A VC - Latest Comments in Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Dan Sauter — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:01:37 -0000

Fred- I think you will enjoy this post I just made:

http://www.dynamit.us/blog

It's based off this post, and shows how Web 2.0 is already changing the world. I really believe in all the organizations I mention, and I hope you can take a quick look and spread it around and help create change.
Thanks

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

berkay — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:30:11 -0000

I think we need to bridge the web 2.0 community with the communities that work on these real problems and see whether/how we can enable them, and you may just be very well suited for this. I've tried to elaborate more at http://www.mberkay.com/2008...

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

vikas sapra — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:54:02 -0000

I've used Mint but the user experience left much to be desired. Looking forward to giving wesabe a shot. 'measure, know, change' - that sums up my thesis in three words...well played.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

fredwilson — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:11:05 -0000

I totally agree with your point of view vsapra

Some of our investments, wesabe comes to mind, can facilitate this 'measure, know, change' behavior you mention

Fred

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

rmchase — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:07:10 -0000

I've been giving some talks on this topic of web 2.0 for social causes, most recently at the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 in New York last week.

Think about collaborative production (eg wikipedia); collaborative consumption (Zipcar, www.goloco.org); collaborative infrastructure (Zipcar, GoLoco, mesh networking); collaborative financing (see my blog on this topic
http://networkmusings.blogs...

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

vikas sapra — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:46:42 -0000

A number of conversations in this thread are pinning the ideas of wealth and sustainability against one another; however, they are not mutually exclusive. Creating solutions for the world’s social/political/economical ills also has the potential to generate great wealth for entrepreneurs.

I head up business development for a startup that solves a common problem – it enables you to bookmark products, places, events, etc. while you’re on the go. Once tagged, you can make purchases, set transactional reminders, and share postings with others. Don’t worry; I won’t use this forum to shamelessly self-promote. The point is that I truly enjoy working on a project that provides people with some utility; but I occasionally lament the fact that I’m not using my abilities to focus on more pressing problems.

Many web apps, such as twitter, define completely new types of behavior. Similarly, I hope that the next surge of web apps modify people’s behavior to make us more environmentally and socially conscious. Many of the tools are in place to create such services cheaply. For example, people would be better conservers if they had an easy way of monitoring themselves. Give people the means to save money and energy (like hooking up their usage to the internet and display daily/weekly/monthly reports of usage, energy price fluctuations, possible savings, etc.) and the aggregate effect can be significant – for both the consumer and the environment.

It’s tragic that with the current state of gas prices, there is still tremendous unused capacity in automobiles. In theory, sites that facilitate ridesharing (www.goloco.org, www.nuride.com, facebook carpool, etc) should be very successful, but few have been able to garner the critical mass necessary to make ridesharing successful. My thesis project at ITP tries to solve this problem by giving pre-existing networks the ability to quickly implement rideshares – thus eliminating the network effect problem. This is only one example; Fred, I'm happy to see you tackling the world's 'bigger' problems and look forward to see what you come up with. We haven’t even scratched the surface yet.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Prokofy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:41:45 -0000

Well, sorry, I'm not interested in having a global technical elite take power over countries and communities.

The decentralization you imagine only occurs for those with technical resources and skills, and those who code control the tool, often in arbitrary ways that the old forms of government did not make possible for only the technically skilled to control. No, the answer isn't for everybody to learn how to code.

All this empowering of the individual -- but the individual doesn't need *you* to do their empowering -- if that's the case, you can take the "empowerment" away. The power of the individual resides in law, not code; law is maintained by governments, not engineers and programmers.

Crowdsourcing is a myth. It's a political movement of the affluent or the freetard piggying off the affluent technically resourced. And depends on how you source the crowd.

There are different individuals; they disagree. You can't magically make everything happen by empowering the individual. That's why individuals gather from the ground up in groups, parties -- countries, governments. I don't see any reason to abolish representative democracy in favour of the e-lite horizontally organizing through a few influencers mining crowds already influenced by memes.

Decentralize, and if you are sincere, you will discover the real grassroots, unlike the ephemeral netroots, don't agree with how you wish to do things; and the first thing they will disagree about is that you and other widgeteers should run everything.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Toufique — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:25:17 -0000

I'd prefer the opposite actually. I think Web 2.0 technologies will decentralize the processes currently centralized by governments, e.g. issue prioritization, resource allocation and even policy making. I think the end goal really is to empower the individual to affect the macro circumstances that impact his/her life by 1) decentralizing the macro decisions & 2) empowering the individual to contribute to those decisions. http://www.thepoint.com/ is another great example of how crowdsourced change could work.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Prokofy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:12:26 -0000

Er, I guess that's why millions of people keep applying -- and keep coming -- to programs to study or research in the U.S. -- especially Europeans, Chinese, Russians.

