Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
It's no accident that Time magazine choose YOU as their Person of the Year. In 2006, the Web was all about the social. User generated content was king this year - and the Time editor in chief is betting that the impact of this will be felt for years to come. In this article, just in time for last minute holiday shopping madness, we look at how the social aspects of the Web are transforming online shopping.
Online shopping has traditionally been one of the big activities online. Jeff Bezos recognized that a long time ago when he created Amazon.com - now the biggest online retailer in the world, by a long shot (according to Mary Meeker's stats). Nowadays most major offline retailers have websites too - and rightly so, because more and more people are buying products online. According to a comScore press release last week, this year's xmas holiday online retail spending is expected to be 25% up from the same period in 2005. comScore estimates that online retailing is running at upwards of $610 Million per day in this holiday season - and the heaviest day was expected to be sometime during the week of December 11, with sales that should approach $700 million.
Written by Richard MacManus, Ebrahim Ezzy, Emre Sokullu, Alex Iskold and Rudy De Waele. Also John Milan wanted to contribute, but unfortunately got caught up in the Seattle storm - so best wishes to John and all our Seattle readers.
In our previous post we reviewed the Web trends of 2006, noting trends such as the hyper-growth of social networks, the push of RSS into the mainstream, consumerization of the enterprise, and the continued rise of the read/write Web.
In this post we look forward to 2007 and ruminate on what trends will be important over the coming year.
- RSS will go mainstream in a big way next year - not only integrated into Microsoft's new Vista OS, but also fully integrated into Yahoo Mail when it comes out of beta (the Ajax version). Plus we expect some of Google's RSS experiments to come into play more in 2007 - especially Google Base, which uses an RSS variant called GData. In addition to all this, new and interesting (if not overly innovative) services will be built on top of RSS - e.g. the Techmeme RSS Ad-delivery.
Tonight I stumbled upon what appears to be a brand new User Interface for Ask.com. I was doing some searches on Ask.com, when I noticed a link in the top right asking me to try out something called Ask X. Screenshot below:
When I clicked on the link, it regenerated my original query using a new interface - labeled Ask X. The following 3-pane UI displayed:
The 3-pane UI is pretty similar to the Ask City UI, which was launched a couple of weeks ago. Ask X appears to be live right now, at this domain: http://www.askx.com. There's no mention of it on the official Ask.com site, but there is an About page on Ask X which explains more:
Last week I was following the De-Portalization of the Internet thread, started by Fred Wilson and then extended by Keith Teare. I was struck by one observation in particular by Fred:
"I don't have the data to prove it, but my guess is if you looked at the percent of all pageviews that are generated each month, a much smaller portion exist on the top 10 properties today than in 2000, at the height of the first Internet era."
Essentially Fred's theory is that the Long Tail of Internet content makes up a higher percentage of total Web page views today, than 6 years ago.
I asked Web Analytics firm Compete if they could come up with some data to prove or disprove Fred's hypothesis. Compete kindly provided me with some great data, which in a nutshell disproves Fred's theory. According to Compete's data, the top 10 domains are not shrinking - but proportionally increasing.
Popular social news site Digg has announced a number of new features in anticipation of the new year, including a beta podcasting service and enhanced video on the site. Digg says the aim of the new features is to make Digg a more inviting environment for new users, in line with Digg's business imperative to broaden their audience beyond its techie roots.
The most significant of the changes is the increased focus on multimedia as a way to reach their audience. With podcasting and more video added to the mix, Digg can perhaps tap into the YouTube/MySpace user base some more. And given Digg founder Kevin Rose's history with podcasting and videocasting (which continues to this day in the form of Diggnation, Rose's popular weekly show), this plays to the strengths of the Digg team. I think it's a great move and one that is likely to appeal to a younger - less techie, but more media savvy - audience that up till now probably hasn't been aware of Digg. You could in a sense label this as 'The YouTube-ization of Digg'.
In a recent blog post, Wenzhi Lai of online listings
company edgeio noted that their China operation -
called mulu100 - has become the second largest
source of traffic for edgeio. I was curious to know more about edgeio's activities in
China - and also to tap CEO Keith Teare's brain about the Chinese Web market in general,
seeing as Keith has experience there from the dot com period. So last week I chatted to
Keith on the phone to find out more.
Keith's background in China largely stems from the period 2000-2002, when he ran a domain names company that did business there. For edgeio, it was about April this year that they started to notice Chinese listings coming in. Keith noted that they built edgeio from the start to be globalized - meaning developing for UTF-8 characters and not just ASCII, and in the database being able to parse and search different character sets. By about June, edgeio noticed there were a lot of tags in Chinese. That has grown bit by bit over the months and now about 10% of their listings come from China.
