An article in NYT argues that this time it’s different, which as David Dodd once said are four most dangerous words in the English language:
Venture capitalists are also tending to show far more restraint before deciding to invest in a start-up — such impetuousness to be part of any deal perceived as hot helped to fuel the Internet mania of the late 1990’s.
Sure, the focus now is now on “users” not on “eyeballs” and there are no theglobe.com type IPOs, but current situation is still too close to the Last Great Bubble to be comfortable:
- Industry still with low barriers to entry in most sectors (see YouTube vs. Google Video, MySpace vs. Friendster, Google vs. Yahoo, etc.) — maintaining competitive advantage is hard
- Advertising once again is the king for most of the startups, with few notable exceptions (37signals’s applications come to mind)
- Huge amount of press and buzz around hottest startups, Google especially (I still think its valuation is ridiculous by the way)
May 19th, 2006
Via Jeff Bridgforth, Yahoo just launched a preview of their new, AJAX-enabled home page. On first impression, the design looks very clean and AJAX is put to a good use:
For example, the left menu the links seem to be a sort of tag cloud with frequently used ones bigger:
And the quick access menu on the right doesn’t require reloading to obtain recent email, Y! Messenger contracts or local weather (though option to switch to metric seems to be missing):
Tags: web-20
May 16th, 2006
Cameron Olthuis points to a great article on Slate explores the reasons for popularity common to both MySpace and YouTube:
I’ve got a different theory. YouTube and MySpace are runaway hits because they combine two attributes rarely found together in tech products. They’re easy to use, and they don’t tell you what to do.
The article has very good points, but it’s interesting that the Google Video seems to have lost the game to YouTube even when there was a time when Google was the epithome of no nonsense, keep it simple principle.
Tags: web-20
May 13th, 2006
A complement to always interesting Google Zeitgeist, here comes Google Trends, a much improved version. You now can
- See search count graph for specific words over 2004-2006 (no absolute numbers though)
- Filter the results by a specific region (country level)
- See from what cities, regions and languages the searches are coming from
A curious aspect is that one coworker of mine wanted something like that badly a couple of months ago and we talked about why hadn’t Google released such a thing.
[Via TechCrunch]
Tags: web-20
May 10th, 2006
Frank Gruber points to Quintura, a new search engine based on visual semantic maps.
It’s a new and interesting twist on the old “words related to your search” story. Instead of offering a plain list of suggested words, it shows a spatial map of words, distance indicating degree of relatedness.
My only objection could have been it focus on desktop application, but Frank points out they have just launched a Russian-language web-based search which seems remarkably similar to the desktop application:
English version of the web-based search and the 2.0 version of the desktop application are on the way.
Tags: web-20
May 8th, 2006
After praising NetVibes in my earlier post, several people pointed to PageFlakes as an alternative. So I’ve decided to do an informal comparison of the two content aggregators:
Design
Both sites are quite nice looking, however on purely subjective criteria I like NetVibes more.
Content selection
NetVibes as well as Pageflakes offers a selection of standard display widgets like weather, web search, TODO list, Flickr photos, etc. Judging by the menu Pageflakes beats its hands down in its breadth, with 68 widgets vs. 16, however NetVibes supports user-created modules via Mini API. Considering those, NetVibes has additional 60+ modules
Interface
Interface on both pages is very similar, down to widget drag & drop, support for multiple tabs and fairly heavy use of AJAX.
Social
Pageflakes is the only one that supports page sharing and it allows you one of three options:
- Private
- Share it with a select group of people
- Share it with everybody
Overall
As it stands, NetVibes vs. PageFlakes is virtually a tie with an almost identical set of features and the personal choice would probably be dictated by subjective factors or availability of a particularly needed widget. I can easily recommend both for a day-to-day use.
Tags: netvibes, pageflakes, web-20
May 6th, 2006
A wonderful post by Joshua Porter on the main reasons web apps fail. I thing the seven points can be resumed to: long-term focus on doing useful thing for your user, not anyone else. But be sure to read the original for details.
Tags: web-20
May 5th, 2006
It’s been a longtime since I’ve used any news aggregator (I used to have one of my own back in 2000/2001) and I haven’t seriously thought about sticking with any. Until I saw NetVibes. This is what I like:
- Clean. A lot of the news aggregators seem determined to pack as much information as possible.
- Fast. It just feels fast, just like an AJAX application should.
- Complete. It has a nice selection of widgets including weather, mail, search, calendar access, useful integrated feed reader.
I’ve seen only one bug so far (low for a beta), but a fairly annoying one - feed URLs get reset sometimes when moving boxes around.
Tags: web-20
May 4th, 2006
Dharmesh Shah at OnStartups.com disagrees with 37Signals (part 1, part 2) on the push for fewer features and fewer options. Be sure you read the comments.
The most interesting point is about non-overlapping feature sets that many people forget about:
Many can (and have) argued that nobody uses more than 20% of the features in Word. That’s likely true. The issue is that it is a different set of features for each user, and within that set, one or more features are very important.
However I think the need for customizability is overrated and 37signals take a right approach. Essentially it is a question of diminishing marginal returns: some people will undoubtedly benefit from additional options(large monitor example), but most people will benefit from the time invested in other aspects of the system.
Tags: web-20
May 4th, 2006
37signals Preaches “Less” For Success at Frank Gruber’s blog relays the key theme from 37signals’s talk at DePaul University - Less is more:
- Do it with less people and less time. Comment: I work in consulting and I’ve seen what teams of 3-4 smart people can accomplish in 3 months that teams of 50 wouldn’t dream of finishing in five years.
- Ship with less features and abstractions. Comment: This will work when feature grids disappear and reviews will start rating simplicity higher than feature list.
- Use less money, use your own money (harder to spend). Comment: Great advice, but it assumes (mostly correctly) more money = more spending. However sometimes more capital is a good thing.
Tags: web-20
May 4th, 2006
Next Posts
Previous Posts