And I guess that's why...Gopnik's salary keeps coming from a U.S. based magazine.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

andyswan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:09:07 -0000

Agree. I was not just talking about Gates....but the effiicencies and wealth that msft software has enabled others to create for themselves, and therefore others.
The pie grows!!!

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Prokofy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:08:55 -0000

So are you for a global technical elite marshalling resources, or would you be willing to let elected governments do that?

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Prokofy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:07:25 -0000

Maybe, instead of harnessing sophisticated technology and tech start-up entrepreneurs and VS, you should start with reforming the local government, which is likely not taking what wealth they do have, especially from local business or international donor community, and investing it in clean water.

Go closer to that baby's home and ask where the power problems lie there. It's not for lack of the Internet or Twitter; you don't need those things to make clean water available, even if they may help.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Prokofy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:04:16 -0000

andyswan, there's a surprising number of people in this thread, however, and even Fred himself, who seem to think that creating wealth for wealth's sake isn't "enough" or "not good enough any more". I find that hugely troublesome, as that leads them down the path to wacky warmed-over socialist ideologies about redistribution or even totalitarian ideologies about social engineering and control which I find troubling inherent in these social media tools as they are being used now.

Your example of Microsoft shouldn't be just about Bill Gates. If you can say, "Microsoft enabled millions of people who would never have been in the workforce to work at home on simple applications and start their own companies or earn as freelancers" that might be saying something.

It's good that Bill Gates gives so much to charities. But if he picks the topics he is subjectively interested in due to whatever "Betterworldism" he is subject to, we get river blindness, AIDS, whatever.

Meanwhile, let's say, other subjects right in his own country like declining education, after school programs, teen-age violence -- are all topics some other billionaire is supposed to work on.

The foundations like Ford based on the last centuries' wealth were more institutionalized with long-term programs and not at the whim of a living donor.

I think we have to reflect why your notion of creating and circulating wealth isn't compelling anymore to modern VCs and they wish to be more instrumental with it.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Prokofy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:47:31 -0000

Maybe I'm just not explaining it very well.

Look at the responses in this thread, and your own invocation of Umar. There's this sense of kind of "white man's burden," that you are guilty about not solving the world's problems. That you contribute to vacuous blogging about people standing in line in a restaurant or throwing drinks on Facebook. That you must absolutely get to the "next thing" and flog all these platforms to make them produce Better World stuff.

I'm merely saying that it's that very guilt-stricken, flogging approach that will marginalize or even kill the freedoms and potential of new media and ensure that you never achieve any of those vague goods you wish to achive -- and I'm hoping you will think more about what good you really are trying achieve by invoking something like Umair -- whose basically telling us that a technical elite should just get to connect with each other and run the world, because they can do it better than the world's democracies. No thanks.

I don't recall nearly so many of those seizures of guilt and rumination about irrelevance when the Internet itself was being built. I don't recall essays of the type you see from somebody like Ethan Zuckerman at Harvard, that sort of, "OMG, the Third World isn't connected yet so we are irrelevant and wasting our time on frivolousness". Maybe because it felt more like laying electrical power lines and connecting?

Yet a lot of the content in the early days of the Internet with everybody's pages about their cat and self-referential geeky web logs were just as content-free and meaningless. Remember when everybody was sending everybody else a sound WAV from a movie on email?

Couldn't we have the same tolerance then for Web 2.0 or 3.D or whatever comes down next?

I don't recall people whining that the Internet was an elitist toy because people in Tanzania or Tajikistan weren't connected yet and didn't have broadband -- they just worked really hard to get them connected.

Yet there's something about Twitter or Facebook or Second Life that makes people seize up into do-goody panic and reflect on the masses being asses -- the very masses that you all summoned by making the service free, and scaling it wildly with dizzying speed.

There's absolutely no reason that somebody can't take a Twitter or a Second Life and go work on some issue like closing Guantanamo -- in fact there are guite a few who do!

Kiva.org was mentioned -- anybody could combine Facebook and FriendFeed *already* if they wish and get to work making a tangible difference, and they do. That is, it's not about media, really, it's about people. Not everyone wants to give up their life of affluence and serve the poor. And that's ok. If everybody did that, they'd all be poor, too.

If the tools didn't change people and make them all think as one Hive Mind and stop world hunger yet, maybe that's because you don't change things like that over night nor in such a facile way -- and something like making everybody think as one Hive Mind isn't a good idea anyway.

I think the more you connect and the more you give people the tools the report, the more you will find that they do *not* feel they are all in one society and will let you hear about that, plenty, and that's a good thing. Early adapters who tend to be in one political grouping should not be trying to impose their vision and will, using the tools themselves.

