RockDr’s Web Log

These are my notes from a talk at the Future of Web Applications conference.  From a purely financial point of view, it’s a good survey of “Web 2.0″ companies, who is making it and who isn’t in the current second-generation web boom.

Topic: Winners, Losers, Companies to Watch

Speaker: Michael Arrington - TechCrunch

Win = liquidity event, goes public or gets bought

winners

• writely
• grouper
• bloglines
• myspace
• weblogs, inc
• flickr
• skype
• userplane
• del.icio.us
• newroo
• ksolo.com

very good bets

• digg
• facebook
• youtube - estimated to be worth $2 billion
• photobucket - put your pictures up, also video, not a destination site but you move them to a myspace, 2% of US internet traffic
• zoho projects - web 2.0 online MS office competitor
• stumble upon - growing by leaps and bounds
• popsugar - blog , celebrity gossip kind of thing, team of 5 people, power of blogs as a new publishing platform
• plenty of fish - dating site, run by 1 guy, total jerk, $300,000 per month off adsense alone
• netvibes - french company, raising funding, grew fast with no resources, ajax home page is what caught people’s eye and got them noticed

ones to watch

• jobster - lots of funding
• riya
• zillow
• flock
• sharpcast
• rocketboom
• 1-800-free411  (telephone number) - 12 second ad, but otherwise free 411, now 3% of us 411 calls
• oDesk
• SecondLife
• WordPress

 

what in the world were they thinking?

• inform.com - massive funding, wealthy founder, big co. news aggregator site with glowing NY times review, everyone else slammed it.   no traffic,  spent tens of millions
• gather - raised 8 million, entered a very crowded market, fighting a two front war, news (google news, newsvine) and trying to get advertisers
• pubsub - blog search engine, great tech, great co., two founders didn’t get along and they ripped the company apart, one founder had a profitable sale but the other killed it
• browzar - wonderful coverage, particularly in UK, new secure anonymous browzar, but people started looking at it and it was really just a shell on IE that was malware,spyware; could have launched with fewer promises and might have been OK
• squidoo - didn’t catch anyone’s eye, broken revenue model from the start, revnue so low they wrote ridiculously small checks to people
• jigsaw - a company that he’s called evil, one of the few evil companies actually funded by venture funding, people get paid for putting your business card info on the net, and then jigsaw will sell it to all comers; he believes it is allowing people to break a social contract;

 

Winners & Losers: Shared Attributes

Shared attributes of winners (other than the fact that they
won)

• passion for what they are doing - (opposite is MBA’s with a business plan that don’t even like what they do)
• doing something extraordinary (Purple Cow) - it catches people’s eye
• removing serious friction - making some process more efficient for consumers or business
• great founder dynamics - the team gets along - failed companies almost always say they hired to fast, hired the wrong people or they (hire slow, fire fast)
• never raised big money or raised it after they won
• perfect revenue model not required (e.g. youtube)
• and - launched their company with a post on TechCrunch of course

 

Shared attributes of losers

• poor founder/ team choices
• lifestyle / ego entrepreneurs
• raised too much money
• spent too much money
• forgot about scaling (e.g. friendster)
• over business-planned

---

 

What Server Platform

• PHP (most popular)
• RubyonRails (upcoming, but starting to see limitations)
• Java (serious applications)

Client

• .Net/ActiveX (no Firefox)
• AJAX (monster)
• Flash (growing)
• XUL/XAML (interesting)
• Adobe Apollo !!! no disparity between online and offline
  application

Market Saturation - what areas are still ripe for new companies &
products

Avoid:

• Social Networking - have to be pretty successful these days
• Social Bookmarks - (e.g. digg)
• Video - too many sites, 250 or more
• Photos
• Blogging./podcasting
• Portals/homepages
• Feed readers

Big potential:

• Platforms

• Desktop apps to Online - w/Ajax, Apollo

• Office Efficiency - in general, e.g. echosign

• Cloud Storage - omnidrive, many others, google, microsoft

• Identity -

• Developer Tools -

• Market Destruction - take someone else’s market away from an entrenched player

• ENTERPRISE - web 2.0 is working backwards, consumers are getting the good stuff first (VOIP, IM, etc.) launching a blog in this area from TechCrunch - salesforce.com is an early example

 

NOTE: Best entrepreneurs avoid this type of advice i’m giving you entirely:  Invent a new market!!!