So Web 2.0 finally goes mainstream....
kind of.
Time Magazine has named the Web-powered "You" as its coveted Person of the Year. In
the accompanying articles, the term Web 2.0 is used and there's talk of an Internet
"revolution". I think this is all great as a general recognition of the read/write Web -
but a few things in the article bothered me...
Yes, the Web is "a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before." It is about normal people contributing to media on a mass scale, thanks to web sites like MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia. It is also about "an explosion of productivity and innovation" which is "just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy."
All of this is what I refer to as the Social Web, or the read/write Web. Time magazine generally refers to it as Web 2.0 - which they archly note is what "Silicon Valley consultants call it".
Next week we'll publish Read/WriteWeb's annual Best Web Companies and Innovators post. Also coming next week is the 2007 Web Trends post (I'd hoped to do it this week, but it's now Saturday where I live and I'm exhausted!). Anyway I'd like to tap the minds of the R/WW community some more, before I write the Best Of post. So I'm looking for feedback in particular on Best Web LittleCo of 2006 and Most Promising Web Company/Innovator.
To give you an idea of what we're looking for, last year 37Signals was Best Web LittleCo and Memeorandum & Digg.com were Most Promising. The latter category is designed for companies or services that have burst onto the scene this year, but probably won't reach their potential until next year or in the near future. That has certainly been the case with Digg and (the re-named) Techmeme in 2006.
In 2004, R/WW named Ludicorp (the then independent company that created Flickr) as Best Web LittleCo, and Feedburner as Most Promising.
For Best Web LittleCo this year, already someone has suggested Meebo. I'd love to get more suggestions from the community on this - so please leave a comment. Try and think of startups or small companies that have had a particular impact this year - and why.
We've already gotten a great idea of who you think is best Bigco of 2006, via our poll earlier this week. The poll is still open, but as of now the results are overwhelmingly in favor of one company: Google. 55% of you think Google has been the most impressive BigCo this year. Followed by Apple on 15% and Amazon on 14%. Yahoo (last year's winner) and Microsoft have only 7% and 5% respectively! The big question when deciding the R/WW winner is the balance between bigco innovation and the impact it has on a mass market.
So what are your thoughts, especially on Best Web LittleCo for 2006 and most Promising Web Company/Innovator? Also let us know if you'd like us to do a category-by-category breakdown of the year's best Web products.
I recently came across a web
service called ZCubes, which is one of those
browser-based portal apps that lets you do virtually everything under the sun - social
networking, develop a website, browse the Web using a special built-in browser, create
media (pictures, audio, video), add RSS feeds and gadgets, paint, handwriting, etc. It
claims to be able to manage over 30 file formats.
I'm usually pretty skeptical of apps that try to do too much - because in this era of 'best of breed' apps, people will usually choose a variety of branded apps for specific purposes (e.g. Photobucket or Flickr for photos, del.icio.us for bookmarks, YouTube for video, etc). Either that, or they will choose a portal solution from a big company that they can 'trust' - e.g. Yahoo, MSN or Google.
ZCubes though interests me because of the advanced ways it enables users to interact with and create content. Parag Mathur, who is VP of Product Management at ZCubes, told me that they use "the latest in next generation web technologies." He said that ZCubes marries client-side web technologies like DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, DirectX, XML/XSLT, and VML with server-side technologies like ASP.NET and J2EE. The ZPaint functionality uses VML vector graphics (supported only in IE) and they are in the process of developing support for SVG to make the platform compatible with multiple browsers.
That's a lot of acronyms! But the nutshell is that ZCubes relies heavily on browser-based technologies - so no plug-ins or downloads are required.
A report from the yahoo.confab event on Prediction Markets, held Wed Dec 13 in Silicon Valley. Written by Nitin Karandikar from The Software Abstractions Blog and edited by Richard MacManus. All photos are by David Rout for Yodel Anecdotal.
Can Prediction Markets make it easier to get at the knowledge that is already embedded within an organization? Are we using the power of collective intelligence to make better decisions?
These were some of the questions discussed at the confab.yahoo session yesterday on Prediction Markets (see also R/WW's pre-event write-up). For the uninitiated, Prediction Markets is a hot new concept that is a fascinating blend of stock market action, knowledge discovery and social dynamics. If you extend the idea that "Market price reflects all the available knowledge of traders", then by deliberately setting up a market based on questions of interest, you can potentially discover probability distributions for answers - by watching the price action.
