Just read a great article on BBC by way of Slashdot about Web 2.0 (tip o’ the hat to Brian Fioca, who IM’ed me the link) It liberally quotes usability-zealot Jakob Nielsen who, as you can imagine, is not all that enamored with the Web 2.0 movement.
As usual, someone more famous than me summarizes some of my thoughts better than I’m capable of.
What I find strange about Web 2.0 is that we web geeks are losing sight of the fact that the vast majority of people use the internet as a tool. They want information. They want pictures. They want music. They want to buy stuff. They want to search for jobs.
But do they really want to socialize online, just for the sake of socializing?
Certainly teenagers do. I suppose I would too if I had a job that was 8am-3pm, had virtually no responsibilities, and had 16 weeks of vacation time.
There’s a great new study out that says:
- 15% of Americans don’t have an internet connection
- 10% view the Internet as a “hassle” (probably because ever site is trying to get them to join their community)
- About 50% of the population “doesn’t use the internet very much. I’d presume that when they DO use it, they use it as a utility.
To me, the most exciting startups are those that solve problems. That provide a transactional product or service. That, in the words of Nielsen, allow users to “get in, get it, get out”.
I tend to be suspicious of businesses that are trying to create an online “community”. You can certainly build a successful business by doing so. But I think online communities are extremely challenging to build, and they tend to turn off the much-more-massive audience that Nielsen talks about. Amazon would be a LOT less easy to use if they were constantly bombarding me with community features.
Look at LinkedIn. They’ve been around since 2002. They’ve gotten over 28 million in VC and they have a tremendously viral service (WAY before it was cool to be viral!). They are the poster child for social networking for grownups. Yet they’ve only managed to collect 9 million accounts in 5 years (and I’d wager than only a fraction of those are active given that it’s nigh impossible to delete a LinkedIn account).
To this day, I still hear people ask, “So what can you DO on LinkedIn?” I’m hard-pressed to give an answer.
At the end of the day, there seems to be a pretty finite number of adults for whom social networking is at all relevant. And there’s a huge pile of sites that are vying for the attention of these busy users. I’d wager that the only ones who are going to succeed (on a grand scale) are also going to allow the other 90% of the internet audience to “get in, get it, and get out”.
