Web 2.0: 10 minutes braindump

Idiot: a person who incessantly argues about unimportant issues. Such as: Is Web 2.0 a buzzword or a profound new vision? Well, establishing beyond doubt that Web 2.0 is indeed a buzzword would be just about as useful as establishing that it is a stroprantzer.

Let's say that we want to make Internet more useful. Let's assume that existing websites have various degrees of usefulness and that users favor the useful ones. Question: Can we find a good predictor for the usefulness (and hence popularity) of a site? My wife proposed: Useful sites offer services based on information gathered from the users. Proof by examples:

1. YouTube offers
   • search for video-clips
   • video-clips
   • lists of similar video-clips
   based on
   • video-clips submitted by users
   • comments submitted by users
   • users' navigation patterns
2. EBay offers
   • cheap products
   • buyers for stuff that your friends don't want
   based on
   • what users want to buy/sell
3. Amazon offers
   • book recommendations
   • books
   based on
   • what users buy
   • second-hand books offered for sale by users
4. IMDB offers
   • movie recommendations
   • movie ratings
   based on
   • user ratings and comments
5. Google offers
   • search
   based on
   • stuff users put on the web

All these sites make it very easy for users to offer data: to tell YouTube what videos are similar you just browse the site, to put a web-page on Google you do… nothing.

Could someone inclined to make money do so based on these observations? No idea, but here's how I would start: What types of sites I know that do not follow the description above? Let's see:

• home-pages of scientists
• web-sites that present private accomodations in one area ("pensiuni" in Romania, B&B in Ireland and UK)
• booking of airplane tickets
• local renting (Ireland has Daft, but other place like Romania don't)
• local movies (per city? country?)

Now let's say we want to make a web-site (2.0!) for movies playing in Bucharest (to replace the horrible thing available now). We should:

• have a search box: people expect it
• let users comment: we can use that to improve the search!
• secretly use external data sources to boot-strap your web-site, but don't say so: write scripts to fetch data from existing web-sites, make deals with off-the-web information providers and so on (BTW, secretly means that you don't tell the users how you get the data, in case you had doubts about the meaning :P)
• give recommendations and ratings
• give comprehensive data about playing times
• make it very very easy for users to provide information: movie ratings, comments, playing times (but, at least initially, do not rely only on them — see the point on using external data sources)

Above all, make it work flawlessly and fast (even test from dumb operating systems like Windows!) and have a very very simple user interface (a person that is >50 should find it easy!).

Ah! And, it may give you a head start if you don't mention to others what you are doing until you launch a beta. (If you try this method and make money then don't forget to send me some royalties.)