We have been discussing the online travel industry and have covered Yahoo! Travel from a Web 3.0 perspective already. Here we take a look at the offering from online travel community behemoth TripAdvisor.
TripAdvisor was founded in February 2000 and is among the world’s largest online travel communities with over 20 million unique monthly visitors and approximately 5 million registered members. TripAdvisor is currently part of Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE). The site is a winner of PC Magazine's Top 100 Web Sites and Forbes' Best of the Web.
In 37Signals' ubiquitious web app design philosophy book, "Getting Real," they talk about "underdoing" your competition. "Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else. Instead of oneupping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing," they write in big bold letters in the second chapter.
New York-based Davidville is probably best known for their excellent tumblelogging service Tumblr. But before Tumblr, they made a splash, albeit a smaller one, with Senduit, a file uploading service that's stripped down to basics. Whether or not Davidville has read "Getting Real," they certainly prescribe to some of the ideas laid out in that book.
Inventing new software for enterprises is really hard. Selling it to them is nearly impossible.
For a startup to break through the thick doors of the enterprise takes years. But even when lady
luck smiles on a startup, the joy is short lived. The next morning its back to the daily grind --
being a one product company means that you constantly have to start over selling to a new place.
Back in the old days IBM had perfected the game of not only opening the enterprise channel, but continuously supplying them with new products. Enterprises were offered bundles, end-of-the-year specials, discounts and all manner of tricks that helped keep the channels open.
Fast forward to 2007 and social startups are faced with much the same problem. A handful of them succeeded at building the modern version of the channel -- a large audience of frequent users. But is a large audience enough? Should the startup perfect what they have or should they leap into another vertical? And if the answer is yes, how far should the service extend? In this post we will take a closer look at growing social networks and consider how they are looking at vertical expansion.
Editor's Note: It might be helpful to read Sramana Mitra's Overview of the Online Travel Space prior to reading this review.
In this article we will analyze the Yahoo! Travel site based on the Web 3.0 framework. The site provides information on travel destinations, best bargains on hotel and travel fares. It has an attractive interface and navigation is simple and easy. However, as a late entrant, it needs to do so much more to differentiate and become a "destination".
Yahoo! Travel has a very broad and vivid categorization, which gives its users both convenience and ease of choice while planning for their trip. The site provides good contextual information for both leisure travelers and business travelers.
There are eight sub categories, Travel Guides, Hotels, Flights, Cars, Cruises, Vacations, Deals, and FareChase. The Deals section is broken down into four sub categories (Popular Categories, Lifestyle, Price and More Deal Providers), which have been further categorized to help users search for deals more easily.
Citizendium, the Wikipedia fork (sort of) that aims to be a more credible alternative to Wikipedia, was launched into public beta on March 25th, which makes it nearly one month old. So how does it stack up to its progenitor?
First some background. Citizendium was founded by Larry Sanger, a 38-year-old who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State University that some say was a co-founder of Wikipedia (though that's disputed, according to Sanger's own Wikipedia page). The idea behind Citizendium is to improve on the wiki-model by adding what they call "gentle expert oversight" -- which more or less means that qualified users approve articles before they are officially added to the encyclopedia. Further, contributors are required to use their real names, which Sanger hopes will encourage civility and stem the flame wars and ad homenim attacks that plague Wikipedia talk pages on contentious articles.
Valleywag recently declared podcasting dead (or at least conceded the battle to Apple). But iPod's play video, remember, and video podcasting (or vidcasting, or vlogging -- pick your favorite term) is alive and well, and still a wide open space. Mostly when we think of online video, however, we think of amateur videographers talking into a webcam. Even some of the most well-known and respected video podcasts have a distinctly amateur feel too them. Diggnation and ScobleShow, which attract hordes of viewers for their content, are still mostly shot with hand held consumer/prosumer-level cameras, are obviously unscripted, and are often marred by low-quality audio.
