« Flasher vs Flashee | Main | Why I like the Web »

June 05, 2006

Web 2.0 is people

Web 2.0 is people: The cloying phrase carries new meaning... just as with broadcast television, the product isn't the content, it's the audience. "Why is MySpace worth over half a billion dollars without a proper revenue model? Why is Digg allegedly pitched at over $20m (at the last count) without any idea of where money is going to be pulled from? The answer is - data. Information. Marketing. Every detail about you and me. That is where the money is." The operating systems and file formats are fading into background commodities, but the real action is in proprietary data silos. That isn't necessarily a bad thing -- most of us use credit cards even though these accumulate hidden data about us too. We just need to know what we're getting into, that's all. More discussion at Slashdot.

Posted by JohnDowdell at June 5, 2006 04:57 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/7484

Comments

I'm sorry, John, but when I read your headline I imagined Charlton Heston shouting "Soylent Green is people."

On second thought, perhaps there is more irony in that statement than I originally thought.

[jd sez: Me, I keep thinking "Web 2.0 is Soylent Green?" and confusing myself.... ;-) ]

Posted by: Leif Wells at June 5, 2006 05:48 PM

Wow, what a poorly researched article. Digg took $1 million in venture funding? YouTube burns $1 million a day in bandwidth? Eh?

Posted by: Mike D. at June 5, 2006 05:48 PM

Web 2.0 is all about putting the creepy back in the internet... DatingAnyone.com... It's Stalking + Myspace + ColdFusion + Ajax. Triple play eh!..

Posted by: jared chandler at June 5, 2006 07:22 PM

If the title of your post is true and all the value is in the audience/data, than the risk-assessment of these large emerging data-silos is far from over.

With the net neutrality debates and the recent outcry re: phone company records and China (Terry Semel's various ball-dodging statements re: position on censorship & china, creating a PR backlash against Yahoo... and Steve Gillmor's memo to bill gates - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor/?p=271), anyone looking at these companies and trying to PREDICT what they will have the legal right to do with this data is entering unchartered waters. It's one thing to have the content, the technology and the traffic upon which to build a business; it's another thing entirely to craft a model that leverages these assets.

Posted by: Megan Cunningham at June 6, 2006 08:24 AM

right on Megan!

Posted by: Chris Davis at June 6, 2006 09:33 AM

Mike - you need to do YOUR research!!

You Tube is burning $1 million a month in bandwidth. No web company would stay alive burning $1 million a day except for Yahoo, Google, eBay.

http://blog.forret.com/2006/05/youtube-bandwidth-terabytes-per-day/

Posted by: Jason at June 8, 2006 06:28 AM