It all started one day, when one of my cousins persuaded me to join Orkut, a social networking site which lets you connect to friends -(long lost or otherwise). So I register myself ,browse through some profiles (many just out of curiosity rather than with the intention of making contact) and happily go back to my regular life for the day. It dawns to me the next day from various scraps that this is a open world ,where every one can see what anyone is doing.
Having been on the web for the past 10 years, I have seen the web go through several phases . I have always felt in sync with the changing ways of the web. But this time I was a little startled, felt a little out-of-sync with the current generation(I am not too old BTW). So I began wondering ,kind of trying to figure out the psyche behind this phenomenon. I had to ,coz if I don't understand it ,how will I ever be able to develop something using it which is why I started investigating it in the first place.
So I do some research and register with a whole bunch of Web 2.0 sites like facebook, flickr, youtube..you name it. These were my musings after a whole lot of time wasting on the web at company cost.
-We had a lot of emphasis on privacy, guarding our data and broadcasting information to only a small target audience most of whom we knew well . W2O has no concept of privacy, forget guarding data and if the target audience is not world wide, it not called broad casting anymore. I guess the term 'world wide web' makes more sense now than ever :).
-The second observation was about blogs themselves. So why do people blog? What drives us to spend time (sometimes several hours) on conveying our opinions and thoughts to a whole bunch of strangers without a face . We are a generation who struggle to make time for our parents, our children and try to keep in contact with closest of friends squeezing chit-chat into 1.25 hr lunches meetings. I am still not able to get it but hey, here I am blogging about it .
-My third and hopefully last thought is who is going to pay for all this. I mean , is this model strong enough to generate enough revenue to keep it going. Will those tweens , teens and young adults who make up most of the W2O audience have time for this stuff when they become busy, earning, responsible(Ahem!) adults. Even if they had the time ,will the interest hold. Targeted advertising and all that blah sounds good on paper but we have already seen it fall through once.
But despite all my reservations I still feel a tiny revolution coming through. A revolution of empowerment. Empowerment through knowledge sharing . We can leverage the technology to make us better consumers, better moms and dads, better friends and over all better human beings.
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6 comments:
Very Nice Anu!!
Way to go :)
Looking forward to more of your postings.
-Gowri
Thanks Gowri..I think you should write one too.. :)
BTW... i came to this blog through orkut.
Couple of points, we leave the digital footprints all over the place and as Tom Friedman says... it is everybody is a journalist, everybody is in public eyes with integrated forums of youtube, orkut etc.
2nd.. how do these web 2.0 start earning and provide roi to investors like me? More than 95% of these web 2.0 are yet to show a penny of earning...
Hi Amrit,
Thanks for the comments. Those were my thoughts exactly.
How is Web2.0 going to earn money? By targeted advertising. First you work on buiding up a faithful customer base which dedicates hours of it's time on a certain interest. Then relay products to them which are very relevant based on their interest. Any company would rather pay for a small group of relevant audience than vice-versa.
Having said all that, is it worth all the hype is something to ponder about. I think the hype is just a bubble and it will burst or maybe just lose steam but the general idea will hold in the long run just like .com era.
I landed on a book called six degrees. Which was basically an analysis of the social networking phenomenon. It's insane... this world of networking on www.
ANd financial models... i have always wondered about that. I for one have never clicked on a single advertisement online. I don't know if that makes me an alien. But then... obviously there is someone clicking away and making online advertising work. Its only slated to grow. But in general I do believe targeted advertising will work. The trick is to lure a person when he is not interested in buying/evaluating a product or service. If that barrier can be breached... orkut is going to be a gold-mine... anyways... i ramble.
Nice one..
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