Offmessage

I’ve been struggling for a while with the fact that no one outside my close group of very Internet savvy friends has heard of Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, digg or any of the other web 2.0 “revolutionaries”. I heard Josh Schachter speak at Carson’s “Future of Web apps” and he referred to his lead users as The Priesthood. I’m honestly starting to wonder whether there is even anyone in the choir, let alone the congregation.

While mulling this over in the shower I remembered my post a few weeks ago about writely. It seems that all of us are susceptible to hype (even, gasp, me). I mean really. Is writely Microsoft’s pearl harbour? No. Is it even a shot across the bows? No. Does it signify that the world might change in a few years? Yes, but we knew that anyway.

Monoman points us to a very interesting set of articles about web 2.0 - the first of which (the investor) sums it up perfectly for me. 25,000 beta users means you got a good review on Techcrunch. It doesn’t mean you’re going to change the world.

Don’t get me wrong. There is space out there for some fantastic applications, but then there always has been. Doug and I wrote the first online supermarket in the UK for J Sainsbury’s back when it was absolutely bleeding edge to connect a web server to a database. Web 2.0 might be bleeding edge now, but it don’t mean the particular application will make it. Ours didn’t (Tesco beat the shit out of us) and by today’s standards we were built on solid foundations - first mover into an easily identifiable market with the backing of one of the largest brands in that sector and some very strong tech. It’s worth remembering that Flickr isn’t even Yahoo!’s largest photo sharing service, let alone the largest.

Just my 2.0 pence worth…