52 Bicycles

David Beisel hosted a great get-together of Boston-area web startups. Element55 is not strictly a web service, but since we are all about integrating with ways people spend their time, wanted to see where we might also integrate in a year or two.

What I saw was a lot of interesting projects that are creating interesting assets, without a sense of what problem they are trying to solve. I have the sneaking suspicion that these are really media plays, expecting to make their money on advertising through driving traffic, which seems awfully dangerous to me. Keep the costs low enough and you increase the probability to eke out a profit, but everyone competing for my attention seems dangerous, since only a few of them will get it. And yet, the asset for many of these projects is not in fact a unique ability to keep our attention, but rather add value in a more behind-the scenes way.

For example, Reddit is really building a database of “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” for web sites - wouldn’t this be useful for any variety of marketers and web sites that want to drive content “that you might like?” As Amazon taught us, it’s not about the craziest algorithms, its who has the data that lets good, customized content and recommendations fly. To that end, should they be focused on having the most popular web site, or just getting people to click those two buttons, and get companies to pay for access to the database?

Everyone seems to be going after the same small set of nails, which is not uncommon when what you think you have is a hammer. Am looking forward to the business that figures out it’s better as a power saw.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Reddit This