for these conferences, of course, it's all about the eye-to-eye, the hallway, the elemental human communication enabled by no technology. That's so 0.1.

[Klas K.]

I agree that everything these days is web 2.0, and much of it is things that have been along for a long time, just renamed.

But this does not mean they are not interesting. Maybe now, with much more mature internet users, they can take off.

The ones that can present these technologies/services to the more average internet user,and solve a real problem, I believe, have great opportunities right now.

[Ken Nickerson]

Not to start a trend, but I've only been putting "Web 3.0" on all my pitches. Web 3.0 is LIKE Web 2.0, but amplified to "11" and typeset with a much cooler font. It's so hot, and clearly deserving of funding. There are some so-called Web 4.0 guys out there, but they are pretenders... Web 4.0 is just Web 3.0 with a new label. I hate those guys.

[Brent Ashley]

You might have a great time if you go to the Web 1.0 Summit (http://upcoming.org/event/20836)

The photo and comments from the first one says it all:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/13374753/

[Ian Landsman]

I just put my own rant up about this. I agree 100%. If it doesn't solve a problem who cares.

http://www.userscape.com/blog/2005/10/02/web-20-is-a-bunch-of/

[Chris Heuer]

Too funny - you have done a great job on explaining this problem from a valuable perspective. This was one of the thousands of reasons for putting on the Web 2.1 BrainJam on Friday (it wasnt all about money). I just wrote about this problem and created an entry for Web 2.1 on Wikipedia. My take is that Web 2.0 is about technology and Web 2.1 is about people.

While too much hype can be a problem, especially when it becomes overused and misused by hacks, it can also be helpful - when generally accepted understandings are created, this short hand lets you move beyond the hype into some deeper areas of discussion.

Of course we are also in agreement on another key point - never fund something because the hype is hot - fund it because it solves a genuine human need that provides some sort of value allowing the company to extract profits.

[Tom Gordon]

Rick, I will send you an email, and thank you for the invitation to do so :)

As for Web 2.0, I do think there's something interesting happening that people are *calling* web2.0, but I also think there's a confluence of different platforms and ideas that need to be stuck together. A freebie for anyone interested in fiddling (I am...): Stick the client-side javascript/look&feel of Meebo into a Konfabulator widget... Suddenly you have a "web2.0" application that's running locally instead of in it's own browser window, that still relies on the server to do all the work.

*muses* I wonder if you could put NetVibes into Konfabulator?

[Jim Manis]

Rick,

Your former boss could not imagine why anyone would need more than 640K of RAM. And the Internet? "Just a fad." And, holy crap, look at us now! The Web is both technology and culture, and, as culture, it moves so fast that it doesn't really exist outside the neologisms that describe it. When we look back on "Web 2.0"--and that will happen sooner rather than later-- we will likely say that it served as well as any other bit of shorthand to point (arbitrarily, non-descriptively) to a stage in the evolution of the Web during which the demands of the culture overshadowed our fascination with the technology.

Stop believing that the hype actually describes something real. "Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself."

The real history of the Web will be the history of the code, and how we did stuff with it.

Jim Manis

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Cliche of the Week: Web 2.0

Event of the Week: DARPA Grand Challenge 2005
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/
http://www.grandchallenge.org/

[David Gibbons]

web1 honeymoon :: USERS will CONSUME anything online
web1 business model :: ecommerce
web1 reality :: ecommerce doesn't work for all product consumption

web2 honeymoon :: USERS will CREATE anything online
web2 business model :: p2p-commerce (CBPP)
web2 reality :: not all p2p relationships belong online & not all products can be created by communities ... especially not for free

web2 has been with us since eBay ... it is nothing new ... but we're at a point where it can be sexy beyond garage sales ...

"web2" is a UI "attribute" ... either your website is interactive, or its not ... it's not a product, or a business model ... once the honeymoon's over though, the viable products & models who impliment web2 as their interface to their users will make the web1 success stories seem comparatively LAME ...

The primary (new) business model enabled by web2, namely Commons Based Peer Production, IS "the ecommerce" of web2 ... and there's a mass of gold in dem' der hills