Web 2.0 i Caleb Applewhite
Kako kaže stara narodna, sve generalizacije su loše
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Kad se prije par mjeseci online kalendar Kiko stavio na prodaju putem eBaya, mnogi analitičari su počeli pljuvati po poslovnom modelu Y Combinatora, investicijske tvrtke Paula Grahama, prorokujući skoru propast njegovih pulena.
Međutim, danas je objavljeno da je drugi od njegovih flagship projekata, agregator vijesti Reddit, kupila nakladnička kuća Condé Nast, čija su najčuvenija izdanja Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair i Wired. Nije još poznato za koji je iznos Reddit promijenio vlasnika, no jedan od njegovih osnivača, Aaron Swartz, koji piše o svojim prvim utiscima kad je kupnja realizirana nakon višemjesečnih pregovora, kaže sljedeće:
On Halloween, everything seems a little weird. […] So perhaps that’s why, when I logged into my bank account this morning and saw more digits in my balance than I’ve ever seen before, I didn’t feel anything in particular.
No ono što mi je najviše uhvatilo pažnju je njegovo odavanje velike tajne, svojevrsnog Caleba Applewhitea uspješnih Web 2.0 projekata, o kojoj nećete moći pročitati na TechCrunchu niti će o njoj pisati Seth Godin ili Om Malik:
Once I went far outside the city to have lunch with an author I respected. He asked about what I did, wanted me to explain it in great detail. He asked how many visitors we had. I told him and he sputtered. “I’ve spent fifteen years building an audience, and you’re telling me in a year you have a million visitors?” I assented.
Puzzled, he insisted I show him the site on his own computer, but he found it was just a simple as I described. (Simpler, even.) “So it’s just a list of links?” he said. “And you don’t even write them yourselves?” I nodded. “But there’s nothing to it!” he insisted. “Why is it so popular?”
Inside the bubble, nobody asks this inconvenient question. We just mumble things like “democratic news” or “social bookmarking” and everybody just assumes it all makes sense. But looking at this guy, I realized I had no actual justification. It was just a list of links. And we didn’t even write them ourselves.
But that’s not something you can say on TechCrunch. You can say a site is cool, stupid, popular, a flop, innovative, or clichéd. But the one thing you can’t say, the one thing that everybody skips over, is that these sites aren’t anything serious.
Popularity: 26% [?]
