Well everybody, if you haven’t been seeing PR praise for Flock on the interweb then you must have been living under a Web 1.0 rock for awhile. Wired has praised it, Bessemer Venture Partners and many others gave them tons of money (enough to hire ~12 people out the shoot, supposedly around $2 million), nearly 70,000 people are talking about it on Technorati, but all this buzz isn’t really doing it for me.
My buddy Jason wrote about The Top 10 Things That Aren’t Web 2.0 over at Signal vs. Noise, and he and I are definitely of the same mind on this issue. Web 2.0 isn’t defined as using one specific technology (AJAX) or hiring a fleet of B and C people — Web 2.0 is just about doing things better than we all did them before. It’s evolutionary, not revolutionary like everyone makes it out to seem.
In that post, Flock guy Chris Messina probably got the wind straight knocked out of him considering he wrote a 4 paragraph comment with his fisticuffs blazing, but he had pretty good reason — Jason basically called bullshit on his entire company. Flock and other “Web 2.0″ applications are reminding me a lot of dotcom-era companies, but spun in a slightly different way. Now, these companies are SO socially-motivated and altruistic that the concepts of a revenue stream and a real business plan don’t get thought about nor defined until they realize they have no money. Now Flock might be flying down this path and they might not, but as far as I can tell, Flock would have done better as a bootstrapped pet project than a fully-funded, full-blown company.
When Doves Cry
Flock is a branch of the popular, open-source Firefox web browser. From what I’ve heard and seen, they’ve basically recoded a bunch of it, developed some really useful Firefox extensions, and made it friendly to work with other cool apps like Flickr and Delicious. To me, it sounds really cool and useful to the blog crowd, but I just can’t see a company being formed around it.
Because Flock is mostly just Firefox, they can’t ever resell it (not like selling a browser is a solid business plan anyway). Essentially, they are building a product they legally cannot sell. When they were recently Slashdotted the vast majority of the commenters said “big whoop” as well, and “how will they make money?”
Well if they’re not going to sell the product, they will be running advertisements to make money. Or not. I just read a post Flocker Andy Smith wrote and here’s a quote:
We are not expecting to make money running Google ads, we are not adware, we don’t like ads, I don’t like ads.
-Andy Smith
So no selling of Flock, no advertisements, am I missing something? They’re paying around $1M a year in salaries alone for ~12 people to work on a kickass product that is essentially shooting themselves in the foot business-wise. I could be missing a big thing here, so please let me know if my foot is in my mouth.
Web 2.0 Without Quotes Around It
I normally use quotes when mentioning “web 2.0″ but for this section I’m throwing them to the side so I can add my definition of this buzzed over term to the growing list.
Web 2.0 is not a revolutionary step in the history of our industry, regardless of what everyone wants to think. We didn’t go from 1.0 to 2.0 overnight, nor does “2.0″ as a version number on the web usher in new things that weren’t around a few months ago. I hate when an application uses AJAX, Ruby on Rails, RSS, etc. just because they think it’s what they should be using. If a hammer is all you have in your toolbox, then a hammer is all you’ll be using to build your house. Ruby on Rails is an amazing web framework, AJAX is a great way to quickly move data back and forth without disrupting the user experience, and RSS makes browsing frequently-updated websites really painless, but if what you’re working on requires none of these then don’t use them for the sake of using them. Amazon isn’t using RoR to power their n-tier web infrastructure, Google still requires you to click a button and reload a page if you want to search for something, and RSS syndication isn’t being used on the enterprise-class CRM applications that power the world’s largest companies.
Web 2.0 is about emerging best practices, putting priorities in order, and creating wonderful user experiences. It’s not a specific combination of technologies used in conjunction, it’s just a better way of doing things. In the late 90s people were using non-semantic HTML and tables to style pages, now we use structured XHTML markup and CSS because we now realize that it adds great value and benefits to our site or application. Back then everyone had Flash splash pages and 100KB navigation movies, more more more, and now the best applications are the ones that do things with elegant, simple, and useful interfaces.
Less is more is bullshit because essentially you are saying that More is what you are trying to attain and Less does it, as if More were something to want or covet. Current best practices suggest that Less is inherently more usable than More, and the acknowledgment of this philosophy is a growing trend spanning from the dotcom days to now. It wasn’t a flip-the-switch-and-make-it-simple moment, it was an evolution from the More mantra to the usable and beautiful Less mantra.
