Alexei@Nitobi

Welcome to the age of you. It’s official. Time magazine has named “you” as the single most influential and important “persona” in the world. This makes perfect sense to me. In a world where YouTube is more important than CNN.com, and Myspace has made minor celebrities of ordinary people, the power of individuals to make their voices heard is unprecidented. This is part of the essense of Web2.0 – user generated content, collaboration, and social networking. Suddenly this “social experiment where we actually let anyone with an email address create content and participate freely in online conversation has become a major driver for innovation, and has in fact become the norm.

A lot of people deride the term “Web 2.0″ as something that has no meaning. I disagree. I think it’s a useful term to describe everything (how very little) that was right with the web, and isolating it from everything that was wrong. These are strategies for engaging communities of people, and for 2-way communication. It’s empowering for users, and it makes economic sense for people wanting to sell products and services. I mean, what better way to discover what people want to buy, than to break down barriers to communication, and allow your customers to drive your business.

It’s not all roses. I would even say that there’s a fair amount of hype along with the substance. Certainly, the way we’ve survived is by looking for ways to match our capabilities (in a web2.0 sense, we’re talking about Ajax) with the quantifiable needs of business. A lot of people aren’t (sorry guys! just one man’s opinion). That’s creating a bubble that eventually has to burst. I’m not trying to be harsh. On the contrary – I’m excited that a lot of people from my own community are doing really innovative, valuable things. You’re going to hear a lot more from these people.

Anyway – congrats to y’all for participating. It’s a great time to be online.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 3:21 am and is filed under business, web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.