Monty Flinsch

I’m sure you’ve heard of Twitter, the micro blogging startup from Obvious in San Francisco.  Twitter has a simple purpose, allow users to post small blurbs of text (tweets) to the service which are read by an individual user’s followers.  It’s a sweet service and does one thing really well.  More than a status or presence message, and less than a blog post, Twitter fills a void in the 2.0 space.  The product emerged in an organic fashion and given the rather simple and inexpensive development pathway (read Ruby on Rails) did not require a traditional start up approach.

Guy Kawasaki has launched an RSS aggregator called Alltop that resembles Twitter in that it also does one reasonably simple thing quite well.  Both of these services are great examples of what I think is the next hot business trend: the Micro StartUp.

Venture capital has clearly adapted to this trend as can be seen with the emergence of the Y Combinator and the Founders Co-op among others. The business model is radically different from traditional VC models in that the initial investment is in the range of $10k to $20k instead of low to mid seven figures.  Business plans are eschewed in favor of the ability to rapidly produce a functional application.  Business models are often left in flux in favor of achieving first to market status.  I’m still not sure how Twitter plans to monetize their service.

I’ve been preaching about opening access to content production with wikis and blogs and how this represents a radical power shift in the publishing industry.  I think the micro startup phenomenon is evidence of a similar trend in the arena of idea realization.  How cool is it that a small group of people can launch a product to a global marketplace with a tiny budget and a project life cycle that is measure in weeks rather than months or years?

Given that both the technology and business case for much of what we’re doing in the web2.0 space is still emerging it really makes sense to me that we try small steps that can be easily realized rather than grand unification projects that often spend longer in development than the projected life span of the product being developed.

I’m thinking this is cool.

There’s a fair amount of hype these days regarding web2.0 and whether it’s real, over, or just another tech trend that fails to materialize. Google web2.0 and you’ll find a pretty deep list of links including a nice overview in Wikipedia. Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media characterizes web 2.0 as:

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform” (link)

Ok, that’s pretty cool but what’s he really saying, and what does it mean for the average user? I’m pretty sure business revolutions are rare, and I’m absolutely sure that web2.0 isn’t a true revolution. I do however think it’s a pretty significant evolution of what the web was intended to be in the first place.

Web1.0 was all about content and the ability to publish to a global audience with a limited amount of overhead. HTML provided a simple format for delivering words, pictures and other media and linking between documents. Browsers enabled regular people to consume this information without having to know much about technology other than how to drive a mouse.

Today’s web is still anchored in content, as it should be, but it is increasingly about functionality and what the user can do with the functionality and the content. To me the fundamental difference between web1.0 and web2.0 is the level to which the user is actually involved. Web1.0 users consumed. Web2.0 users contribute, or at the very least participate. User contributions are at the key of leading web2.0 sites such as flickr, digg, and youtube. While contribution has been around since the early days of Usenet, what we’re seeing today is a democratization of the level of accessibility the user has. You don’t need to be a geek to upload a video to youtube.

So it it web2.0 yet? I think so. Average people are interacting with web sites and applications as if it were normal, google is now a mainstream verb. My Mom probably doesn’t understand what cloud computing is, but she relies on the cloud every day for her email services, but who cares if she knows what it’s called. It’s become part of her life.

So if my Mom is using participatory web services and contributing content to the interwebs and relying on the cloud for her data storage and features isn’t it time to admit that we’ve crested the hill?