Death of a Web 2.0 era

Filed in archive Web 2.0 on November 26, 2007

As the peaks of Web 2.0 are behind us, more and more online applications disappear, often try to get sold or just close doors. Looking at Techcrunch's Deadpool, an accurate source for applications that did not make it, the numbers are going up. Is Web 2.0 reaching it's end ?

I think not. Something else is going on. As I have said many times, there are way too many applications on the internet these days that offer the same thing as many others. Only one thing can come from that : death. I have never understood why people keep on launching applications online that already exist in many forms, but I think it's just an attempt to get even the tiniest slice of the market. As stated in the article about the cofounder of Hotmail before it was bought by MS, you need only 1 percent of the market to make serious money.

Bhatia said, "If Live Documents makes 1 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues, then we would earn USD 200 million a year.(Zoho Blogs)

He was talking about online office software, of course.

So what is the way to go if you are eager to launch an online app? Go for inventive solutions, such as smart integration software that will make several existing applications work together, or enable people to get to their online data from whereever they are. Launching yet another calendar service is useless.

Image by Gamespot.com.