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The New Wisdom of the Web
theodp writes "In a cover story, Newsweek takes a look at the new wave of start-ups cashing in on the next stage of the Internet by Putting The 'We' in Web. Sites built on user-generated content like YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Digg and Facebook have all taken a page from Tom Sawyer's playbook, engaging the community to do their work, prompting Google CEO Eric Schmidt to suggest he finds MySpace more interesting than Microsoft."
He said more interesting, not better.
thisnukes4u.net
Does user generated content like seen on the sites mentioned equal quality reading? is it worth hours of browsing other people's randomly submitted content to find a few diamonds? how often do you find yourself spending time on those sites?
so other people create your "content" for free, and you get advertising revenue for having those same people look at the "content" created by others. what's not to love in a business model like that?
Google has its own pet project - the social networking site orkut, which has at least 14 million users which has been in beta for almost 3 years now...this appears to be in line with Eric's comments about the user-generated content web idea.
My sig has been answered.
go look at the videos and you will see a majority of them are copyrighted content (tv shows/clips and the like) and they have the excuse "it wasnt us it was one of our visitors
how they havent been shutdown is anyones guess, i guess the latest wave of sites is more based on copyright be dammned than user-based-content
I find watching paint dry more interesting than microsoft... what's you're point?
I agree though, user generated content means that users will be more likely to frequent the site.
Indeed, more heads are wiser than one. An old concept applied on a massive scale, and so far it works. The piece I personally like best in this article is from Craigslist's founder who points out that the reason his team is so scalable is because they provide self-service. Everything I ever built (including the latest Simpy) was like this, and I've always been happy not to have to hire a team of people to manage something that users of the system could handle themselves, or amongst themselves.
The other piece I like here is also from Craigslist guy, about not having to charge everybody. This reminds me of what I did with Simpy (see this Simpy + AdSense bit, and pay attention to the Q&A towards the end of the entry). People have been very happy with the simplicity of this concept, and no user has complained about ads - they don't see them... but others do!
Simpy
Why is everyone so happy in Silicon Valley again? A new wave of start-ups are cashing in on the next stage of the Internet. And this time, it's all about ... you.
Where's the "we" in "you"? If it's going to be about "you", that means all the "me" baby boomers are finally getting out of the picture. Does that mean there's no "I" in "we"? I'm confused.
There isn't a business plan behind Flickr, myspace, etc... that even comes close to Microsoft. CEO Google is full of himself if he thinks he can bolt one onto these nice ideas.
Craigslist is the only upstart that has leveraged Serendipity into a business plan AND provide a valuable service.
All MySpace is is a means of sharing personal information. Microsoft makes tools that can be used to drive the development of a variety of cool things, and enables MySpace indirectly with Internet Explorer. To a typical teenager, MySpace is more interesting because .NET is not interesting. To a person who wants to actually make something novel and interesting, Microsoft is a far cooler company than MySpace.
The internet was built by users, it only makers sense that as the tools to create content become easier to use more and more ordinary people are likely to create their own content. for all their creativity, large companies cannot create anything other than a standardized product, individuals on the other hand create content that companies would never even think of making.
Fool me once...shame on you, fool me twice...won't be fooled again (our president)
Slashdot agrees with you.
I've been working on a project called Appleseed, which is sort of a distributed version of MySpace/Friendster, but is turning out to be an amalgamation of gmail/flickr/myspace/livejournal. It's been slow going, but it's starting to pick up the pace, it's just been hard having to work full time and do this in my offtime.
That said, I'm disappointed that, with all of these social network oriented sites popping up, and all these new technologies being explored by commercial enterprises, that the open source community hasn't stepped up to the plate and offered free alternatives. Gmail? Flickr? Del.icio.us? Myspace?
I know the open source community can build reusable software that's as good or better than any of this, so why haven't we? Why are we still using SquirrelMail?
Unlike all the other purely web offerings imeem is built around a client and a distributed data model - making it technologicly the most interesting of the sites in the article. It's not been too successful so far but a lot of the smartest people I've met are using imeem - mostly because they're developers. It's really a shame, but the best technology rarely leads the market in popularity. .Net code as powers the windows client.