It's really important to make the tools free of a social mission, and be prepared to accept that they will not only be used for your own social mission.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

fredwilson — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:44:08 -0000

I don't follow your argument

Maybe I am just too dense or dumb to understand it

And yes, I am very much engaged in working with the twitter team to identify a good business model

And yes, I do feel that social media should be free of any restrictions (by owners, investors, government, etc) on what it can do and become

Fred

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Prokofy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:37:22 -0000

I think you aren't taking ownership for the consequences of what you are saying, Fred. If you "have no desire to use social media to foster a world view," good Lord, why are you going on and on about world hunger and the frivolousness of throwing drinks on Facebook and wishing to somehow harness all this to Do Good?!

Maybe you can't get excited about "just making money"? But...you didn't even do *that* yet on Twitter, did you? I mean, Twitter didn't break even or pay back their venture capitalists yet, did they? And what *will* be the model to sustain it? Isn't that still a challenge worth working on that isn't boring?

And...You still want this to be a cause -- and you still want to weld into the tools themselves some kind of function, or social justice mission, and that is *exactly* what will kill it.

You must be willing to create free media, as free as mainstream media was. The wealthy families who backed the newspapers may have instilled some sort of foundation of political culture in these outlets, but they didn't so directly interfere in editorial line and journalism and they kept intact the idea of a "firewall" between editorial and advertising. They didn't insist that they adopt certain business models (like Danah Boyd and Brad Fitzpatrick are doing to Live Journal, decrying the end of free accounts), They didn't have such prescriptive messages -- like you are doing trying to put social media and its users to work answering Umair's Orwellian questions.

I'm sorry, but I simply can't imagine Punch Sulzberger sending out a memo to all his editors telling them to get to work on organizing the world's finance and organizing the world's hunger and organizing the world's education.

Would *you* want to read a newspaper that had that much exhortation and do-goodism warped into it?

You just summed up the problem, Fred: you want to "invest in things that make the world a better place".

But of course you *do* have a very firm idea what that "betterness" is and like a lot of social media backers and power users, it is very much tied up with certain political views and outlooks -- and that can't be denied.

If it is REALLY true that it is REALLY up to the people who build and use them to "make the world better," then you would persist through this period of "being bored" and annoyed at the shallowness of social media, and stick it out until that day when it was up and running and being used in various ways.

And look what you say! "we have a unique opportunity to create a world where people all feel like they belong to the same society. It’s already happening in business. Look at the EU to see a model of what the entire world could become."

That *is* a very, very rigid prescriptive approach to media that really *is* in fact ascribing it a social mission. You really want everybody on the planet to feel as if they belong to the same society?! But they don't! You *really* want the entire world to become like the EU? Don't you think, oh, Africa and Asia and Latin American might have a different outlook and want to have a say in this? And can't they?

I personally don't invest as much time in Twitter or Facebook as I once did for the simple reason that unlike Second Life, they have no way for the average amateur content maker and networker and community builder to monetarize their time online (only a tiny percentage of devs, relative to the mass user base, can find VCs to back their various widget-making capers on services like FB).

The challenge is to find a way for everyone who works to get paid -- even a little. That would *already* be a Better World.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

fredwilson — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:23:05 -0000

I think you misread what I a said

I have no desire to use social media to foster a world view

I was simply saying that I can't get excited about just making money

If that was my goal, there are better ways to do that than run a small early
stage venture capital fund

I'd like to invest in things that can make the world a better place

How they do that is up to the people who build them and use them, not me

fred

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Prokofy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:46:44 -0000

Re: "It has to be a force for positive social change. It needs to be about making the world a better place for our children and their children."

Fred,

No private media owner or government media owner who has tried to assign to the media such a social function as "being a force for social change" has ever succeeded. The question instantly becomes political: Who gets to do the ascribing of what role to the media? Why you?

Media has to be free to be able to accomplish these goods of "making social change", which is achieved not by media itself, but by people who use media who can publish the news and commentary without fear or favour.

Social media is still media. And this awful urge that venture capitalists have to try to force social media into a prescribed social roles like this lurching around the world "doing good" will succeed in killing it -- and is already killing it in places. Unless you want social media merely to become a tool for social engineering and social control, you have to enable it to be as free as possible, and that means that it will take many forms and that good content may not always drive out bad content.

Nobody needs a handful of venture capitalists to "organize" the world as unelected, unrepresentative, and undemocratic forces planning from the top down. To the extent that old and new media can be accessed and used freely by groups in civil society and political parties working for change (or working to conserve what is good -- change for change's sake isn't an absolute good), that's all fine, but it has to be genuinely pluralistic, not welding extreme leftist social views into the very tools themselves, enabling leftist influencers to ban, mute, expel anybody whose views they don't like. It's important to retain a free public commons that can debate public issues from a variety of perspectives.

