The Home Pages of this New Era
Pithy comments in Charlie O’Donnell’s post I’m off eHubwatch! and a followup:
“I think the web-based features that are appearing all over the place will be the home pages of this new era — many will be abandoned by their developers and left to die a slow death once the developers realize that they don’t have many long-term users. And others will be cultivated and slowly grow into businesses. In that respect, I think Ning is the new GeoCities.” - Scott Moody
“…that sounds right on. And it looks like Squidoo will be the new About. This whole web 2.0 thing is getting pretty retro….” - Pete Cashmore
There has always been a place for speculative ideas and proposals. The difference is that now, many of the ideas can be tried out with relatively little time and money, specifically, those that relate to consumer-ish web services. These can achieve the appearance of depth and capabilities that they may not actually have yet, or ever, though…
An analogy:
As a young research guy, I obtained one of the first prototype HP Laserjets in the early 80’s, when everyone else was using dot-matrix printers or handwritten transparencies for presentations. For some time after I started using it, people would occasionally complain about my speculative and draft memos and presentations when they were circulated for discussion, because they looked too “official”, even though all that had happened was to write up some notes and format them for printing. People were getting the impression that the draft was a done deal, because before that, memos and presentations didn’t get cleaned up until they were pretty far along. In most cases, they really were intended as starting points for discussion.
I think of many of the new web services as being something like those draft notes, but wrapped up in code rather than print. Seeing a storyboard works better than reading a requirements document for many people, and working with a live system works better than walking through a storyboard. The underlying code at many of these sites often just represents an idea in development, rather than a plan for a product or even a feature. But it works far better than a written paper would to communicate an idea, and flinging it out onto the internet can help find an audience for the idea, if not the business.
Tags: web2.0, ning, squidoo
October 25th, 2005 at 8:21 am
Excellent point… we conceded that betas weren’t done in the past because they looked awful and hardly worked. Now, they look pretty slick and it makes the audience expect more.