A new video podcast network, ON Networks has a killer combination that many video podcasts lack: quality and content. ONN boast a lineup of 8 shows ranging from "Zen Living," in which an attractive host guides viewers toward a healthier life, to "Raw Golf," which takes an indy band and films them at a golf lesson, to "Budget Health Nut," a cooking show that would feel at home on the Food Network.
Kyte launched today, and as Rex Dixon pointed out, it has already been discussed ad nauseum. But never one to shy away from the latest hot trend, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Kyte is a media remixing service that lets anyone "create their own interactive TV channel," which basically means you can upload video, photos, and audio and mix them into slideshows that other people can watch.
Of all the comparisons being made -- and there are many -- SplashCast made the most sense; they appeared to be more or less the same application, so I initially set out to compare them. But after playing with both services for awhile, I realized that in terms of editing together media, there isn't much that either can do that more mature video editing services like Jumpcut, eyespot, or motionbox can't do. Video? Check. Photos? Check. Audio? Check. Text? Check. Create a channel, leave comments, share on MySpace? Check, check, check. All that, and with generally more intuitive editing tools, in my opinion. However, editing, isn't what makes Kyte compelling.
I'm on holiday all this week and during that time Josh Catone will be Guest Editor of Read/WriteWeb. You may remember Josh from such posts as Internet Killed The Television Star and Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One. Josh is a talented writer, as well as being co-founder of the web's largest community dedicated to Ruby on Rails development - Rails Forum. His personal blog is mockriot. I've said to Josh that he can post what he likes here, as long as it's about web technology of course :-)
Read/WriteWeb's other writers will also be contributing, so you shouldn't notice much difference - although it will probably be lighter posting this week than usual.
So without further ado, I am off to enjoy a one week break from blogging and online life in general! If you are thinking of emailing me during this time, don't expect a response ;-) I will be back at the Editor's desk from Monday 30 April, when Microsoft MIX in Las Vegas kicks off. I will be covering that event live, so see you then!
Ed: To finish up the coverage of the Web 2.0 Expo that we provided this week, I asked some of the Read/WriteWeb writers to give us their takeaways. Graeme Thickins, Sean Ammirati and Emre Sokullu list their thoughts below...See also my own Web 2.0 Expo Wrapup.
Web 2.0 Is Going Beyond the Consumer Market: There's no doubt these technologies will be increasingly applied within enterprises, and that's a good thing. The big vendors see this and were all over this venue - exhibiting, presenting, and otherwise.
The VC Investment Model for IT/Software Is Changing: Because new Web 2.0 ventures don't need much money to get going, the VC business is being somewhat disrupted. A new style of early-stage VC firm seems to be gaining. It's becoming obvious that the big funds don't fit in here. These days, a mere $250-750K is all that's needed to prove assumptions, one VC said. And angel investors are newly energized.
Yesterday, 20 April, was the 4th anniversary of Read/WriteWeb's first official post
(although I first tinkered with blogging in March 2002). It's amazing how much has
happened in the last 4 years. A common question I get when I meet industry people is: how
did you start R/WW? The short version is I started writing Read/WriteWeb in the evenings
4 years ago, simply because I was passionate about Web technology and wanted to explore
the read/write web, a.k.a. the two-way web - Dave
Winer's term that pre-dated the term 'web 2.0'. For a long time the blog stayed a
part-time hobby, albeit one that consumed my life more and more. It was only really when
the web 2.0 trend started to take off in mid 2005 that Read/WriteWeb got popular too.
Then of course in 2006 the blog took over my life completely, as web 2.0 ramped up. Read/WriteWeb is now a media property and it's my full-time job to edit and manage the site. It is also no longer a 1-person blog, but has many talented people writing for it. Of course I'm continuing to grow the site, and there are some big plans in store for the rest of 2007.
If you're interested in more detail on how R/WW was born, check out this post I wrote on the 1-year anniversary. Here is a quick pictorial reminder of the old days:
