The Evolution of the Internet

Have a friend who has been blogging for a while. He sent me his latest, http://gadgets.netscape.com/story/2006/09/17/make-an-ipod-case-from-a-milk-jug/, and asked me what I thought of Netscape's new incarnation.

I thought I would post our conversation for general review.

Victor's blog, by the way, can be found at http://superpixel.blogspot.com/.


Victor Agreda
to Vania

So what do you think of the "new" Netscape? I value your opinion, as a web dude, and overall tech person... They're trying really hard to make it work-- and "they" are my co-workers!


Vania Smrkovski
to Victor

To be honest, I almost didn't sign up. I had an aversion to signing up to "yet another social site". I have a friend who has a MySpace account, and he has some funny stuff, but initially he thought I would have to get an account there and I was reluctant to even bother to look at his stuff.

I signed up for Netscape because I had to in order to vote for your blog post. But in my mind, if other people are like me, they will have to fight upstream to get people to get involved.

Of course, I'm finding that I'm becoming representative of an older techie crowd, too, and I am finding that high school/college age ranges area sweet spot for these social network apps, and my opinion along these lines is simply representative of another market altogether.


Victor Agreda, Jr.
to Vania

do you ever visit digg.com?
or reddit or del.icio.us?
Just curious, as I really feel voting on content is an interesting model. I like the democracy of it. Of course, the downside is registration-- there's no fair way to do it otherwise. Maybe that's why marketers like it too ;)


Vania Smrkovski
to Victor

I'm familiar with digg and del.icio.us, of course, and I realized full well as I wrote my last comment that I was not "with it" in regards to these latest social experiments. I've been exploring them, trying to grok the zeitgeist of it all, and I too have found them fascinating.

I just remember the early days of the public Internet, how the first versions of "search engines" were monitored and maintained by the general public. It didn't work then, and I don't imagine that it will work as effectively in 6 months as it does now. It's a fad, and as such it will likely have various echos in the next ten years, a "next big thing" that celebrates the public role, and that "gets everyone involved", and all as fragile as every phase before, wilting in the hot sun of "neat-o-keen" pressures of other "next big things".

Through it all, I am certain of a couple of things. Open source, and therefore some watered-down version of all public-interaction projects, will never die. They will suffer from a massive down-turn in popularity, and will have to adapt to some more minimalistic form, which will be when they get really interesting.

If you doubt me on this, and think that YouTube, Digg and now Netscape (2.0) are in it for the long haul, remember that most of the revenue is being generated by ad revenue, and remember that in the late 90s, most of that dot-com boom was .... well... based on revenue based on ad revenue. The reason it died was that advertisers stopped paying for ads, which led to the first tier of companies no longer staying afloat, since their stocks were already in the toilet, which meant they went out of business and 2nd tier companies suddenly stopped receiving ad revenue from the same people that paid the 1st tier, and stopped receiving ad revenue from the 1st tier companies that went out of business. Vicious cycle.

There were a lot of reasons for all of this, but you could easily summarize by pointing out that the stock market is the very capitalistic equivalent of the open source, public interaction voting machine. People stopped being interested (for various reasons, of course) and stopped voting with their cash.

I figure if I'm at all right about this, then while we may not get another dot-bomb, while we may have enough momentum this time to survive down-turns, we still haven't got a machine that's tuned well, and there will be skips and stutters, and diggs and youtubes and others will find themselves stomped on by people looking to see the new kid in town, be it a virtual vibrator or another networked-mechanical-do-hickey.

I've been working on a toy that I hope is NBT survivable (NBT = Next Big Thing). It's based on providing the candy initially, hooking the heroine, so to speak, but providing the long-term satisfaction of actual usefulness. To explain, if you have a networked toolset that allows you to chat with people, and work from home, from your office and from your hand-held phone/computer seemlessly, then you have opportunity enough to get people hooked on "neat" things like chat and interaction-based sharing, etc. But if this whole kit also provides less-advertised features like a statically and remotely stored environment, where your home computer can explode, and you don't lose anything of value, and where you can easily collaborate with a colleague on something by simply giving them explosure to your personal projects, then once the "Next Big Thing" comes on the square, you have a good portion of your group honestly committed to you, because you are tied into their professional and personal development, you have things that will generate revenue in their future. You have introduced them to other people that are intrinsic to their personal development. And you, the company, have a captured audience to introduce your own "Next Big Things".

This may not be very clear, and I apologize. But the essense of what I'm describing isn't all that different from what Google has done. They have all sorts of "neat" things, like GMail, calendars, spread sheets. Sure, maybe 5-15% of their user base actually uses all of these or most of these. But that's fine, if they have 80-90% use of some other revenue generating products, and they still have a user base for the other ill-conceived ideas. If they keep them alive, then one day someone will come on the scene and say "You know, insert tab A into slot B, calendar and GMail and spreadsheet, and Google.org, and we have a ready-made vehicle to answer this NBT, and we don't have to spend months developing the whole thing. Now, where's that marketing guy when you need him. We're going to have dinner and discuss some things."

In a similar way, I'm certain that whatever a company develops, they have to assume that everyone will abandon it for some other new idea in 6 months to a year, and they'd better have some alternative plan already in beta by then or they're going to be providing interviews for Business Weekly on how yet another company announced lay-offs this week.

Did any of this actually answer your question? I'm re-reading it, and I don't know if it did.


Victor Agreda
to Vania

No, you're absolutely right on most of this. With the pace of the web, and how we're training managers to glom on to the "next big thing" there's a lot of this going around... One thing that is lost is the notion of the average consumer changing on a dime. That just doesn't happen, and I think that's a factor. There's still resistance in business too. Bear in mind many organizations still use NT and Office 97! Fewer every day but still...

I was trying for a freebie one-man focus group, but don't worry about it ;)

Everything you said to me should be in a blog. You should at least be blogging. Reminds me of John C. Dvorak. But you're very forward-thinking.

Couldn't agree more on Google. I use the Calendar, Gtalk, Gmail, Spreadsheet, Ads (both Sense and Words), Writely... and I posted on Download Squad a while back about them needing to get their shit together-- literally. They have a powerful "stateless" suite of products.

And let me tell you, after using Google AND Yahoo to place ads for Llamapod-- I know why Google makes so much money. WAY easier. Yahoo tries to woo with service in more traditional ways. Interesting approaches.

I'm very wary of this job, being tied to advertising.


Vania Smrkovski
to Victor

I am blogging, if somewhat sporadically. www.pandorasdream.com/blog

I think you'd be, like, the first visiter, or maybe the third, but no one I've told about it has admitted to actually going.... :-)

That's part of what I've observed about Internet NBTness. Like an iceberg, those who succeed are the visible 1% against a 99% hidden, and unused mass. One of the reasons, I think, the social networking phenomenon has cycled both IN popularity and OUT of popularity is that people think that their ideas will be available to the general public, but they forget that they have always encountered that environment, and they forget that those times, like middle school and high school, only the "cool" and "popular" ones really got any visibility. The Internet will still provide a leveling of the playing field, I think, but only because it's easier with millions of people to have some small fraction actually see the lowly dregs. In my high school, we only had a few hundred in each class, so one half of one percent was, like, a single finger. At least with millions and millions, you have a chance of two or three whole human beings actually feeling some sympathy, or at a minimum some sense of morbid curiosity at what you the blogger or social networker may have to offer.

As I was writing my last email, I was considering it as a blog. Horror though it may be, I may have to edit this email chain and blog.