Friday, October 28, 2005

I’m on a Web 2.0 kick lately. They say that before the internet crash it took millions to form a new startup. The first step back then was to get angel funding. Now in the web 2.0 era, there’s free open source software, cheap hardware/hosting, and built in revenue streams like adsense and affiliate programs. You can literally start you company from your garage on a shoe string budget and grow your company with revenue instead of selling your soul to investors.

The other part of the web 2.0 definition is that these new websites are services. Users and other developers should have access to your services so they can create all kinds of new tools that you would have never though of. Another aspect of a web 2.0 site is that they’re very community oriented. The users are in control of content. There’s sites like Flickr, Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us and more. Those are the sites that stand above the rest and a lot of them seem to just be hype. I saw one that reminded me of the internet boom and I was like, yeah so what? Another thing that I just heard in the web 2.0 podcast is that Digg doesn’t fully pay for it’s hosting. They have 7 servers and their own switch, etc but someone helps them out with that. Kevin Rose met a lot of people on TechTV and made some great contacts. He said that they wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for it with their adsense revenue. Interesting stuff.

One startup that I’m waiting patiently for is Squidoo. Seth Godin who wrote permission marketing and a bunch other excellent books that I read during the boom came up with the idea of lenses. 1 page guides to any topic. He believes that these pages will become more valuable to people looking for information than a seach engine. Think about the last thing that you searched for in Google. Did you find what you were looking for? If you did, you probably had a dig through a few pages of sites selling stuff to find the information you were looking for. Squidoo is hopefully going to filter out the noise better than the search engines with their new LensRank algo. We’ll see how that works out. I know I’ll be banging out all kinds of pages once the beta opens up.

Web 2.0 is the internet's 2nd chance. I’m sure that some people will believe their own hype and blow it again but some good is definitely going to come out of this.