microformats

Web >> Lull >> Web 2.0 >> Lull 2.0? >> Web 3.0?

I think we’ve hit a wall. Not that I haven’t said this before, but I think my viewpoint has changed a little. Before when I complained about an innovation downturn it was based on a lack of independent startups that I found to be interesting (there are plenty of good independents - but I still haven’t seen a lot of great ones lately). The problem as I see it now, is with a general sense of contentment with the largest “Web 2.0″ sites.

The problem with moving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 is that people just generally don’t care. They don’t think Google is broken, they don’t think Facebook is broken and generally they don’t care about the difference between machine readable and machine understandable. The difference between machine readable and machine understandable is the key difference in Web 2.0 and web 3.0 (well at least in one generally accepted understanding of 3.0) - if there isn’t demand, it’s tough to get supply. Most entrepreneurs, in my opinion, are focused on getting quick run away success with a quick exit. Tough to get quick run away success if people aren’t craving what you’re making.

I understand wanting to see some gain from the time put into your endeavor, but if we keep focusing on the same things we can’t move forward. It seems people have gotten used to using a certain set of web apps/sites and aren’t really looking for anything new. So, developers keep making the same things and making incremental gains. This has lead to an overall downturn - a downturn in innovation and not surprisingly a downturn in financial investment. We’re seeing small ideas, not big ideas. There’s a general sense of what people like and startups make copies and incremental changes.

I know I say this every five posts or so - but it’s not all gloom. There are some things that are exciting to me right now. Chief among them: mobile and microformats. The mobile web is really starting to take off - I honestly believe that personal web browsing (not business) will be conducted more on mobile devices than computers within 5 years. Microformats are exciting… or at least they could be. I’m excited about companies that are trying to interpret them, not those that are merely adding them to their sites (though that is important too). A downturn may even be good for the web. If the possibility of financial gain decreases, fewer people will try to create me-too startups and those that are creating truly innovative applications will once again stand out.

Of course, there is a chance that mobile and microformats really won’t take off. If you would have asked most people what they thought the next big wave in the web would be after the first crash my guess is most would not have said social applications.

What do you think? Is innovation slowing? Is it good?

I’m working on a longish post on Microformats to go along with my recently updated contact info - but I want to know: do any of my readers care about Microformats?

In my last post I talked about using MySpace as a source of viral marketing, but really success on MySpace has very little to do with viral marketing. It has to do with Real Estate. I’m meeting with someone tonight who has an ecommerce website and I’m going to tell him what I always do: “sell your stuff on ebay.” People go to ebay to buy, if you sell you should be there. Similar logic applies to MySpace. People go to MySpace to … look at profiles and communicate, if you have a message that you want to communicate put your message on MySpace. You have to go where your message will be heard.

For the same reasons that you’ll sell more products in the mall than in a stand alone store in the middle of nowhere, you’ll get more traffic from Google and MySpace than you will from HotBot and Geocities. You have to go where your customers are you can’t force them to go where you want them to go.

Okay this will be the last on Lopico for at least 2 posts; here are a few of the new features of the site.

1. Design - completely redone, all css based, nearly table free (I’d say my design skil;s have improved, but I’m still getting better).
2. Picks - Adding places to your picks is like bookmarking them - I really like this feature, it allows me to keep all of the numbers of places that I call often on one page. Uses a little AJAX for this - see my picks.
3. Directory B - New feature that enables you to create custom categories.
4. Friends - This is sort of a social feature, and the last thing that I added - so it’s not quite perfect yet - this allows you to see reviews of people that you have added as friends.
5. hRev and hCard - Lopico now supports microformats.
6. Instant vote updating - old voting took time, this was first on my list to fix.
7. Now LAMP based - the old format wasn’t really working out, Lopico is now coded in PHP and much more functional and scalable. (I did all of the coding except AJAX code which is openly available).
8. Easier Reviews - old review used a content overlay and there was no direct link to review a business, new system is much easier and also updates automatically.
9. Homepage Experiments - I already blogged my theory on having the registration box on Lopico’s homepage, my other experiment is the “unpopular cities” - hopefully I’ll draw some attention to these cities and people will add more stuff.
10. Accounts - this may hurt more than it helps, but I’ll be able to do much more now that Lopico requires registration.

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Things I need to work on:
1. Creating passionate users
2. Photo Handling
3. IE7 problems
4. Social Features
5. Lopromo - local offers via RSS (only avail in Akron right now)
6. Business - I have a self serve ad program that I’m working on that will be done soon (1 ad, 1 day, 1 dollar)
7. SEO - The worst part about taking down my site for so long was that my search traffic plummeted. Luckily I think it’s even better this time around, just need to get back into all of the indexes.
8. PR / Marketing - I need to be much more active, this probably isn’t the proper forum, but there’s a lot more that I can do now that Lopico has a stronger architecture.

Last note - I submitted Lopico to TechCrunch, but doubt it will be reviewed, I know longer fit the TechCrunch niche, and that’s okay with me. If it’s on TechCrunch great, if not I understand TechCrunch is a business and should only put on the stories that are going to be the best for its business.

… no Lopico posting is going to be tough I have a lot more to say.

Technorati has just released a microformats search and it couldn’t have come at a better time for me.  As I am rewriting Lopico I’ve decided to implement some microformats (I won’t say which but it should be fairly obvious).  I was planning on doing this despite not really being sold on the benefit of microformats.  The potential was always there, but I really think that the people behind microformats have done a fairly bad job of selling the concept.   I listened to a podcast not long ago with Tantek Celik and Dan Rohit, and it was sort of a waste of my time.  They talked more about organizing soccer practices with microformats than they did anything else. But now with the new Technorati microformats search the reality of it is starting to become more tangible. Hopefully, Technorati won’t be the only place where microformats are put to use.