DARRYLFELDMAN.COM

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I enjoy writing articles and publish them here, mainly about the internet and the trends and issues I think are interesting or important. The views I express are are entirely my own and do not represent those of my employers or companies I associate with.

Had great fun doing a session yesterday at ProductCamp Berlin – seemed to go down quite well, got some good responses and comments on the content. If you would like a copy (.pdf) download here.

Recently occurred to me that my lifestream is becoming a big echo chamber for all my integrated/aggregated feeds. I publish and share using wordpress, twitter, Ovi, Facebook, last.fm, Flickr, YouTube and Google reader from mac and mobile device. I aggregate using Friendfeed and lifestream.fm. and use a widget on my blog to share the combined social stream. I also have connected most of the services now to cross publish (e.g. Google reader to twitter). The problem is that I am fast losing track of what is connected to what and ending up with a kind of confusing social soup with an ‘echo effect’ whereby a posted item is duplicated in my aggregate stream due to the cross publishing effect. As more services come online and the API’s become ever more interoperable plus the volume of items shared increases and publishing/lifecasting becoming something we can do anywhere/anytime I wonder where this will lead. The noise to signal ratio will increase steeply and potentially be a real turn off. The tools need to be smarter and already I notice some services are removing duplicate feed items which is a good start. I need a cross service lifestream management tool that makes it easy to control what I publish where and when…mmm…maybe a startup idea.

This got me laughing. A real world mashup – a book about micro blogging available in e-reader format…that’s a strange and wonderful paradox which somehow defines the current state of ‘Content’. In terms of the standard definition even wikipedia struggles to define it…this description is obviously out of date but still left me cold and confused. Clearly I think there is a need to try and clear things up and redefine the term a bit and thankfully a number of people have tried – Content even got it’s own 2.0 moniker in recent years which (although irritating) is quite useful in bringing things at least up to date. Econtentmag puts it so…”As with its Web 2.0 counterpart, Content 2.0 includes structuring content with adherence to openly developed standards, collaboration, and mashups—all delivered in highly visual ways.” This is OK but does not help clearly define it. O’Reilly.com blog has had a go in defining  Content 2.0 (see table below) …which is all well and good but doesn’t cover the contextual aspect in terms of the ‘Who, What, When and especially Where’. Content 2.0 is all about being mobile – location aware content is here to stay.

The next generation of smart content services (well in fact they are all ready here) will take full advantage of the rich metadata and services available (geotags, microformats, API’s, etc.) to provide a richer and more engaging content experience. These experiences go way beyond the simple paradigms of creation and consumption and enable us to look at and participate in content in new ways. Imagine for example being able to wander through a city listening to a playlist constructed of songs that are currently popular with the locals or bars that automatically compile playlists based on the tastes of people present. I am anticipating some really cool content related apps with the next wave of location savvy phones and expect the major the players to be focusing on this in 2009.

More and more I wonder why apple chose to not ship the iPhone safari with a flash player support, seems crazy to me considering the multimedia capabilities of the phone and the fact a LOT of websites depend on it (I couldn’t access the lego online shop on my iPhone recently) . One excuse I heard from Apple is that the touch interface would not work with most Flash media but I don’t buy this. Steve Jobs has been critical of Flash for the iPhone in the past, suggesting that the mobile version of Flash isn’t powerful enough for the iPhone, and that the Mac version is too bloated for mobile gadgets – I don’t buy this either…Nokia have a version of the Flash player running on their handsets fine. From the Adobe camp we hear “We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.” This is bollocks too…mainly because this should have been sorted out a long time ago before even the 3G shipped. On top of this and to my amusement I saw on the BBC today a story about how Apple’s latest iPhone ad is misleading because it does not offer ‘The full Internet” on the phone, the ASA has received complaints from consumers claiming that lack of support for Flash and Java means that not all parts of the internet are available on the iPhone. Well if the rumours and press statements are correct we can expect a Flash player for the iPhone soon, but I am not so confident due to Steve Jobs arrogance and bad relationship with Adobe. Shame because this would improve the iPhone browsing experience considerably for us (the people who pay handsomely for the device and app content), maybe another recent example of Apple not caring too much about their customers and product quality?

Hype over
Now all the hype is (mostly) over I find myself along with a great many entrepreneurs, founders and investors are wondering what happens next. Clearly we have witnessed something important over the last 5 years a democratising shift on the web bringing a wealth of new technical innovations, standards and interoperability and a change in user behavior online that is driving the growth in social networks – something significant has happened, a tipping point or whatever you may want to call it. As O’Reilly the self proclaimed ‘inventor’ of web 2.0 pretentiously puts it “Web 2.0 is a transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterized by harnessing collective intelligence, openness, and network effects.” I agree to this statement, however this vision is currently a technical one and doesn’t really address the reality of building a real business on these principles and actually making money. Most of the companies who are driving web 2.0 (apart from the Yahoo’s and Google’s who make money from advertising) are still struggling to monetise the phenomena in a sustainable, long-term way, instead chasing short-term key performance indicators in the hope of a successful exit. I am hoping that the arm waving web 2.0 evangelists and conferences organisers start to take this into account and start to apply their thought leadership to the challenge of monetising web 2.0 and building sustainable businesses from it.

Investors losing confidence
The over hyped darlings of web 2.0 are still riding the wave of angel/VC funding gained from early market moves and with audience numbers growing – and are looking at a future of being bought out by Microhoo or whoever. This conveniently steers away from the business model problem but also means that web 2.0 companies don’t have to get creative and find a real business strategy – thus the danger is web 2.0 is becoming a fluffy add-on for traditional ‘business as usual’ (advertising/subscription/commission) web sites and is not redefining or transforming anything from a business model perspective. This is a real shame as the potential to test/iterate/improve any kind of models on the web is possible. There is evidence (and I have first hand experience) that many investors are losing faith in the web 2.0 phenomena, after 5 years of experimentation and ongoing investment there has been little to show in terms of real returns. Investors see the only real opportunity to realise any cash is to jump on the already successful 2.0 players…consolidation is coming (just like last time) and the big guys will get bigger and the smaller underdogs will sadly disappear. FT.com have an interesting article on this, claiming that this coupled with the coming economic downturn will help to dampen investor attitudes towards social media and drive many startups into the ground.

Business unusual
The fact that mainstream audiences are adopting new and innovational services is great and what many of us who have been working the web for over a decade have been waiting eagerly for – the only snag is how do we go about building new and sustainable businesses on this. Most current web services are positioned as ‘free’ which is great from a consumer perspective but leads to situation where web 2.0 businesses are not monetising their core assets (content, levels of user engagement, …). Obviously there are opportunities to charge for add-ons and exclusive content but it takes a long time and a huge audience before this makes sense. Other web services are ‘free’ but only until a point comes when they feel comfortable charging customers, this point being one of critical mass and concept being tested and proved – this is also a challenge with fear of drop out when charges are introduced. So clearly there is a need for for some new thinking here, thinking that addresses these challenges and also leverages the collective intelligence, openness and networks effects that are web 2.0.