No Bubble 2.0
For those who thought (and think) we are in a bubble of web 2.0 startups, here is a deep irony for you: Kiko, a supposed ‘dead’ web 2.0 company, returned more money to its investors than it took in.
People grossly misuse the term bubble. First of all it relates to financial markets not anything else. For over-attention that’s called hype not a bubble.
We don’t even need examples of Kiko to show that there is no bubble. That’s because so little money goes into web ventures taht there is no chance of even being a bubble. In the Kiko example they took in $50k and still had money in the bank when they put the project on eBay. Y Combinator, the brilliant idea of Paul Graham and others to give kids $6k a piece and three months to see if they can come up with something useful, prudently gives young entrepreneurs a chance. Just because the media go gaga over the firms to arise from it (which on the whole is a net positive for the companies), says nothing about a bubble.
I completely agree with Charlie that there will never be a widely used online calendar, including gmail, because there is just not a significant enough need. But giving $50k to the Kiko team to build a product to try and beat the overwhelming odds against it is fine too. If anything the site is a resume for the three people who worked on it.
Niki - isn’t part of what you are not accounting for the time and attention that is being spent on some of these ideas by their creators without any actual business model for most of them? I think your point about a resume is fine, but then I think we’re definitely talking about something very different overall - we’re not talking about companies or enterprises, but more about ‘programming hobby’ projects or little pet projects or resume-builders. That is part of why some of this stuff about Web 2.0 grates on me with its talk of “lightweight business models” because many of these things are not sustainable enterprises, they’re experiments. I think the original sense of the Web 2.0 description was probably around that ‘rapid prototyping’ kind of idea but as these ideas sometimes do, it was overgeneralized and many more attributes were added in there that many of these projects can’t and won’t have.