 

Questions &Answers

-outsourcing? : always hard.  no one has a good experience with elance;  New service odesk similar to elance but it works takes a picture of person’s screen six times and hour and so you know if they’re working, if not they don’t get paid

-desktop vs. online?: thinks there’s still a big place for desktop superior storage and functionality, online is good for collaboration and sharing

-enterprise class?: he would advocate building on salesforce.com or something similar

-NY times just doesn’t get the web, so any company that launches there automatically pisses him off

-shopping?: really likes amazon and doesn’t see how people will compete

One of the most interesting aspects of my work right now is building out passion-centric communities around Autodesk products. The most exciting one is for 3d animators, and is called AREA. Tens of thousands of users have registered and hundreds have uploaded their own personal portfolios of their work for public display. It’s really satisfying to have created something that is being used by so many users to feature their work.

The following are my notes from a related talk I went to at the “Future of Web Applications Conference”, describing the emergence of this kind of website.

---

The State, Future & Business of Passion-Centric Online Communities

Ted Rheingold – founder of dogster/catster – ted@dogster.com – blogs: blog.dogster.com  spideysenses.com

Complete presentation here: http://blog.dogster.com/2006/09/19/teds-talk-the-future-of-web-apps-conference/

Passion-centric online communities are spaces dedicated to a single particular interest they usually include human profile sharing, posting of passion-specific items and offer members opportunities to express their enthusiasm for something

Really all about amplifying passion

Core components

• entertainment
• sociality
• information
• services

Other likely features

• design, copy and UI have to reflect site user’s passion and amplify it
• moderation is key
• clear ground rules are critical
• lots of opt-in and opt-out policies , member is in control of their experience and communications

Sincerely cannot be faked

• it’s not about leveraging user to create content, it’s about offering features and services users can leverage
• people’s passions don not fit into silos, verticals, cannot be commoditized
• monetizing will not work
• do not use out of the box community software that’s not topic specific

dogster - home page is a mess, but people cannot help but click on things
catster, different community so needed different cat colors and theme

people’s pages are like their lockers in high schools, they put up all kinds of crazy stuff on their own pages

• forums, groups
• 20.5 million virtual treats given
• 4,200 groups
• 50,000 pet diaries
• 1.3 million photos

---

Business — not too many revenue options

advertising and sponsorships - good place to start, sponsorships better than ads,

subscription programs - good goal is that the community should be self-supporting

selling products that are member-made or site-specific, even better than membership fees for community to support itself

How to make advertising work

• keep your ad sales inside, no one will be able to convey your passion better than yourself
• (Cost per thousand) CPM is almost dead, for an advertisers message to be heard in the site voice and in placees where memeberrs are receptive to messaging
• require advertisers to offer something real to the community, something that requires them to participate and become trusted

Circle of Trust: Dogster –> Community –> Advertisers

Advertisers need to work with dogster to offer something of benefit to the community.  Does the community understand and appreciate the offer?  if not, then don’t keep it

Generalized Thoughts:

For every passion there will be a dedicated ’ster’ and theire can easily be more than one popular one per passion

• there will be tens of thousands of passion-centric online communities in 5 years
• Public APIs, badges and mini-site widgets will bring communities to where the member already is
• Public/open ID systems will be used
• the web is just the launching point, think cell phones, MMS, PDA’s, console-gaming, hand-held games, DVRs, car-based - communities will meet where their members are

