My predictions

I’ve talked about web 2.0, talked about web 3.0, but today realized theres still a middle ground we have to reach in between the two. It’s quite a pain that I really have no idea when my friends do certain things online. While some use facebook for absolutely everything, this is most certainly NOT the best option. Throwing your data into their walled garden is one thing, but for this to be the one and only place you store your online data is quite stupid. Facebook will only open up when they’re absolutely forced to, and may not even open up then. To migrate ‘notes’ or rather blog posts out of facebook, or all of your pictures, or you’re messages can be an absolute pain. Why not use a service built for just those things, such as a wordpress blog, or flickr/picasa, or twitter/jaiku? Well most people don’t because of the simplicity of facebook being the central place for your data and your friend’s data.

Well there is a solution to it, though it’s not ideal yet, it will soon hit a tipping point of when it will be the solution. Well first I guess I should clearly layout the problem:

web 2.0 - the dynamic web emerged, users started publishing content
…. Mass amounts of data, problems getting to it all …..

thus in the future we have…
web 2.5 - content aggregation became nessecary, via friend feed

and eventually…
web 3.0 - the semantic web, services understand you and your needs and provide content around context

In short this is a small plug for friendfeed, but if anyone else knows of a better service to in essence create a feed of you, please send them this way. I’ll be posting a full review on friendfeed soon, but for the time being just want to point out the value in such a service. Right now I post on multiple sites, I twitter, I blog, I use facebook, I use smugmug, I use picasa, I use last.fm, I use ilike, I use librarything, I use tumblr, I use google talk, among others. While personally I might be a little more invested than most, still the point remains that a lot of people are on more than one of these services. While I know them and follow them on the ones I know about, chances are I will never see their flickr accounts, or last.fm accounts. While some people worry about privacy and this being a stalker’s nightmare, I really don’t see it making things that much easier. Much less, most people are making a pretty big assumption assuming that they’re worth being stalked. I personally hope I could have a stalker come out of such, as it would give me a definifitive answer that someone actually reads and find me interesting. I just hope she’s 5′6″, and a blonde bombshell, but then again I’ll take whatever stalkers I can get.

But the point remains that before we get to web 3.0 and the ability to deliver content based on context, we need to aggregate the content. Sites like friendfeed (and eventually socialthing) are a reasonable first step.

Check out my friendfeed at: www.friendfeed.com/craig081785

I’ve written many posts here about business, technology, and the like. The reason I’ve been so delayed in updating, in addition to the busyness of life, is because this post has been brewing in my head for quite some time. I just haven’t been able to sit down and actually compose it until now for some reason.

So many of my posts have been about the web and how things will change in the future. Well while in this post it is still strongly related I want to talk a bit more about the social aspect. Of how I feel the next generation will insight change in much of the world because of the web. With the web and all of its utilities, youtube, aim, twitter, email, people no longer feel they’re separated by thousands of miles. Also its allowed any old joe to take on the form of publisher. I’ll concede that my generation watches more television than any generation prior, that sex and STD’s are at a higher rate than ever before. But in large part I believe the whole of the generation is following and simply consuming then information put out by the generation ahead of them.

BUT, there is a small group within the generation that cares about change. That small group is now able to gather mass following, to cause others to thing, and to actually make a difference. This generation seems to have done this through simply expressing themselves. To them its not about making money, or having a cult following, its about personal expression.

Here’s a few examples of what I mean about people expressing themselves:

wefeelfine.org

Kiva.org

This week I want to talk about one of the hands-down best sites on the internet. Mint.com, in case you haven’t heard about Mint yet, it’s like Quicken or Microsoft Money just online. You create an account on the website, login, add your account information. From there mint connects to each of your accounts, pulls down your transaction history, automatically categorizes your spending into categories, and then will send you alerts for budgets or other settings via text or email. Oh, and best of all since it knows where you’re spending your money, it tells you how you can save.

So since mint sounds great and wonderful, and it indeed is, I’m going to jump straight in and start addressing issues people may already have about this kind of site. The first is security, why would I give all of my account information away to a single place so someone could walk in and take every penny I have? Well first account information is hashed, it’s not just sitting in some text file on some desktop, its quite secure. Next, well mint gives you warnings right? So if someone goes and buys a car with you’re credit card you’ll get a text message about it. Now I may be missing something, but my bank has never offered me that kind of service. Oh and best of all, just because you put your account information, you still have the normal security backing of your bank and liability.

