I was just on Yahoo! Answers and couldn't resist answering a user's web 2.0 quesiton there.

The question went someting like, "Tell me about your favorite and the most promising web2.0 site out there. Why do you think they will become successful?"

My answer was a pretty good listing of some of the web 2.0 sites I have encountered lately.

By reviewing them, you will get a much stronger sense of what web 2.0 is all about, especially as it relates to the social and community aspects of the web 2.0 movement.

Here is my answer:

I am going to list a variety of web 2.0 sites and tell you what they do and why each will be successful. I am also going to focus upon relatively new web 2.0 sites, as you will have heard of the less new ones. I hope you don't mind.

Web 2.0 Winners, in order of least favorite to most favorite:

14. LifeIO – The coolest calendar, photos, contacts, sharing, application I have seen in a long time. It is a webified mash-up of the essential stuff you need to manage your life. Very well designed. Well executed.

Reason they will win: the integration of these tools inside a socially aware web app is truly unique. They will get snapped up by Yahoo! Or AOL within the next six months. I predict Yahoo! Since LifeIO’s CEO is an ex-Yahoo! Exec.

13. Sharpcast – These guys synchronize all your content and apps across your mobile, desktop, laptop, Windows or Mac machines. The cool thing is how you can use files across devices, just they way people actually work.

Reason they will win: They are solveing a real problem. They will be able to sell their solution for a price that users will tolerate and make pleanty of money off of the millions of people who will buy it.

12. Vpod.tv – YouTube is great, but they lack really great online video editing capabilities. These folks have nailed that one. They also have a really great sharing and monetization model.

Reason they will win: They will struggle to position against YouTube, Google Video, etc., but like LifeIO, they are on the fast track to be bought, probably by AOL, or someone like that.

11. Webaroo – Search the web when you are not connected. This product is based upon figuring out the web’s 80/20 rule of which sites are the most probably relevant sites and making them available in a web search engine that is available offline.

Reason they will win: Again. They solve a real world problem in a cleaver way. I would expect Ask.com or some second-tier search player to make a move to buy them before they get too big.

10. ZiXXo – Merchants can create online coupons that can be redeamed by users in the physical shopping realm for a fraction of the price that I would cost them to produce the same coupons and distribute them via newspaper or direct mail. These coupons could even be made available in the context of web sites or blogs, etc.

Reason they will win: They are so drastically reducing the cost of coupons, and making them available to consumers so conveniently, the money drivers will cause it to succeed, as they apply from a variety of angles: from the advertiser, to the person wanting to save on products. It will just work well, and then make their money off of service fees for millions of coupons printed by people wanting to save money.

9. Ether.com – Lets you earn money selling what you say. Think of this as a place you can offer your over-the-phone advice and get paid for it. I can think of a bunch of uses for this. One of the funnier ones is driving directions. Call me up from your cell phone and for $0.50 I, or one of my pool of answerers, will give you directions from your current location to whereever you are trying to go. Or, I am a family counsellor, and I get calls all the time from clients off hours. This way I can charge them a small fee for talking through their crisis with them.

Reason they will win: People have been monetizing products on the web for a long time. Now, they can sell their services. It is a natural and logical next step, and they have made it super easy to set up.

8. SoonR – Turns you PC into an personal connectivity server. My favorite thing about it is the skype support, which illustrates the technology model, from any cell phone, I can place a call using my PC’s instance of Skype and conference me into any SkypeOut number I want to call. So now I get free long distance on my cell phone… Bye Bye overage charges!

Reason they will win: Market size and awareness of pain will combine to make this compelling product a must have. They will continue to leverage their core IP to integrate with more and more services that are web-based.

7. Vaestro – Allows people to establish and participate in forums by recorded messages (voice comments), related to any topic they choose.

Reason they will win: Matt Ready has created a tool that is easy to use. He will benefit from the amazing attention to user-gnerated content, including that which can be generated as a response to podcasts, or vidcasts. Voice is a much more compelling medium than text for communicating certain kinds of information.

