I have been doing lots of research on Web 2.0 lately and continue to be confused on the massive amount of companies attempting to make some value proposition out of products that just don't seem to carry any revenue model. Yes, advertising can get you somewhere but that should never be the entire equation. If you look at the trends surrounding web 2.0 it seems to be focused on social networking, information aggregators or some sort of porting of desktop application to the web. I have yet to see a creative player taking these trends and trying to make a model in which users will actually pay for the service. More importantly, look at how much investment is going into these areas and we already know at best there will only be one or two winners in each marketplace. Here are some examples that confuse me:
Digg.com - ok, awesome service, News, bookmarking and social networking all tied into one. I learn something new on that site every day, but I have never clicked on an ad and probably never will. I know there has been some talk about using the technology to create a review service for different types of products, but there are many dominating services already out there that let you get users participate in this way, i.e Amazon reviewing . And more importantly, nobody really wants to pay for this because they will just find it for free somewhere else.
Meebo - allows people to sign into different chat services directly through the web. Nice interface and it works pretty well, but how do they generate revenue. This seems to be a nice to have and I have yet to figure out what pain they are solving?
I guess my point is that when are we going to get away from "look another cool Web 2.0 application" and start talking about how we can solve people's pain. When we started Cardvio, we were looking for a way to change the way people send greeting cards because it's a pain to go to the card store and find a card, deal with addresses and getting it to the mail. I would really like to see more companies take 2.0 technologies and make applications that help solve a real need in the marketplace and porting desktop applications to the web doesn't count. It's about asking what the new level of functionality allows us to do that hasn't been done before. It's also about finding the pain, so here are some pain points that stand out for me:
Data management - I hate the fact that I have 5 to 10 versions of every document I ever make and I wish there was a better way to track, store and share these document in an easy way. I think about sending a document out to 5 people to review and having to manage edits from all of them.
Sharing - I have so much stuff on my computer from pictures, movies, music that just sits on my computer gaining dust. I would love a way to easily share all this stuff with people I know. I saw a demo of the IWeb product from Apple and thought it was a great tool, but what about the rest of us that live in the PC world.
Ok, enough ranting for tonight, back to work. And just in case, if you haven't already, use www.cardvio.com.
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