does web2.0 connect with the masses?
Posted on | July 31, 2006 | 1 Comment
skeptic from dead2.0 started an interesting series of posts, asking his mother – who he claims has been an average internet-user for years – about her knowledege of substantial web2.0-buzzwords. the subject of interest is given 30min, researching the given term on the web. covered so far: RSS and Wiki. unsurprisingly, the candidate has never heard of both, and wasn’t able to give a proper definition even after research. sure, you might argue that the whole thing is scripted/a hoax…but still, it mirrors my personal experiences.
I know a lot of tech-savy people who haven’t discovered the possibility of reading blogs via feedreaders/RSS yet (yeah, they still visit blog-websites with their browser [good for advertising at least]… if they read blogs frequently at all). many of my friends respond with ‘how’s that spelled?’ after directing them to my flickr-page. and most of my peers, who are on the net since the late nineties, haven’t even heard of the web2.0-meme.
so what does that mean? when starting to develop a web-application, think of the long tail of users – i.e. that 98% who won’t use be introduced to your product just because it’s got fancy features like tagging, RSS-feeds or – even more abstract & irrelevant – an AJAX-driven user-interface. while a TechCrunch-review might help to gain momentum, it won’t bring continuous traffic. this goes especially to all the ventures trying to move office-applications into the online-space – the more I try out, the more I lose faith in them (check my Office-is-dead-series for more details).
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August 7th, 2006 @ 8:02 am
[...] For one, I think this era of “Web 2.0″ will last for a while, and could even span a couple of bubbles. Part of the reason I believe this is because the term is so nebulous, few people can truly define it (although there have been numerous mediocre attempts). Going along with this is the fact that the term spans so many types of technologies, many of which have little to do with each other (sure, you can link up podcasting with social networking, but they are not inherently related technologies). As a result, we are using a catch-all phrase to follow multiple trends. I liked Michael’s take on my Ask Skeptic’s Mom’s series to summarize. I don’t think it’s hard to envision several mini-bubbles/booms occurring over the next 2-5 years, all surrounding ‘Web 2.0′ as a concept. [...]