This is another great reason why you guys need to correct your use of the term "web service" - you are applying it too broadly - and using it inconsistently amongst yourselves. All future (technology?) business models will have some internet component - your investors should get that.
Gualberto Diaz
· 3 years ago
I have also been thinking about where technology will be taking us into the future. There has been an obvious shift from machine based software to web based software over the past couple of years. The trend is pointing towards making that web based software even more mobile. Mobile, handheld technology is where I think the future lies. Compounding on that even more, I think a mobile social network that can be accessed easily via handheld devices could prove to be successful. Communities in general, will be what will create the most value for users as well as people looking to offer products to them.
I'm a big fan of your Feedburner investment. RSS technology will be the future of the way people get information, as it is published. And you're completely right, the technology is in its infancy. I would be very interested in possibly investing in the company if they open up another round of investing.
Daniel Barton
· 3 years ago
I found your site searching google for the term "Social R&D". I found a spirited debate about whether in this era Technical R&D was more important than Social Engineering.
What I was looking for was debate on the question of whether there was anything actually like true Social R&D going on.
A lot of the Web 2.0 services you talk about start serendipitously; they are wanderings in the social-systems space, and once they to hum they produce a gravity that attracts participants, they distort the opportunity space for later entrants, and then finally they produce an "exhaust" which may or may not be valuable. They are Research in the pure sense not the applied sense; they seek only to prove or falsify the proposition that they are useful. And they are Development only in the sense that some of them stick and then go on to to change how society functions; they are not Development in sense of the pragmatic application of research results for commercial gain. They cannot be Development in this sense, purely because they cannot be tested on a closed user group or in controlled environments. They only work on the entire population.
The question I want to ask is; can there be social R & D? Is there any way to do applied social research and then pragmatically develop commercial propositions from it? Or is the combined positive feedback from the waves and waves of cost free collaboration that is currently being implemented too to seductive to resist and too transformative to predict?
We are by definition the most reciprocally altruistic organism to evolve on the planet to date. For individual users the net has moved the cost of minor altruistic behavior near to zero, and the compound benefit that is derived from that altruism may be the greatest of all transformations of the social space to occur. And it is very likely that it is still in its earliest stages.
All Comments
This is another great reason why you guys need to correct your use of the term "web service" - you are applying it too broadly - and using it inconsistently amongst yourselves. All future (technology?) business models will have some internet component - your investors should get that.
I have also been thinking about where technology will be taking us into the future. There has been an obvious shift from machine based software to web based software over the past couple of years. The trend is pointing towards making that web based software even more mobile. Mobile, handheld technology is where I think the future lies. Compounding on that even more, I think a mobile social network that can be accessed easily via handheld devices could prove to be successful. Communities in general, will be what will create the most value for users as well as people looking to offer products to them.
I'm a big fan of your Feedburner investment. RSS technology will be the future of the way people get information, as it is published. And you're completely right, the technology is in its infancy. I would be very interested in possibly investing in the company if they open up another round of investing.
I found your site searching google for the term "Social R&D". I found a spirited debate about whether in this era Technical R&D was more important than Social Engineering.
What I was looking for was debate on the question of whether there was anything actually like true Social R&D going on.
A lot of the Web 2.0 services you talk about start serendipitously; they are wanderings in the social-systems space, and once they to hum they produce a gravity that attracts participants, they distort the opportunity space for later entrants, and then finally they produce an "exhaust" which may or may not be valuable. They are Research in the pure sense not the applied sense; they seek only to prove or falsify the proposition that they are useful. And they are Development only in the sense that some of them stick and then go on to to change how society functions; they are not Development in sense of the pragmatic application of research results for commercial gain. They cannot be Development in this sense, purely because they cannot be tested on a closed user group or in controlled environments. They only work on the entire population.
The question I want to ask is; can there be social R & D? Is there any way to do applied social research and then pragmatically develop commercial propositions from it? Or is the combined positive feedback from the waves and waves of cost free collaboration that is currently being implemented too to seductive to resist and too transformative to predict?
We are by definition the most reciprocally altruistic organism to evolve on the planet to date. For individual users the net has moved the cost of minor altruistic behavior near to zero, and the compound benefit that is derived from that altruism may be the greatest of all transformations of the social space to occur. And it is very likely that it is still in its earliest stages.