As a company imeem is doing good things for open source, I see that they're really pushing the development of mono, particularly on OSX where they're using it as a platform to run the same
There are clearly some good ideas out there right now and some of them are making good money. Personally, I think MySpace is lame, but I'm not 15. There's another site I've seen called catch27, which allows people to create fake trading cards of themselves and try to collect a deck of the most popular people. It seems silly, but it turns a profit. I have to wonder though how long a site like that will remain popular? Will MySpace be making money 5 yrs. from now?
Webmail sucks. Why don't we use KMail in a KDE desktop using NX tech. to connect to our home PC? IPv6 provides easily always-connected devices. There will be no need to have a mail service, just roll your own mail service with your own domain.
Just that it essentially boils down to theft. These sites are using copyright against the users, by having them submit content under the site owner's choice of license. Often, users are not aware of this. As a result, they see no difference between open sites and closed ones, and move between them based on nothing more than popularity.
Of course, those of us who know better look for a GFDL license, and find it on sites like Wikipedia, or one of the more Free Creative Commons licenses. One day, there will probably be a law that the licensing must be very clear to anyone who submits content, and hopefully everyone will prefer the sites where the content belongs to THEM.
I see no *revolution* on YouTube, Flickr, blogging, etc.. You could post, and share photos and/or videos on the Internet back in 1994.
;-)
IMHO - The "difference" between now and 1994 are just Demographics and Usability:
* Nowadays, we have much more people online than in 1994, 1998, or 2001.
* Back in 1994 you had to be a computer whiz to post photos/videos, etc... most "business" built then assumed their users had some kind of "computer skills" normal people usually lack of.
*IF* you lower your product entry barrier (making it easy to use), WHILE there's more and more audience available, you're business will likely succeed
mootion.com - Never underestimate VCs stock options (was: Web 2.0)
Wonder if my site counts, since I'm giving free access to those willing to sort and categorize pictures... the metadata is more important than the pictures themselves.
Do not confuse leveraged market share with any real contribution they are making to peoples' experience.
I just clicked the "sign up" button on myspace.
The "Terms of Service" linked from the sign-up page links to a 404.
So I guess I can only agree to all of those terms.
Look at imeem.com they've had a distributed client based network with all these features for over a year. A lot of the developers are ex-napster, the ones that didn't go to snocap ended up at imeem.
Exactly. The same way that watching bacterial cells divide themselves is more interesting than watching Jenna Jameson doing her stuff.
The latter is infinitely "better" to watch, but gets tedious after a while, but the former is always interesting, "interesting" as in Hollywood keeps putting that kind of footages in sci-fi movies.
"an amalgamation of gmail/flickr/myspace/livejournal."
"My pet name for it is Web 2.0 Katamari."
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
Tom Sawyer, according the the external narration of the novel, inadvertently found that on some level, the children liked painting the fence, so long as it was not obligatory. (I don't remember the exact wording, but Twain compared it to driving a buggy.) People like to show off what they know, hence Wikipedia. People like to go on about every thought that pops into their heads, hence blogs, including LJ and mySpace. People like to throw in their two cents about everything, hence ours truly, as well as Fark, America's Debate, 2, etc. If someone's under obligation to do these things, you get scholars, columnists, politicos, etc. complaining about their jobs.
...which is exactly why there is not open-source online community. Geeks develop OSS, but geeks don't need these social sites--they're for the masses. Those who would, in theory, build them would rather rant about IPv6.
how else could people like this come out of the closet?
how do youtube, flickr and digg expect to make money? i don't see ads on any of those sites and i can't imagine that many people are paying for flickr's premium service.
Nor about SourceForge, which is also a great user-created content website, although it's left to the geeky "elite"
You just got troll'd!
Roundcube is a pretty nice open source AJAX webmail application currently in beta. My previous email provider offered it, and although rather feature bare (although no more so than Gmail), it is very promising.