Ride The Wave, Let’s Hope It Won’t Crash
Dozens of “Web 2.0″ companies launched this past week, while many other companies (Upcoming, Weblogs, Inc., Weblogs.com) were bought. It seems like the web industry economy has suddenly gained 50lbs of muscle weight overnight, and sudden upturns are always scary because it reminds me of the old days of over-valuation, junk IPOs, idiotic businesses, and everything else that sucked after the dotcom economy drowned. Are we growing too fast too quickly? Are people throwing their money around too haphazardly, without due diligence? I don’t know, but it’s always a possibility. Economic systems run in cycles, so if we’re currently living in a boom 2.0 era I want to get in and get out before the wave crashes ashore and sweeps us all under.
About Mike Rundle
Hey Mike, I was fortunate to have a beer with Geoffrey Arone (one of the founders of Flock) when I was in San Francisco. He gave me a few hints about there business model and if it works, they’ll be doing quite well.
I can’t remember if what he told me was confidential, so I’d better not say anything until I shoot him a quick email. Trust me though, they’ve thought through the business plan. There’s more than one way to make some decent cash!
By the way, I’ve done a quick review of Flock over at our blog
Mike, I totally agree that Web 2.0 is not about specific technologies or tools — but I think it’s a little more specific than just “doing things better.”
My view is pretty similar to the O’Reilly view. Web 2.0 is an attitude, not a technology (or technologies). It’s about a different view of what the web is, why it’s important, and looking for value in the interactions and relationships between people and businesses.
Ironically, it has a lot in common with the “old” web (before it became heavily commercialized). But it’s different than the business models and ideas that dominated until a few years ago.
Nicely put. Reminds me of a Yay Hooray thread I started: http://www.yayhooray.com/thread/59902/Flock-is-boring
Yup, you missed the obvious. There is a very straightforward business model for a web browser that doesn’t sell out the user experience: that simple search box in the upper right corner. Mozilla folks have talked publicly about their search monetization deals, a simple Technorati search will show you rumors about how much money is involved, and Opera just went free thanks to their new search deal with Google. That’s just one example. We believe that there are any number of other ways where a browser provider can offer valuable services to its users and pay the bills while always putting the user experience first.
So the bottom line is: if a browser vendor does a great job offering a better user experience and is able to earn the trust of its users, then there’s a solid, simple business model.
As for whether there’s lasting value here, let’s let the market decide that. Certainly we’re not the only company that is building on open source and actively contributing back to the open source community, so I don’t quite follow your logic.
There’s no reason that Flock can’t sell its browser, since Firefox is open source.
Whether anyone would buy it is another question. But nothing about open source keeps anyone from selling software. Go ask Red Hat.
And as for Flock, it may well be their “business model” is to be much like the mozilla foundation but be working to help companies like technorati, blogger and flickr by building a browser that works easily with those services and then trying to fork the changes back into firefox.
I can understand why a bunch of companies would want to fund that effort.
Jimbo-
I’m not sure if you realized this, but RedHat doesn’t actually sell their software. The money you pay them is for a subscription to updates and entrance into the RedHat community, so they sidestep the open source license that way. If you read the RedHat website carefully you would have understood this.
Mike,
There is no stipulation in open source licenses that you cannot sell open source software.
The logistical problem is that when you do sell it you have to provide the source code and whoever you sell it to can do what they want with the software, so long as they provide the source code if they distribute their changes.
So Flock could sell their browser, but if the first person who buys it puts it on the web — as the license says they can, who is going to buy what you can get for free?
So those who sell open source software sell extra things, like documentation or service.
But it is factually incorrect to say you are not allowed to sell open source software.
I give up Jimbo, you’re totally right.
*takes foot out of mouth*
Excellent post, and for the most part I agree with your takes. Web 2.0 is really an umbrella concept, and while some would argue that that alone makes it a meaningless concept, I would argue that history suggests something different.
Each wave of computing has its own little memetic concept that serves as the defining wrapper for understanding it, be it “personal computing,” “client-server,” “dot.com era,” or “Web 2.0″ (there’s those quotes you talked about).
At the end of the day, technology is just a bunch of moving parts integrated into a vehicle that hopefully gets better mileage, runs more efficiently, less expensively and doesn’t crash as much.
Call it buzz, call it hype or just call it trying to frame a discussion by providing a point of entry into what the next chapter of computing looks like.
