MediaVidea

The Web, the giants, the opportunity

The time has come when we find more intelligent ways to ride on the success of web giants like Google, Myspace , etc because the Giants won't give way easily.

As far as I could understand the 'Web 2.0' idea, it meant web users having access to better tools for wholesome 2-way conversation on the internet. It never meant everyone getting rich from using those tools.

If better user experience meant getting rich, just staring at Flickr and Del.icio.us on a daily basis would have made many of us richer than ol' Bill Gates.

That’s why I do not understand the sappy sentimentalism of Om Malik when he does a nice linkbait article with a corny heading like 'Web 2.0: End of Innocence', pointing to the growing trend of web giants such as Google taking more control of their APIs and stuff.

In form of Pagerank, Google already had a monopoly over the current scene of web user experience, using crowd intelligence and all that hooey.

Basing business models on mashups was never a wise strategy. So when Google launched MyMaps, which let users create their own personalized maps, the days of mashups-using startups such as Platial are indeed numbered.

I wrote about it a posting titled “the end of web revolution”, where I talked about the next phase of web innovation being focused on making existing tools work better – a phase of refinement if you will – much like the aftermath of the earlier web boom at the end of the earlier millenium.

Take for example, the new Firefox bookmark extension for del.icio.us.

In fact, Firefox is going to be one of the pillars of next generation web innovation – people are very excited with the next version of Firefox which promises to have social networking features, which will be disruptive for many startups, in this case, Flock may get hurt. Soon, Firefox will have offline working capability.

Where is the money?
First of all, do not use the Web 2.0 term. It is old, get over it. Those who could have already made money out of it – Tim O’Reilly, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Six Apart, Craigslist and others.

Things that I think are trends for the future:

1. Attack Microsoft niches: For example, Zimbra is targeting Outlook with its Desktop version of Email application. As Om Malik says, Desktop Hybrids are in. Look closely at where Microsoft is making most of its money and whether you can do it better.

2. Build and sell tools for people to a have a better experience online – for example, people are making money selling people tools for posting videos online.

3. Game the big sites, ride over their success. (Ride a big star)
Not everyone of us are lucky (and smart) like Michael Arrington of Techcrunch blog network, who was only the second person after Tim O'Reilly to made big money on the idea.

On behalf of plebians like this writer, I have nothing but praise for people who successfully game big sites – SEOs (Gaming Google), SMMs( Gaming Digg), so on and so forth.

4. Continue tracking the changes happening in the internet space. Especially, know this: who sucks …and target that space.

Enough of preaching.
Let me first try and do some of thatmyself.

Labels: trends, web 2.0

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:28 PM