There's no need to put the 'We' in Web. It already has.
The poster mentioned youTube. I frequently visit youTube when I get bored but I have never seen a single ad there? Where are the revenues coming from?
This was bound to happen. As soon as a new generation grows up knowing the Internet the same way that they do their television, it couldn't be stopped. There have also been reports of teens that think voicemail is 'so last week' and for 'old people' because texting is all they do, it is a part of their life, part of how they interact with their friends, and things that happen on the net spread faster among social groups than anything else, well at least as fast as anything the olsen twins are doing.
Once it becomes a part of the social life of humans, it will necessarily need to become socially oriented, or it will be relegated to the same place that books explaining air bags go. If you have been keeping up with wireless news around the world, with news of the Internet around the world, you will not be surprised by this. The one really good thing that social networking sites have going for them.... they really didn't have to hype it much... no FUD, no 'smoke n mirrors', no 30 second commercials, no billboards. The sites just work, and news spread by word of mouth... I understand that in some circles, if you don't have a myspace address, some teens just don't know how to relate to you... in other words, it was adapted so quickly, and so readily, that not being part of it is a sort of self imposed ostrisization.
Anyway, to me, its not a surprise at all, and if the reality lives up to the hype, the semantic web, and some of the web 2.0 stuff will make the world a very different place. I can see a future where a teen, in her friends car gets a text message on her phone, and pleads over the phone to get her friends mom to spend $80 on shoes that just went on sale at xyz-store, and her mom to pay her back later. Yes, I foresee changes in social interaction on many levels if we get the next generation of the Internet correct.
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Someone just figured out a way to harness a million monkeys to randomly type the works of Shakespear given enough time and bandwidth.
Are you one of the monkeys?
MySpace Is The Trojan Horse Of Internet Censorship- Media elite's last gasp effort to save crumbling empire
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2006/160 306myspace.htm
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Prison Planet.com
March 16 2006
MySpace isn't cool, it isn't hip and it isn't trendy. It represents a cyber trojan horse and the media elite's last gasp effort to reclaim control of the Internet and sink it with a stranglehold of regulation, control and censorship.
Since Rupert Murdoch's $580 Million acquisition of MySpace in July 2005, it has come from total obscurity to now being the 8th most visited website in the world, receiving half as many page hits as Google, despite the fact that on first appearance it looks like a 5-year-old's picture scrap and scribble book.
MySpace is the new mobile phone. If you don't have a MySpace account then you belong to some kind of culturally shunned underclass.
What most of the trendy wendy's remain blissfully unaware of is the fact that MySpace is Rupert Murdoch's battle axe for shaping a future Internet environment whereby electronic dissent, whether it be against corporations or government, will not tolerated and freedom of e-speech will cease to exist.
MySpace has been caught shutting down blogs critical of itself and other Murdoch owned companies. They even had the audacity to censor links to completely different websites when clicking through for MySpace. When 600 MySpace users complained, MySpace deleted the blog forum that the complaints were posted on. Taking their inspiration from Communist China, MySpace regularly uses blanket censorship to block out words like 'God'.
Earlier this week Rupert Murdoch sounded the death knell for conventional forms of media in stating that the media elite were losing their monopoly to the rapid and free spread of new communication technologies. Murdoch stressed the need to regain control of these outlets in order to prevent the establishment media empire from crumbling.
MySpace is Rupert Murdoch's trojan horse for destroying free speech on the Internet. It is a foundational keystone of the first wave of the state's backlash to the damage that a free and open Internet has done to their organs of propaganda. By firstly making it cool, trendy and culturally elite for millions to flock to establishment controlled Internet backbones like MySpace, Murdoch is preparing the groundwork for the day when it will stop being voluntary and become mandatory to use government and corporate monopoly controlled Internet hubs.
The end game is a system similar to or worse than China, whereby no websites even mildly critical of the government will be authorized.
