the Onda

The number one justification that I hear these days about why so-called Web 2.0 companies succeed in areas where better-funded Web 1.0 companies failed is the "maturity" of the online audience. Ofoto had to dump millions into marketing online photo sharing because people didn't understand what you could do with digital cameras and the network. At abuzz, we were too early for people to understand that the site was really a mix of the best parts of Friendster, Craig's List, and the current crop of Q&A sites.

Baloney. This has always felt like the easy way out to me. It would be one thing if the "before" world consisted of people with 14.4Kbps modems and gopher file requests, but the reality was that the web of 1998 looked a lot like the web of 2005 (the penetration of broadband being the main material difference). We may have had more browser hoops to jump through in order to get decent usability but people were still able to grok the power of the network and the implications of communities online even back then.

Which is why it's so refreshing in the wake of the Yahoo-Delicious deal to read this piece by Ari Paparo on why Blink failed with more money and time where Delicious won. In the final analysis Paparo claims that it always comes right down to product:

My intent was to show that product design matters. We had more money, more users, a five year head start, and some really, really smart people working on bookmarking in 1999. The bottom line is that we simply didn’t get it right.

I'm ready to admit that on the web it's all about getting the product right. This is exacerbated by what someone yesterday described it to me as the "hit-and-run" mentality-- since it seems that just about every day someone is announcing a new online service, a key segment of your early adopters are likely to "hit" your site, make up their minds in 5 minutes (if you are lucky), and quickly run to the next thing if you fail to capture their hearts and minds.

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