Worried about a company having so much information on you? What if I told you in a matter of minutes if I know you’re name I could likely have your past 3 residences, phone numbers, and other information. Or for that matter if you’re concerned with a company having that information, do you pay cash for everything. Because if you don’t the credit card companies have just as much information, and they and other companies often sell this information. Mint.com promises not to do such. So if your argument is that you don’t want people to know that much information about you, its a very valid one, but hypocritical if you don’t always use cash which, which in ways can still be traceable.

Finally I just want to highlight my favorite thing about mint.com. They get web 3.0, sure they have a rich interface, decent categorization, and good alerts. But best of all, they know where I spend my money, they know generic stuff about me, but because of that they can recommend to me ways I can actually save money. Now it may be just me, but I’m pretty sure everyone out there would like to save money. So its great to show ways that I truly can save money, not typical propaganda that is a waste of time for me.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the valley lately around this very small startup, that has a few pretty heavy hitters. Between the four founders they have worked on nearly all of the Google products so many know and love, with the exception of search. Paul Bucheit, is even responsible for Google’s current motto, “don’t be evil”. These four guys not only are visionaries within the web space, they also know how to deliver a product, having helped build and scale gmail and google maps is indeed a noteworthy accomplishment.

But what about their current task at hand, to be web 3.0 and reduce the noise of all of the web 2.0 tools out there. Well, first let me summarize what friendfeed does. When you sign up for friendfeed you add your web 2.0 accounts (currently supporting 35), some of note are: facebook, google talk, iLike, digg, twitter, flickr, picasa, youtube, yelp, and others. Friendfeed then creates a feed of you, so you can send the link to anyone and they can have a single source for updates to all of your web 2.0 interactions. Friendfeed does do a little more than that though, they attempt to filter out some of the noise by grouping your interactions together. For someone like Robert Scoble that on a given day could post 1000 tweets, you likely don’t want to see each one as a single line item. Friendfeed will group these and give you a short preview, then allow you to drill down.

All-in-all friendfeed is a reasonable service and will continue to be talked about in the valley for the coming year and then spread elsewhere in the world. However there are some problems with the service. First is the lag time, due to the restrictions of some of the services they connect to, sometimes your feed is twenty minutes behind your original posts/updates. Though this is no fault of their own, but nonetheless something users will not be excited over.

But more importantly friendfeed doesn’t have a concept of context. This would be my number one complaint that they’re not approaching web 3.0 yet. My most likely favorite site (well second to twitter), which will be reviewed next week, does a great job of understanding you and your context. When it recommends something it’s doing based on your history and it’s knowledge of you, and its often right. Indeed grouping messages together does have value, but until it can show me the messages I want to see and hide the ones I do not I won’t be amazed.

Whether or not you should be on it strictly depends on your involvement in web 2.0 sites. If you’re on more than 5 of the sites listed in their 35, it may be a worthwhile investment. While it won’t make the noise quiet, it will likely reduce it by 10-20%, which is better than nothing.

Other sites to watch out for (if they ever release): socialthing

For those interested, my friendfeed

So this week they announced what many expected was coming the iPhone 3g. However off the shelf it’s still not web  2.0, while a great device its not a web 2.0 device yet. Apple without a doubt understands user experience, but they do not fully grasp web 2.0 yet. Microsoft seems to even have a better understanding with the products they are looking to role out with Mesh and their enterprise social/collaboration tools. Lot’s of great applications were highlighted at the keynote, but only one of those talking about publishing content (with the exception of mobileme, which is a paid service). While there’s no doubt I will be getting the new iPhone when it is released in July, I will not talk about how it is a great web 2.0 device.

If the application store is as open as Apple alludes to it being, then I can see how it will quickly become a web 2.0 device. Loopt is likely the strongest contender for helping to build a location based social network, and when they release for the iPhone can turn it into a web 2.0 device. I’ll be most anxious to see how the push based services they announced will help to allow developers to turn it into a web 2.0 device as well. If I had to have my application constantly up it just doesn’t work out as a full enabler for web 2.0. BUT if you allow notifications to be regularly pushed it just simplifies and increases the regularity of community and people staying in touch.

