Whether or not you believe the tech and venture communities are generating companies with real business plans and long term value, you’ve got to admit that the new web is making some waves 
What should the rest of the world be paying attention to and taking away from Web2.0?
Well, its a bit more than just suggesting you use social networking for your products or company. Web2.0 or rather the cutting edge trends happening on the net right now (I hate the silly name) can really be broken down into 5 movements.
- User interface – easily understandable at a glance
- Transparency – whats really happening here?
- Open Access – low cost and easy access to tools
- Reputation – track records and power
- Participation – get everyone involved
All of these movements rely on each other. You need transparency to build reputation, you need access to tools to create that transparceny, and the user interface needs to be there for anyone to make any sense of any of this.
In a follow on post, I’ll map these 5 areas to the real world, but for now I just want to go through the exercise of defining them.
1) User Interface
Make things easy to use, at a glance. You can never make things too simple, and you can never over simplify a concept for your public. Whether its mint.com doing a better job than the banks and quicken of making financial software easy to use, or posterous.com bringing an even simpler blogging tool to the masses, UI here is key. It makes for more positive experience and it gets larger amount of users participating.
2) Transparency
You don’t know who anyone is on the web (you don’t always know in the real world either), so you have to go to great strides to establish your identity and trustworthyness online. Kiva.org is a perfect example of this, they bring enough transparency to the world of micro-finance that millions of dollars from credit card weilding Americans are flowing into 3rd world countries and the financial institutions supporting them.
3) Open Access
Free tools and low-cost access gives even the smallest players a voice. This increased participation is reflected in the amount of bloggers out there, the amount of people posting photos on facebook, and the amount of people posting restaurant reviews to Yelp.
4) Reputation
This one goes hand in hand with transparency, and really is the driving factor behind it. Anyone can be anyone on the web, and this inherently causes a lot of trust issues. Its key to be able to build, manage, and monitor your reputation online.
5) Participation
This word already cropped up twice as I defined some of the previous areas. Open Access and Usability both promote participation from the the masses. Who knew 10million people would want to sms publicly through twitter? Or become citizen journalists on NowPublic? These all need participation from the masses, not just passive audience…
My name is Evan Bartlett, and I'm all about connecting people and finding better ways to do things. Every day life should be approached with the eye of an entreprenuer, so here's where I'll hash out my ideas on the intersection of sales, community, and product!