The litmus test for me is that I can actually explain to my mom what is different and how it’s going to evolve the face of computing.
If you are interested in such things, I have written a post called, ‘Web 2.0: heads or (long) tails,’ that is more focused on the business model ramifications of Web 2.0 concepts for startups, investors and the like.
Here is the
http://thenetworkgarden.blogs.com/weblog/2005/10/web_20_heads_or.html
RedHat cannot use the copyright laws to prevent people from distributing copies of their CD’s, but they are using the tradmark laws.
Because of this, you can’t just make copies of the while RedHat CD. You can, however, take the sources of all the software in the RedHat CD, which RedHat is obliged to publish freely, and use them to create a system that behaves exactly the same as RedHat. Except that you have to remove all RedHat trademakred stuff (names, logos, ..etc). Actually, there is a distribution called CentOS that does just that. They get legal threats from RedHat just for mentioning the name in their website. But they do it.
So this might be a good business model for products based on open source software.
Not to mention that many open source software license (most notably the BSD license) does not prohibit resale of software.
Mike,
I am a first time visitor.
Great article! I haven’t given much thought to the state of ‘Web 2.0′ – I must say though, after reading this post I will be thinking about it much more.
Thanks for good read!
Good writeup. Your mention of the tools (AJAX, RSS etc.) in the feature lists of apps is interesting though.
I don’t like hearing about the tools used to create an application personally, either. But some people do give a shit. A ton of people subscribe to del.icio.us/ajax feeds, read tech blogs and keep up to date because they’re interested in services that use these technologies. By name dropping these buzzwords in your marketing copy, you open your app up to a decent sized potential audience (geeks) and get free publicity.
Fortunately for people who use products based on what they DO and not the technology, this trend is stopping now. Doesn’t mean it didn’t work though. :)
You raise some good points, but I don’t like that you picked on one specific product/company to do it. So far, little bitty Flock looks to be better executed than Google’s lame-o reader. That thing is definitely web 2.no.
An interesting read, and while I agree with some points (such as technologies not equating to Web 2.0), I have to wonder about your assessment of Flock.
To understand the true power of Flock, you can’t just look at the geek market today, focus on their .5 pre-alpha release, and wonder what the point is. Just like if you’d looked at Mosaic 1.0 and thought “surfing the Web is dumb”.
Flock is the beginning of something huge, in my opinion – bringing social technologies, and more important the original utopian “everyone helps everyone” vision to people like my mom. She couldn’t possibly care less about technology, and she couldn’t possibly care less about learning multiple new sites/software. People talk about Flock and say “it could have been done with FF + extensions”, and that’s simply not correct. As I see and understand the vision of Flock, it’s not about us. It’s not about you and me that already run our own blogs, us social bookmarking, and post to Flickr. It’s about the future and making those things transparent and easy. It is to the web what the GUI was to DOS. It may not be there at this moment, but look at version 2.0 when considering the ramifications.
Jake, does your mom actively use del.icio.us? Or Flickr? Is she enthralled with the social networking aspects of these new companies? I know my mom isn’t and I can’t speak for your mom, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of moms out there don’t read hundreds of weblogs and post del.icio.us links all day long.
C’mon man, Flock isn’t targeting people like your mom, or people who aren’t geeks. They’re targeting people who use Flickr and del.icio.us day in and day out, post to multiple weblogs, and need to be on the bleeding edge of technology — does that sound like your mom to you? Hell it doesn’t even really sound like me to be honest.
Everyone loves Flickr, and everyone loves del.icio.us. Posting to either of them is not a hassle (you can upload multiple pictures at one time using Uploadr, or you can post to del.icio.us via a bookmarklet, how easy can you get?) so why is Flock trying to make something that’s already incredibly intuitive and easy “better”? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
GUIs were a revolutionary step in comparison to DOS. Going from Firefox to Flock is like adding Sega CD to your Genesis. It builds on the core functionality and adds some niceties that aren’t totally necessary cause Genesis still kicked ass.
You’re talking about version 2.0 kicking ass, well they built up all this hype for version .00003 and now it bombed. You think BusinessWeek and Wired write about any joe schmo company in the valley? Yeah right, it takes contacts. I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Mike, good post but – on the business model: Flock is a build-and-run business. I think the plan is to build it up (and it sounds very cool!) and then sell it. IMHO.