---

A look at some really cool ones:

deviantART

• $0 in funding , 2 million members
• revenues from subscriptions and orders of member art
• advertising revenue is just gravy, used for R&D
• strong rules & etiquette policy

amateur illustrator – based in UK, brand new

CNet – featured members, lots of passion, lot of community

PopSugar – great community based around a news and content site

model mayhem –really well-defined etiquette necessary for this content

MLG - major-league gaming – averaging hour-long visitor sessions; don’t even try to monetize website

Yahoo Autos Custom  –Very successful, hardly supported, and so compare to some other attempts:

Carspace - created and supported by edmonds - doesn’t really say ‘car’ enough, not custom enough to the community and their passion, wouldn’t know it was a car site other than the logo

boompa - unfortunately white background, really all about what car lovers want, doing much better than the edmonds site,

faniq –

• all for sports fans
• good job of replicating their environment
• every team has to elect a commissioner that is the moderator
• more about respect

feelingbullish.com - one of the few communities that is actually working based on a reputation system without, lots of people have had trouble with reputation systems being gamed, (my note: here there’s an external realtioy that drives the reputation value)

My bloglog – what’s really interesting is that most all the information comes from two lines of javascript in my blog to present a badge.  you don’t have to make the community if you can tap into one

famster – sharing families online - first priority has to be protection - Ted expects to see TONS of family sites

clubmom – getting more traction now, but lots of partners, doing well on advertising

minti - a baby site - like that they make their home page the latest activity

teachade - for teachers

crafster.org - crafts and craft advertising

vampirefreaks.com - goth enthusiast site - 600,000 members, 4 million forum posts, band listing, really get into theme -  don’t do groups, they do ‘cults’ - on another similar site instead of a “shopping cart” was a ‘”coffin”

yourclimbing.com - done with drupal, nice to have a face on the home page

yourmtb.com – “enthusiast-in-chief”right there on the home page

cute overload –just using blogging software - "commenting is community" - every day
featuring a different picture  best use of ning, topic agnostic ning, caption
me tool allows you to label a photo

An example of "digital doritos"  - addictive stuff  - "this is great, this is better than working" : stuffonmycat.com, cats in sinks, kittenwar, catsthatlooklikehitler.com

twitter.com - cell-phone based communities coming up, where people post via text messages and photos into blog entries

BANC - bay area nerd core - created as kind of a tag and nowinstant community that spans across sites and techniques:

• http://banc.slide.com/
• http://upcoming.org/group/720/
• http://www.flickr.com/groups/banc/
• http://www.last.fm/group/BANC

---

Applications for community usage are coming up around console-games

Every piece of software would really benefit from a community if it had the right rules and sharing features in the software

OK. So I couldn’t resist leaving the classic subject line “Hello world!” for my first official blog post . At least the first one that I half expect someone might someday read.

Honestly I’m not sure where I’m going with this.

Why blog?

My overriding reason against for resisting it so far is a feeling I’m probably not egotistical enough to do a blog. The more I look around at blogs the more I think it really is true what I heard at the “Future of Web Apps” conference: “never underestimate the egos of bloggers”. A lot of blogs give me the impression that the only reason someone regularly blog, unless it’s a part of their business, is that they have a really big ego. It seems like that is what it would take to believe that people all over the web really want to read your half-baked thoughts you post in a few spare minutes every once in a while.

On the other hand, at the same conference, I got really excited about the idea. It really gets back to what I love about the web, what fascinated me with it in the first place and keeps me going: universal publishing and global availability of information. I’ll probably never forget a statement from the keynote speaker at a MacWorld conference in the mid-90’s who said that the web represents “the possibility that everyone on the planet would have access to the sum total of all human knowledge”.

Obviously that’s a bit over the top, but what excites my passions about the web and keeps me engaged with my work is indeed the scalability, the fact that one can go to the relatively simple effort of publishing a basic web page with good information and hundreds or thousands of people may read it over time.

The more I got to looking at other people’s blogs the more I thought I could certainly do as well, or better, and type some interesting things. But why? For what motivation?

So this blog is essentially an experiment so far as I’m concerned. I’ll try to create a quality post once in a while when the spirit moves me and I think I have a topic worth writing about, and we’ll see where it goes.