aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, December 10, 2005

My brush with the bubble

This site’s promise to provide “a pre-created VC friendly Web 2.0 company just for you!” took me back to the heady days of the Dot Com Bubble. I was a close observer with an opinion then, contrary as always, but swept up in it and not so cynical as some of my colleagues. Now I can hardly recall the ridiculous jargon I had such fun with.

In this clip Carl Pritzkat, my boss through some of those years, takes us from YourPharmacy.com to GayHealt.com, a wild ride that was my brush with the internet bubble. I sometimes wonder where I’d be had I been a producer at Yahoo! rather than Mediapolis, but the boutique internet shop was the best fit for me. Yes, those were the days.

While on the topic of bubbles, I will take this opportunity to agree with John Battelle’s NYTimes opinion piece from last month.  John says it feels like a bubble again:

Let’s tick off the signs: a red-hot market for Internet stocks (Google, for example, has more than quadrupled since it went public in 2004); fawning articles celebrating entrepreneurs; a glut of venture capitalists elbowing one another to invest in companies with no plans on how to make money past some hand waving about “advertising” and plenty of vague claims about how their technology will “change the world.”

The Internet is exciting again, and once again folks are rushing in. In some categories - like search or social networking, for example - there are scores of start-ups vying for pretty much the same market, and it’s certain that, just like last time, most of them will fail.

But regardless of all this déjà vu, we are not in a bubble. Instead we are witnessing the Web’s second coming, and it’s even got a name, “Web 2.0” - although exactly what that moniker stands for is the topic of debate in the technology industry. For most it signifies a new way of starting and running companies - with less capital, more focus on the customer and a far more open business model when it comes to working with others. Archetypal Web 2.0 companies include Flickr, a photo sharing site; Bloglines, a blog reading service; and MySpace, a music and social networking site.

He explains that this time around the Web platform has already been built, so we don’t need as much money to start companies, and we’re not as reliant on VCs. That means the driving force this time around is the entrepreneurs and geeks, rather than the financiers. And that search emerged from Web 1.0 as the killer app.

I’m hoping that some variation on the Wiki theme emerges as the killer app of Web 2.0.  Attributes I’m particularly interested in include aggregated filtered distributed and citizen-produced.