The Pentagon admitted that they would engage in psychological warfare and cyber attacks on 'enemy' Internet websites in an attempt to shut them down. The fact that the NSA surveillance program spied on 5,000 Americans tells us that the enemy is the alternative media and that it will be targeted for elimination. Google has been ordered to turn over information about its users by a judge to the US government.
The second wave of destroying freedom of speech online will simply attempt to price people out of using the conventional Internet and force people over to Internet 2, a state regulated hub where permission will need to be obtained directly from an FCC or government bureau to set up a website.
The original Internet will then be turned into a mass surveillance database and marketing tool. The Nation magazine reported, "Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets
What qualifies as a worthy read? Something that makes your professional value go up? Something that makes time go faster (i.e. it is fun?). But what is the real value that you get from playing Counter-Strike, posting or reading a rant, or some sexually confused girl's myspace blog (okay, maybe she is attractive)? What value does it add to your life? A candy bar tastes good, but it only makes you fat and probably doesn't do anything valuable for you, other than provide you with the five minutes of pleasure that it took to eat it. Perhaps, you could argue that eating healthy and working out provide long term value, because it makes you feel good in the long term. But does being fat make you feel good in the long term? Does 20 gigs of pr0n? 20 gigs is a lengthy bit of media, perhaps that does qualify as long term.
Ever heard the phrase "too many cooks spoil the broth"?
.. is democracy just? If you are "oppressed", does it matter that a majority decided to want to oppress you rather than a crazy dictator? Probably it hurts more knowing the majority condemned you.
.. the sun orbits around the earth etc. Were they right? Probably not.
.. in which fewest people can get oppressed. But it doesnt make it necessarily just. That depends on the willingness of the people to educate themselves and crucially, care about people.
.. I'd want people who have studied the art to dominate. Which is why although I use digg, I also prefer a slashdot style system (yes, yes, slashdot isn't a science crap or peer review thing et.c blah blah i know). I have long wished slashdot would show all the submissions they get, instead of those just accepted. In effect a combination of digg and slashdot. Also, instead of just seeing stories editors selected .. I can see stories that submitters I respect have submitted or "dugg". I suppose now /. would be afraid of implementing this for paranoia of digg theifing good links they may have missed?
Well see a majority of people can give an answer that is popular. Often, popular means correct or good. This is why democracy is viable, strong etc. However, the question is
A majority of people, may have, at one time thought the world was flat
Socrates was put to death a lot because he didnt believe a majority of people wouldnt necessarily make just laws. ("Would you choose a physician by election, why would you choose your ruler that way?").
However given these arguments, currently democracy is the best form of government
For science, however
Now, I love nx and use it a lot, but using it like you describe is a totally shit idea. It takes, what, 2 minutes to even get into KDE before you've even launched Kmail? I can ssh/putty into Pine in about 20 seconds, and starting Firefox and logging into yahoo mail only takes a minute. nx is complete overkill and therefore slow as hell. You also have to deal with the lag and the bandwidth usage, nx doesn't really rate as usable on a modem, IMO, despite their claims to be. Plus, only a geek has an always on linux box. And letting everyone run their own mail server = spam city. You don't say why webmail sucks either? I don't have a problem with it, once I've blocked the adverts anyway. And, yes, hotmail sucks a donkey's balls, I mean the good webmails like gmail and yahoo.
Interesting that the Slashdot submitter tossed Digg in there when it wasn't actually mentioned in the article. If they were going to mention Digg, they would have been irresponsible not to mention Slashdot as well.
Internet means end for media barons, says Murdoch - Power 'moving from the old elite to bloggers'
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1730382, 00.html
Owen Gibson, media correspondent
Tuesday March 14, 2006
The Guardian
Rupert Murdoch last night sounded the death knell for the era of the media baron, comparing today's internet pioneers with explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot and hailing the arrival of a "second great age of discovery".
The News Corp media magnate nurtures a long-held distaste for "the establishment" but last night confided to one of the few clubs to which he does belong - The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers - that he may be among the last of a dying breed.
"Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry - the editors, the chief executives and, let's face it, the proprietors," said Mr Murdoch, having flown into London from New York after celebrating his 75th birthday on Saturday.
Far from mourning its passing, he evangelised about a digital future that would put that power in the hands of those already launching a blog every second, sharing photos and music online and downloading television programmes on demand. "A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it," he said. Indicating he had little desire to slow down despite his advancing years, he told the 603-year-old guild that he was looking forward, not back.
"It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy - not just companies but whole countries."
The owner of Fox News added: "Never has the flow of information and ideas, of hard news and reasoned comment, been more important. The force of our democratic beliefs is a key weapon in the war against religious fanaticism and the terrorism it breeds."
Refusing to reminisce over a career that saw him develop a global empire stretching from DirecTV and the New York Post in the US to Sky and the Sun in the UK via assets in South America, Asia and Australia, he declared: "I believe we are at the dawn of a golden age of information - an empire of new knowledge."
But he combined his new-found enthusiasm for the digital future with a "change or die" message for the monolithic media empires of the 20th century.
"Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall," he warned. "That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet." Two hundred liverymen and freemen of the trade guild were joined by family and friends who then dined in Stationers' Hall, a Grade 1 listed building near St Paul's Cathedral in London.
He had some words of hope for his industry peers buffeted by declining circulations, free titles and the internet. "I believe traditional newspapers have many years of life but, equally, I think in the future that newsprint and ink will be just one of many channels to our readers," he said, predicting a future in which "media becomes like fast food" with consumers watching news, sport and film clips as they travel, on mobile phones or handheld wireless devices.
"Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart," he enthused.
Following its chairman's change of heart, News Corp has splashed out close to $1bn (£578m) on internet investments.
Most tellingly, the company spent $400m on MySpace.com, the social networking phenomenon that has proved hugely popular with 35m regular users on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr Murdoch has undergone a Damascene conversion, admitting he hugely underestimated th
Support Roundcube.
Send Them Money.
A label that is even less valid.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
zombo.com?
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
The "hey, if we give it away, we'll get eyeballs and mind share" concept is very 1999. There's only so much advertising revenue possible, since sellers have finite advertising budgets which are some fraction of their sales. An increase in one area means a decrease somewhere else. Or, more likely, lower advertising prices. Look what happened to banner ad pricing. And now Microsoft wants in. The only thing that makes this work is if the users are doing all the work and the infrastructure is cheap to run.
The eBay model and the Yahoo Store model work, because they're involved in the transaction and do some of the work of making it happen, in exchange for a cut. They have a real revenue model.
I wonder why they didn't find any other blog to give as an example. the blogs on myspace are the most cluttered and ugly ones I have ever seen. I can think of a lot of other more interesting ones like wordpress.com and blogger.com just to name a few.
Flickr and digg are good examples. What about slashdot.org ? This is also driven entirely by the readers albeit with some strict moderation in accepting stories.
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Just Friday, I started putting up a copy of LiveJournal on our webserver for internal company use (the boss says we can't trust Other People with our internal corporate communications, kind of like, um, email).
LiveJournal is an extremely NON-trivial bit of software. It's easier to build Apache with OpenSSL and Frontpage extensions. And the dependencies! Oh the dependencies!
So while the nice people at LiveJournal headquarters are getting all this "free" content, they're spending copious amounts of time making it easy enough for the web using public to make it all happen. And then there's the hardware requirements...
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
While I do love sites like flickr, I had a bit of a change of heart when they made it possible for others to buy prints of my photos. While I always knew that flickr made money off of my work through their advertising, selling physical copies of my photos made it a bit too real and a bit too obvious. I think that in the future of Web 2.0 the companies should recognize that their users generate their profits and share some of the wealth.
-CGP
Because the important part of these sites is the storage service they offer.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
I've been working on a role-play/chat site since 1999 and in time it has grown to pick up a lot of features. These days in addition to the role-play component, there are built-in forums, a collaborative gallery component for text and image works and I am currently working on a social aspect based loosely on PlentyOfFish. While it does not have webmail, it does support an Internal Mail system and private messaging when within rooms.