The tipping point though for me at least will be if or when Apple finally allows video on the video. No, not playing video, but recording and streaming video. The kind of abilities available on a nokia n95, or available in my apple computer through iChat. When I can pull my phone out of my pocket and display to the world what I’m doing or where I’m at, you will have a device that allows you to communicate and most of all collaborate like any other before. It doesnt require more power than is already there, in fact I can record video on my jailbroken phone right now. The nokia n95 does a great job of streaming live video to qik, which is how I watched much of the Apple Keynote, it simply takes Apple finally understanding web 2.0 and embracing it.

While I may or may not know how to be successful in silicon valley, I feel pretty confident that I can point out a few ways to not be successful in valley terms. What follows is my thoughts on how you can best limit yourself to own, run, or be involved in the entrepreneurial spirit of the valley.

The first is keeping yourself in a bubble, by not diving into the new technologies, new services, and new age of the web there’s little possibility you can be at the next steps of it. While I concede you don’t always have to explain it or understand it, you at least need to use it. The prestigious attitude of standing against something just for the sake of it won’t get you very far when people attempt to find you and communicate and can’t. There will be few individuals in the future similar to Jobs and Ellison that are a box of mysteries that no one has access to. Instead you will simply filter out noise that is relevant, but regardless your presence will be felt. It’s not only about making your life easier with useful tools like mint or dropbox and thinking about the next useful utility, but also about communicating and relating to others. Final thought … facebook be on it, twitter use it (don’t understand it, don’t explain it, just use it), friendfeed (jury’s out, but you better know what it is).

The second biggest thing you can do is to be patient. So many seem to sit around, wanting to have their own big thing, but are waiting for that one great idea to come to them. In most cases something probably does, the only problem is they’re not seasoned or practiced at building something. Yeah a few get lucky on the first try, but as a whole for those that are successful its due to persistence and not patience. Waiting for the right time in the market, the right time in your life, or just the right idea is wasting time you can’t get back. If you truly want to run something, start running something, and when the right idea does finally come along you’ll be prepared to build it up and run with it.

Third thing you can do is not to network. Yeah it’s easier than before to build a product and get people to adopt it because of the web, but that doesn’t mean you can do it on your own. If you want to have a great idea with a lot of potential go to waste, sit at home on a Friday night, work away alone and you will have no worries about having too much traffic or too many users. Most likely your idea will only appeal to you and miss various features and miss the needs of some of the users that would have been happy to tell you what they wanted.

Fourth, spend all your time networking. So you go to the events, meet the people, know people to fund you, have a great idea, and finally decide you’re going to actually start working on a product. The same night you sit down to code, you read of your product launching with someone else. With less funding, less knowledge, and less experience, all because they’ve actually been working on it. It’s a fine balance, but err on the side of not having every connection that you will need for a successful launch, and instead having a working demo or product to show to the connections that you do have.

There was a recent post over at ReadWriteWeb about how content is becoming a commodity. I don’t believe many people would argue with this. While at first this wasn’t something I viewed in a positive light the more I think over it the more I see some value in it. As content does become more and more of a commodity the value in who is publishing or producing that content goes up. Five years ago if someone would have talked about some trade-secret they learned about from Google many people would have perked up and listened. Today however rumors spread faster than ever and before you know it google calendars now predicts when your appointments are, puts them in your calendar, and sends you text messages with directions 30 minutes before each meeting. While this may very well happen some day, I’m pretty sure they won’t be rolling it out next week.

Now with so much content being produced and spread all over the place there is still some value in the quality of content (which there always has been). However, now there is much heavier focus on the source it came from. This comes to the principle of branding, and not necessarily like a wal-mart or coke brand, but a personal branding. My guess is that in the future, and by future I mean sooner than later (likely 2-3 years), personal brands as a whole will carry more weight than the companies they work for.

Take for example Digg, when Digg makes some announcement or stance a few people listen and it does get noticed. But this is only when the content or opinion falls within the Digg world. Meanwhile when Kevin Rose makes an announcement many more people than just in the realm of Digg notice. He’s a prime example of someone that has built a personal brand, he’s name carries weight, and more so than just that of Digg, Pownce, or Revision3 (even though they are nearly one in the same).

