A couple of weeks ago I linked to Rich Ziade’s Reality Check 2.0 which highlighted how our Web 2.0 darlings compare to Web 1.0 counterparts. Yesterday, Colin, Mike and I had a discussion, which led us into talking about the brilliance of Myspace and their ability to keep you coming back.
Web 2.0 is about giving users the content and letting them run with it. APIs and RSS feeds keep content closer to us while in the Web 1.0 world you would never see something like this occur because to make money from advertising you need pageviews and what good is it to allow people to take the content off the site? When you get a new message or comment on Myspace you get an email simply telling you that you have a new message/comment. They don’t tell you what the message or comment is and their reason for doing this is due to “privacy” concerns. If a Web 2.0 app did this you would probably here a lot of complaints, but not in the Myspace world.
And that’s part of the brilliance behind it to me. Myspace does so many things wrong in our world, but they are about to become the most popular site on the web. So the question becomes have we listened to our geek peers too much in trying to make data accessible everywhere without thinking of keeping people coming back and greedily hoarding them to ourselves? As a user I think its obvious that we want data the way we want it, but as a businessman what do you do?
To us Flickr is the most popular photo site on the web, but they pale in comparison to Yahoo Photos and Webshots, but on Flickr I can export my photos while on the other two sites that becomes a major chore therefore keeping you on the site longer to avoid any hassles.
So in the end who do you cater to? Do you go for the glory?
Originally posted on April 20, 2006 @ 4:06 pm