There's something basically flawed in your model, like the model that Danah Boyd or Lawrence Lessig or Philip Rosedale seem to want to impose us. Basically it works like this:

o create a really popular website, game or world and enable lots and lots of people to sign up for it -- masses of people (you always love those masses!). Have them pay nothing -- and have free accounts -- you want the poor of the world to have access. Keep those free acounts! No matter what! Otherwise you are evil imperialist old white guys!

o get the middle class or overstretched working class to pay for the subscriptions and sustain the entire enterprise; get people to create content for free while expending money themselves to have premium accounts

o get some advertisers to buy ad space

o find some more angels

o try to scale the whole thing to enable a very small number of wealthy corporations with ad dollars and a smaller apex of middle-class premium purchasers, plus a tiny percentage of content-creators/widget engineers to sustain the entire rapidly growing pyramid as a small number of devs work frantically to scale the whole enterprise -- all on behalf of masses and masses of free accounts that keep piling in the door; never charge, even $3.45!

o watch as VCs become disenchanted with the frivolity, porn, hate speech, mass culture of the masses -- the reality of the masses as they pour in outpaces their vision of the masses being "empowered for a better world"

o watch as engineers can't scale the thing with all those masses on top of the servers

o watch as premium account holders grow disenchanted as mass numbers deteriorate the quality of the experience and performance diminishes

o watch as ad dollars go elsewhere because they aren't getting clicks from people who have no money because they are using free media for free

Why does this keep happening over and over again on Web 2.0?

The origin of the problem isn't engineering scaling problems; it isn't fickle advertising dollars; it isn't easily-offended customers, although they are fickle and burn through content and features as they always did on MMORPGs.

No, the problem is your utopian vision of the world: that you can make a tiny handful of people work for free, and a tiny number of companies with ad dollars sustain an enormous mass of freeloaders to do...something that is supposed to Make the World Better.

It's your belief that all you have to do is pile on masses of people online for free, and magically, they will transform into a global village all thinking the same thing (as if that were a good thing!).

Russian businessmen, who went through 75 years of this sort of betterworldism in real life as "communism," with "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us," dumped the free accounts on Live Journal, to the howling of idealists Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig. But...social media's engineers, servers, bandwidth, etc. cost money. Why not make people pay, after a trial account expires? Indeed, why not? They pay, even in Russia, for cable or electricity or cell phones. They can add this, too.

Before you and other backers get sick of Twitter like Brad Fitzpatrick got sick of Live Journal, Fred, you should really think about these basic truths: when you offer something for free, nobody values it. They treat it badly. And when you can imagine that you can just harness the masses like that in such a utilitarian way and "do good," they will slip through your fingers -- and that's a good thing. You shouldn't be in charge of them. That's not a better world.

Television could broadcast for free to millions of people who did nothing more than buy cheap TV sets once because it had a huge volume of advertising dollars -- and people dutifully went out and bought the things advertised on the TV -- it was effective. But TV and magazines haven't disappeared to the extent that Web 2.0 advertising can completely replace it, and people just won't click on ads with dorky things like "Lonely? 52 years old? Find eligible males in your city."

I don't want you or Umair or anybody else to "organize the world's freedom" just because you are wealthy or because you are politically correct. Leave the world, and media alone, and let people organize themselves as they see fit.

I hope you will not lose sight of your historical mission here.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

eldsjal — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:26:10 -0000

Ok, let me know if you include Stockholm as well :)

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

fredwilson — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:51:04 -0000

I have firm plans so far to visit slovenia, denmark, berlin, london,
edinburgh, and northern england

fred

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

eldsjal — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:59:02 -0000

Fred, where in Europe will you be except Paris?

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

greenskeptic — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:56:55 -0000

Agree with you Andy, which is why we'll never solve the energy/climate change issue unless we can create wealth and grow the pie for all...when the new green economy really gets traction, there will be plenty of money to be made and change will come.

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

Toufique — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:39:50 -0000

Amen! In my mind, Non-Zero's thesis is as close to the word of God as humanly possible. Wright basically argues that life, history and humanity produces increasingly more and more non-zero sum games over time. Then he makes the case that this increase is made possible by better communication "technology."

"There is one further analogy between organisms and societies. It isn't just that in both cases energy is marshaled in a way that sustains and protects structure. And it isn't just that this marshling is always guided by information. It is that it is the function of the information to guide the marshaling."

I would guess that a lot of these Web 2.0 technologies would start producing these global impacts when they start "to guide the marshaling" of resources. Take Kiva as an early example.

If you haven't seen it already, I'd highly recommend the excerpt at http://www.nonzero.org/chap...

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

fredwilson — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:24:07 -0000

Great idea

Starting with kids is a wonderful idea

Re: Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”?

cfrerebeau — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:10:37 -0000

very interresting post, indeed