Here's What We Have To Do
If you are thinking about building a web service, take the advice of Seth Godin. This is from his post today on rethinking what an auction can be.
my point is that this is just the beginning of using internet tools to
change the world we interact with, as opposed to trying to make it easy
to interact with the standard world using the Internet
Marc Andreessen said this about web 2.0 last year:
what we have seen over the last several years is the Web itself coming into its own.
After an initial phase of the Web as a medium, in which lots of people attempted to make the Web look like a newspaper, or a magazine, or a TV channel,
we as an industry have recently been collectively developing a much
clearer idea of what the Web is really like as a medium in and of
itself.This has led to broad realization of a set of design patterns for how Web services and Web companies often get built and used.
Which is great.
Exactly. But as Seth said, it goes even farther. The web is changing the world we live in. And we have the tools to change it even more. Way more. That’s what we have to do.
Comments (Archived):
I hear this internet thing is going to be big.
Not too sure whether the totally competitive dynamic pricing model works well in society. It could make latecomers upset with the brand. Better yet, implement the dutch auction model which is what Google used to IPO. Makes everyone less unhappy.And a geography based system for pricing? That is just screaming for discriminatory practices. At least couch it in terms of shipping costs!I think private B2B networks would be better at monetizing the new interactive web without such obvious conflict.
Just a few days ago I had a vision… :)How about transforming the car ownership into an investment type of thing.Imagine people being able to lend their own cars for the times they are not using them. Or even making a small business out of owning a few cars. Everybody sets their own prices.Think of Zipcar – but without the centralized ownership of the cars.Think of an Internet platform (could be open source… or even at the level of a protocol may be) which supports the data and logic for such a distributed environment.Imagine the effects of a dynamic price competition for a short term leased transportation… not to speak of the long term disruption of the car sales market.The hardware could be developed and sold by any vendor.Please, whoever starts doind this – give me a credit… 🙂
I’ve seen some ideas like this beforeAre you sure nobody is doing this?
I don’t know… your new hire (the analyst) may do the research… 🙂
I don’t know of anybody doing this…
This reminded me of an Umairism from Feb 2006:”The challenge, of course, is for geeks to understand that it’s exactly this value equation they should be disrupting, not ignoring: making marketing, branding, advertising not evil.”That they’re evil doesn’t mean you should ignore them – it means you should be destroying them and then redefining them: making them less about Madison Ave and BuzzAgent, and more about the deep 2.0 principles that in fact, are revolutionizing the deep economics of many industries – principles like peer production, gift economies, sharing, transparency, social capital, anticonsumption, and deep culture.”Let me be a bit more blunt than I’d like to be: geeks (you too, VCs), this is your Next Big Thing – stop blowing it already.”http://www.bubblegeneration…
Funny, I just spent a big chunk of the weekend going back over some old notes and thoughts on Objectivism/rights of individual in society with the idea of web economy and social roaming in mind. Fascinating time we’re in, new light breaking on horizon.
Totally agree and in fact I’m banking on it…especially in the new parent/baby world.
I am firmly in the “we will know that we have succeeded when all the computers are invisible” camp. Unfortunately, getting to that nirvana is not a smooth easy process. Facebook is broadcasting to the world its members’ every sneeze and cough. Drivers, distracted as they furiously text, are routinely killing pedestrians. Etc.BTW, off topic but important, the blog monetization model appears to be breaking. I am almost always reading the text of this blog within My Yahoo! now. Their new interface results in behavior that keeps users on their site. I never click through unless I want to leave a comment.
Do my feedburner ads show up in the posts?If so, I am still getting paidOr actually, the charities I support with this blog are getting paidfred
Nope. Sorry Fred. No ads or graphics of any kind. Text only, in a little pseudo-popo-up window. There is a little link I have to scroll down to that says “to read this on AVC click here”. So you are SOL.
Nope, Yahoo will be SOL once people realize what they are doingIt’s my feed and I have the right to control what goes into itfred
Emil,Funny thing about memes…I just had a conversation two days ago with a buddy of mine who is a frequent Zipcar user. He lamented that there was now a tragedy of the commons problem with Zipcar (that didn’t exist in the early days)…the cars frequently came back empty, and were a complete mess.We had a thought provoking conversation about how a more coop/Netjets style model might solve that problem, where one person became a “landlord”, bought three cars, and interviewed a group of people to join a 10-20 person cooperative, and people were charged a monthly fee that was competitive with Zipcar . All that would be needed is a basic scheduling platform and some open source software, and people could run their own mini Zipcar’s on a limited basis with their trusted friends/community. And you could always use zipcar as a back-up in case
Yes, something could be done on a smaller (local) scale… then made easily replicable as a setup… and then all such nodes could be connectable… and we’d have a bottom up movement.Or, Zipcar could open up their platform – and become the Google/AdSense of cars.About the meme – I really did not (and still don’t) have any recollection of somebody doing or talking about something like this. But I really joked about the credit – I don’t believe much in “original” thinking. Fred mentioned something about having seen similar ideas before – without elaborating further (wonder why).
BTW, in my previous comment, I totally missed your point about the “tragedy of the commons”… now I see why you’re talking about “trusted friends/community.”