This year, I attended Future of Web Applications – #FOWA, Under the Radar – #UTR. Heroes of the Mobile Screen – #HOTms and Techcrunch’s – #XmasCrunch. In my humble opinion I’ve noticed a series of trends since I started the Conference scene back when I scored some of that sweet sweet startup money from Edinburgh University.
In 2007, everyone wanted to know what the next Google would be. Turns out – it’s Google.
The Seven Bomb was all about destroying these internet giants, harnessing the power of the internet to create something bigger and better, packing your product with innovative features whilst at the same time niche enough to carve out a hefty market for your startup. Everyone wanted to be YouTube and they didn’t even know why.
In Two Thousand Ocho we were meant to follow suit. What was your social media idea? How would you create a community of like-minded thinkers? How would you be different? Unfortunately, this approach did not work. People wanted to know what the next Facebook would be. Surprise, Surprise! It’s Facebook
The BIG 9 rolls along and everyone is taking about how they plan to harness Facebook & Twitter. Twitter was a sort of sleeping giant. Still there are lots of people I know who can’t get their head around how it works. The simplest answer I can give them is a living breathing search engine. You can look at whoever you want and find out what they are thinking in 140 characters or less. They blog, they post photos and they spit out modern day Haiku’s to pass the time. .@publicMentions of whoever might be important enough to be heard.
A daily soapbox of followers with loads and loads of deaf ears for your thoughts to be heard. Of my 200+ followers the majority of these are spam artists or my Technology/Design brethren who are too big to care about my thoughts. And of the 300+ people I follow – most of them are talking about how great they, what they’ve eaten or where they are going. Since I’ve stuck myself in the league of the world’s greatest innovators I’ve found that entrepreneurialism and innovation have become the same thing. It’s the entrepreneurs that have won – the opportunists reign supreme – Suit wearing Bankers, Single-minded lawyers and Trumpet tooting Marketers – leaving the innovation to the guys in their development caves who usually keep far away from the Real-time web or anything else buzzing around our twitter tweets.
The first round of the new millennia has only managed to give us businesses who are trying to make sense of the noise created by the calamity of twitter’s tweeting twitter tweets and Facebook’s ability to reunite people that might not necessarily need reuniting. I see all these new startups getting funded because VC’s make bad decisions as a rule of thumb and no one even knows what this whole Social Media revolution does or where it is going exactly. All they know is that everyone is there and the money men want to know where the party is. This is so reminiscent of the Dot Com crash where people thought the internet was where infinite possibilities lived and almost everyone involved lost their shirt on the next big thing. The internet has always been wrought with scammers and spammers and I see no difference in this New Wide Web. A software that does nothing but aggregate Twitter and Facebook is nothing but a no-good spambot. No human in their right mind is passionate about spam robots, but spam robots get funded cause VCs want to grab up on 1% of Facebook’s fabled 300 million.
If the real-time web is meant to represent the real world on the web, consider this: Put 300 million people in Times Square and add 100 million business owners trying to sell their products in that crowd. How is anyone possibly going to do anything significant? Search engines aside, Google has yet to produce an algorithm to separate the Official businesses from the scammers. And I see no end to this without completely alienating the little guys who are attempting to innovate out of their garages, which is what originally made the internet so awesome.