The code has always been released under the GPL, listed under Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Though I normally never get too much interest in the matter, must be the Perl and PostgreSQL combo!
Whoever modded it up needs to be $rblfed or $rblmed or whatever it was called. Don't make me crack open the DMCA!
At the recent MIX 06 http://mix06.com/ event held by Microsoft, the keynote featured MySpace guys explaining how MS tech gives them the power and scalability they need to create MySpace. Now before everyone goes off... maybe that power could be obtained elsewhere, but my point is simply...
Given that, we might infer from Schmidt's comment that Microsoft is more "interesting" than Google.
No, me giving you a bottle of beer is not the same as you stealing a bottle of beer from me.
Hey, I never said I agreed with him. I was just setting the record straight.
thisnukes4u.net
Livejournal is open-source.
I took a look at the Appleseed site. I didn't really know what I was looking at. I know building a pretty site is not what you're setting out to do, but I have a recommendation - make your effort to build this technology based on the same factors that make networking on the sites mentioned so successful.
Make it easy for people to contribute. Make it beneficial to them. Instead of making them add to your big code base, have an API that they can hook their own stuff in to. Make it a no brainer to be part of it.
The appleseed site you're looking at was just the site explaining the project.
There's a test site at http://www.appleseedproject.org/ but that's currently down.
"Here the people who post the content actually lose something, the right to their content, where piracy as I suspect you are thinking about dosnt take the original owners right to his content away."
Uh, no. Think about why it's called copy-right.
To be fair, unless you're a mod_perl ninja, most mod_perl apps are pretty difficult to set up. Compare this to most PHP-based apps - mod_perl apps require much more work to set up, especially in a development environment.
creation science book
and thats what slashdot is. when i want to interact with (mostly)real life friends, i use facebook. if i wanted to rant about tech stuff, i would use slashdot. its not really so different, its just that the personal profile bit is toned down and the discussion bit is emphasized on /.
with great power comes great...uh...opportunity
MySpace has thousands of pictures of scantily-clad 16-year old girls. Microsoft.com, not so much.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
When people ask me what myspace is, this is the video that I show them.
It shows myspace is all of its painful glory.
If only we could only get popular musicians who like to make music, and put it online, then we wouldn't need the Rockstars Interests Against America...
Great post about http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/ Appleseed
The difficulties in web2.0 are apparent for slashcode's experience. Although I have a slash site at http://mashdot.com/Mashdot. It was a bitch to install, and I'm still unsuccessful after a 2-3 attempts at restarting the site with cvs. Luckily the release version is doing the job for now. I also have an interest in bringing AI applications using web2.0, right now at its infancy at http://ai.residentmanual.com/Radiology Decision Support. There are also the partially free open cyc projects and its like... An MIT grad student, http://web.media.mit.edu/~push//Singh, has a couple of interesting projects: Conceptnet and openmind
gah, i was beginning to think my sense of good/bad site layout was skewed. really, it hurts to look at even my page, and i've tried to make it pretty.
( I
User-generated content has existed for years on EBay, Amazon, and even Slashdot. All of these sites understood that they could simply aggregate data and then distribute it. Ok, it's actually not that simple, especially for the larger sites, given the amount of logistics involved to coordinate it all. But it's been around far longer than MySpace or YouTube.
One of the dangers with this model, as others have pointed out, is the fallacy of collective intelligence, that we can some how vote on facts. Had Wikipedia been around in the Middle Ages, the entries on astronomy would have presented a geocentric view of the universe. There is much less quality control on these sites than in traditional media. While the editors of Slashdot do a better of managing content than say, the Internet as a whole, this webpage is not the Wall Street Journal. It's a good starting point, but definitely not the last word.
It's easy to create a big repository of user-generated content. The key to success is to provide a service which makes it easy to sort the junk from the good stuff. This involves creating algorithms either for figuring out what's good or allowing users to rate things with minimal abuse possibilities. It's a hard thing to get right, and the most successful sites are the ones that do.