Category Archive

I like Web 2.0. It’s a great idea and a fantastic buzzword. It allows me to seem “in the know” to people who are only just beginning to get Web 1.0.

But the problem is that Web 2.0 seems to have a slight identity crisis, certainly within the business world. A lot of discussion has happened and is happening around the idea of revenue and cash flow for web 2.0 businesses.  This comes on the back of Twitter securing $15m funding for continuing to grow it’s business, when there are many in the business world who are asking where the business model is.

This article in the FT a few days ago, it suggests that most financiers are at the very least unsure about why they should invest in a company.  Web 2.0 to them is about social online behaviour, and so far, very few of the recent startups has shown enough promise to start making money.  Twitter, for example, is being backed because of the strong early adopter user base it has grown very quickly.  The interesting thing is that there’s still no obvious business model, even now and it’s been going a while.

But maybe the key is that it is changing our online behaviour.  It used to be just about email and phone, then came online ads, and now it’s about putting out your online personality.  This will create groups (I don’t want to use the word “crowd” here) that can then start to become the next business communities.  So maybe, Twitter will just become a community around which business is done.  What business and how much that will make for the users or for Twitter is unknown, but Dell and others are beginning to use Twitter to get information out there about their businesses.

Some of the other businesses that are touted as Web 2.0 are Slide (how it’s worth $500m I will never know) and Ning. Because all of these businesses start with open source software and tend to be beta versions at launch, then the technology tends not to be the valuable part.  The value appears to be in the number of users that they can get as quickly as possible.  So making something that is “useful” and/or “fun” for a large number of people appears to be how to make a Web 2.0 startup. Monetisation is not the key.

Jemima Kiss points out that it’s not simply enough to look at the finances of a business.  Web 2.0 is still young as an industry (if indeed it is a separate industry to the “normal” web) and these businesses springing up are less about the traditional and more about the innovative side of business.  Maybe Web 2.0 is the future of all business and maybe it is going to be much more disruptive than even we are seeing now.

My opinion is that Web 2.0 companies are here and here to stay and I like them.  I still fail to see how Twitter is going to make a lot of money (and certainly not out of it’s current user base) without someone there creating a micro-payment model (of some sort) on top of it.

The key to a successful Web 2.0 company appears to be finding the right angel to invest at the start (if needed) and the right VC to fund it after the initial launch, and the right company to purchase after a short-ish amount of time.  It’s less about the business model and more about fashion.  Maybe the business model is more like that in that it’s more of the web’s “luxury item” than previous companies were. Luxury and fashion may be the way to view Web 2.0.

I was just chatting with my mate James Ogley (a curate in the Church of England down in Bursledon and also a SuSE evangelist) and we were just trying to figure out if it’s possible to create a feedback loop.

While it may or may not work (or be socially/internet responsible) it is something that should be considered.

If networks such as friendfeed did something like auto-post comments to another social network, and then that network auto-posted those comments back to friendfeed you could end up with a feedback loop very easily.

The thing is, has this been done, and if it hasn’t how do you stop it happening?

Every post must have a unique URL against as an identifier of course, but if when you pull a post from somewhere else it gives it a new unique URL, then what’s to stop it being a perfect feedback loop?

I’m not suggesting this is a good idea as it’s likely that at least one of the networks online would be overrun and brought down because of it.  However, maybe there needs to be a more robust solution for handling posts posted in one place being sent to another.  Maybe a post should only have 1 unique URL.

The problem is, that if you use a multi-posting client like twhirl then one post to twhirl can create 3 identical but essentially unique posts elsewhere.  Which one is the master post?

This could be a problem folks…

Over the past few years, I’ve watched and been a part of several social networks. My favourite (currently only) is twitter.  I have developed lots of friendships over the years, some entirely online, and some I’ve made online and continued in real life.

What I’ve seen before, but I’m noticing more and more is something I like to call spamship. What this is is a person making a cursory link between themselves and yourselves on a social network.  The better ones at it make an attempt at a conversation, but there are enough out there who are just setting up profiles to gather “connections”.  The worst ones are those who think that the number of friends on a network somehow signifies either popularity or value or expertise.  It’s rubbish.

An added extra that has emerged is distributed spamship which is even more annoying.  Someone “friends” you on one social network, and then “imports” their friendships from that network into another network.  What happens if you’re on both networks? You’re automatically joined to them there too.

It makes the idea of friendship less and less useful and more and more annoying. It is friendship spamming and it’s something that I don’t like. The only beneficiary is the person who is doing the spamming as you end up with pointless connections that have zero value to you elsewhere.