Some might view content becoming a commodity as a bit of a blow. I believe we will see more individuals emerge with an understanding of personal branding in part to help us sort through the content, but also to provide quality content in repeatable manners.

If you like the app shown above please check it out at: http://www.fotoviewr.com

Adobe’s former CEO, Bruce Chizen, when asked ‘What advice do you have for new/young public companies?’, gave a response of ‘Go private’. While partially a joke he went on to elaborate something that many businesses seem to miss on. The main idea is that businesses are very nearsighted in their focus, they look at quarterly goals and in some cases yearly, but not where they want to be in 10 years. When companies become worried that head count is high they simply freeze hiring across the board without thinking of its ramifications. Good people, well great people are truly hard to find, and when a company enforces a blanket hiring freeze they miss out on those few great people that they truly need to grow. Meanwhile when they decide they have bandwidth for 1000 new employees they open the flood gates and let the first 1000 that can spell their name correctly in, because they can. This short term focus in the long run greatly limits the ability of what a company can achieve.

In contrast a smaller company that is actually much more at risk of dying seems to have a better understanding of what their approach should be. While they may be understaffed and overworked, they firmly understand that they only have so many funds and therefore make wiser decisions when using them. The characteristics of the larger business and their short sighted focus leads to the cyclical performance that many experience over a few years, rather than a very steady growth they would like to maintain, and often leads to their end. A prime example would be IBM that laid off so many of their more talented people to lower their numbers years ago. As a result they lost their best workers and had many unexperienced individuals in there when they began hiring again. They are still working to catch back up to where they once were in the IT industry…

In part I wonder if being a private entity is really the only way to have the long term focus and not worry about quarterly earnings. Personally I have never been privy to this insight and may not be for some time, but I don’t foresee shareholders being patient enough to not punish a company if earnings are not so hot for a year or even a few quarters. So there may be nothing a large business can do about it, but I am surprised that more do not try.

So yesterday I posted around blurring the lines around your personal and professional life. Today I’d like to discuss a bit of the opposite of when companies blur the lines. Hopefully you don’t, but at first you may think how is this possible. Well first let me highlight some of what many feel are negative pieces, such as when an HR Rep who went to the same university as you looks up your facebook profile. You thinking this is private to friends at school may not regularly monitor the content that goes up there. This specific case is a very interesting one, and for the moment I’d like to stay clear of it.

Instead I’d like to focus on some of the areas where businesses undoubtedly should improve, and some notable ones that are doing that very well. I first would like to take (as per my usual) an example from twitter. Twitter is many things for many people, but it is extremely common to find people on twitter ranting about a particular service. While I may complain all I want about Comcast to my friends, they have little ability to do much to counteract this. But when I do it on twitter they do, and Comcast is one example of a company that is taking a very pro-active approach to managing their online presence. I take an example of a few months ago, when internet had been out at Michael Arrington’s house, who is the founder of TechCrunch. He twittered about this outage, and had a personal phone call from an executive in Philadelphia a few hours later. Sure, he’s a noticeable guy so they responded to him. To me the attention getter was when someone called comcast’s bluff they they only follow the important people, and any old average joe doesn’t get a response. That particular average old joe did, saying they make the best effort they can to reach out to everyone (HR Block, Southwest are also doing this quite well).

The other is a little less about blurring the lines, but I still think a great example of a business stepping out of their traditional roles. This one was a story relayed to me by a co-worker. Zappos, which is an online shoe company primarily, has a great return policy. In any case, if you don’t like the shoe after you receive it, just return it, and they’ll even pay for the shipping. This specific incident a woman’s husband had recently passed away and she was attempting to return the shoes. She gave the reasoning behind it, and the customer service rep proceeded to go an extra step and send flowers to the funeral. While to some this might be offensive, or at the very least outside the bounds of a normal company, it shoes a company actually caring for people, which wasn’t their core business. While I won’t go into details of how well this turned out for the company, it’s a great example of a company blurring the lines.

In the future I anticipate we will see more and more of companies doing this, actually caring about what someone says/thinks/feels not only about the company, but personally as well. As we get to this it will become less about the buck and more about meeting needs.