Feedonomics

You know, the people who pay for things. Last week I started working with an old friend of mine. By friend I mean someone I actually know in the real world. He’s been part of the software business since the mid-Eighties, but he hasn’t been following the Web 2.0 movement as closely as I have. I wanted to get a new perspective on what we should do with all the feed technology we’ve built. It’s been an interesting and sometimes embarrassing week. He keeps giving me the kind of advice I used to give him when he started 20 years ago.  My first software company in 1981 was a software mail-order business. It doesn’t get more entrepreneurial than that. We were selling things we didn’t even have in inventory. I can see just how much Kool-aid I’ve been drinking.

It’s only Saturday of a three-day weekend, and the storm is gathering on Techmeme already. The mob is screaming “Kill Twitter,” “Kill Google, Reddit and Digg.” Is that what Web 2.0 supposed to be about? I thought we were going to all hold hands and reach a higher state of consciousness through continuous exchange of memes. The irony is that the site at the center of this bloodlust has the innocent name of FriendFeed. Are we really heading to a social network apocalypse, or is this just a duel of competing tech gurus linkbaiting for all they’re worth? How will we know when FriendFeed has killed everyone else? Will Twitter make less money than the zero revenues they have now? This is getting really silly. Why can’t anyone get excited about a business model that works? You can’t have zero sum when there is no sum to measure.

Grazr user privacy posted an aggregation of the Privacy and Security forum’s latest discussions, plus headlines and links. The forum is hosted at CollectiveX, a new “do-it-yourself” group site.

It’s a catchphrase that means the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. yan2506 wanted to keep up with the latest on this buzz. Here’s the widget, in French.