I like the idea that twitter uses of followership. Where you choose to follow a person, and they can follow you, if they want. There is no need to reciprocate if you don’t want to. Twitter puts me in control of my own friends and means that I don’t have to follow anyone I see as a spammer that chooses to follow me.

What will emerge in the future is that followership is going to become a much better guide to expertise, popularity or value than the number of friends a person has.  I know this isn’t new, but it is going to emerge.

We need to organise our lives around something. The internet allows us to have massively connected networks but we just can’t cope for long periods with so many relationships. We will have to focus our time and energies on certain niches and networks whilst staying aware of the outside world.

Spamship will decline as networks mature.  We will need to be more in control of our networks than we are currently, but there will always be a need for openness and collaboration, and we shouldn’t stop people who wish to watch/follow from doing so. We’re all open for collaboration.

Wooohooo!

I’m going to BarCampLondon4! I’m really looking forward to it, having been to BarCampLondon3, and on a reserve ticket that time too (I really need to work on my timing).

Having said that, I only received an email saying I was first on the list and to reply by the end of the day.  It was sent at 4:10pm on a Friday, so I’m not sure if I had 50 minutes to reply or 7:50 to reply.  I hope he’ll take 2 hours!

Well, now to think of a talk…

Maybe my blogging over the next 2 weeks will help me! At the last one I did 101 uses for twitter which brought forth 75 uses in 30 minutes.  Maybe I’ll do a follow on talk.

If anyone who’s going (or isn’t) wants me to expand on anything on my blog, please let me know and I may do a talk on that instead!

One of the things I dislike about online “communities” is that there is often a nastiness that comes along with the interaction. The fact that you don’t have to meet a person to be in a dialogue with them means that you can pretty much say what you like. The gloves are off.

One of the things I really like about online “communities” is that there is often an openness and honesty that comes along with the interaction. You find out a bit more about the real person and some friendships can be created and massively enhanced because of the interaction.

It’s an inherent contradiction that the openness of the internet allows both openness and nastiness.  The worst part of this is that people online will often make assumptions about a person’s ideas or beliefs, and act on that understanding. The reaction of others can often taint a person online, especially in the age of “search” where nothing online gets hidden.

You can’t change other people, you can only change how you react.  If you don’t like the idea of the community being that open, then don’t become a part of it. Dialoguing is sometimes useful, but there can often become a point where it just brings both down in the estimation of everyone who views the interaction.

Reputation Management is a term that has started to appear because of this openness.  I first heard it about 2 years ago in relation to online, where a person in one of my online business networks started offering a service to get a person’s Google search results changed. It meant that things that were undesirable (including negative comments) were pushed down the list and replaced with a more positive view of that person, but the negative things could not be eradicated. It’s spin for the internet generation. Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, is an interesting case of poor reputation management in the fracas with his girlfriend.  Internet spin gone wrong!

I like the idea of reputation management, but I also find it slightly disingenuous. Part of what attracts people is the “warts and all” interactivity of the net. The fact that people/companies with spare cash can in some way portray a positive view of themselves is good sense in a business world, but a person with no skeletons is much more scary than a person with a few. In my view, it’s a balancing act.

What I much prefer is to be able to find other people’s views of a person (or company). If their view of that person is positive then I am going to be more favourable to that view than of the person’s “spin”. Kind of like an Amazon rating for people.

The problem with an amazon rating is that there are many types of people on the internet. Books are different, because the content of the book means that only certain types of people are going to read it. Books on C# will be read by techies. Mills and Boon by women of a certain age.  So the ratings are going to be from people with similar interests.  People are a different matter. They are a part of different groups and have different aims.  So how do you judge their rating?

You have to find people who know that person for the same reason as you may want to. In business that’s quite simple - to use their services or find out about them as a prospective client. That’s why businesses try so hard to get testimonials from their clients. However, they control those testimonials and what you see.  You never, ever see the bad bits.

When you are in an online community with someone, you have the opportunity to find out another person’s reputation from their interactions with others. Most communities have a friends list, and you can find those connections to you.  It’s the idea behind LinkedIn, because you are constantly working through your contacts to find other contacts, a partial trust has appeared, but there’s no rating. I like this approach to a point, but it attracts the wrong type of people in my view. People with a big contact base (sales people generally) mean you end up with a bunch of people all trying to get the biggest number of contacts.

In the end, the best way to manage a business reputation is for a company is for it to be the best it can be and to be clear about what it does. The community around it will then speak out loud about it, and the nay-sayers will be available but will be just noise.  That kind of reputation, where the negative is available, but outweighed by the positive says more about that company than any kind of management of what is visible.

Lots said… need to work!  I’ll probably talk about the idea of followership in my next blog… this one’s got too long!