6. Simpy – This tool is great because it incorporates users browser bookmarks as social tags. Then it also lets users continue to bookmark online. By combining their existing bookmarks, they feel really comfortable with adding new bookmarks online, where those bookmarks can benefit all other simpy users.

Reason they will win: People love search and discovery, they love their bookmarks, and will love how Simpy adds the benefit of all user bookmarks in retrieving their search results.

5. Findory – A blog search engine that will let you create dynamic RSS feeds that will give you results of new blog content that matches a set of search terms.

Reason they will win: Blogs are hot. This is a hot blog search engine. If they can get their ad model to work, they will win big, even with Google Blog Search out there, especially for their RSS feed support.

4. Jookster – Social searching tool. Allows you to receive search results based upon what others in Jookster’s user base have found to be interesting. You can tell how credible the results are based upon the number of degrees of separation between you and the recommender you are.

Reason they will win: Better search, especially for communities of interest. They, too, will have to get their adSense like ad model worked out, but if they can, they will attract millioins of users.

3. StumbleUpon – This is one of the coolest web site discovery tools I have ever seen. You put in your interests and the system helps you discover web sites you would probebly never have found on your own.

Reason they will win: People trust the recommendations of friends more than they trust any other source, when it comes to advice. The approach taken here, and with Jookster, allows a person to discover what other people like them have found useful. That is compelling. Now, they will have to outrun Google and Yahoo!, but given their unique approach, they have less to worry about in that regard than others. They, too, will be an acquisition target, but I struggle with exactly who I envision for a suiter.

2. Plum – Plum lets you really easily aggregate (pack rat) web sites you have visited, making them fully searchable, and also enabling social interaction around the content of the sites.

Reason they will win: People are packrats, and they love to share and show their collections of stuff with others. They also like to find the content they have previously seen, especially for the use case where one has read somehting, found it mildly interesting, and then had someone ask a question that brings it more to life, and they then want to tretrieve it instantly, mail off a link, etc.

1. NetVibes – I think you should make this your new home page! Like Google’s new custom home page feature, but far more exciting from an extensibility perspective. Meaning, they guys have a great start on delivering on a vision of a time when any web 2.0 API based app can be simply incorporated into a user’s portal page. That means these guys could be a sort of application foundation for building integrated web appilcations that fit into a portal-like, user definable interface.

Reason they will win: A more seamless integration of the many disparate web 2.0 applications will become increasingly important. This product will act as a platform upon which the user can assemble all his favorite web 2.0 tools into a single experience, without the help of a programmer.


So that is the list!
Just for grins, here are some more established web 2.0 sites:
- Technorati
- Digg
- del.icio.us
- PRWeb
- Flickr
- 37signals (basecamp, campfire, tada lists, backpack, writeboards)
- jotspot, especially their wiki stuff (amazed at the breadth of their offering, now that they have been out for a while)
- Google: - writely - Google Spreadsheets - Google alerts
- Yahoo - Flickr - Yahoo news - Yahoo Podcast Search
- PodZinger (podcast and vidcast search engine)
... and the list goes on...

Hope that helps!



And maybe I will score some Yahoo! answer points, too.... Oooooh I can hardly wait to find out!!!

As I mentioned in Yanoo! Answers, I have been in attendance at SuperNova this week in San Francisco. I will blog more about that in the Podango blog, especially as it relates to what we are building there. It has been intreaguing couple of days. I learned about many of the companies listed above in that context. Some are not even live with a beta yet, so pardon if the links take you to a closed beta invitation page.

Vaestro Launched! Voice-Recording Based Forums

Vaestro, a new, voice-based forum site announced today by Matt Ready (CEO) and his team, is absolutely cool. In a matter of about two hours I began the Web Immigrant channel there and kicked off 10 different forums all discussing (literally) topics related to web 2.0. I also made eleven posts!

I have to tell you, I liked it much better than posting to text-based forums. It just felt more comfortable. And I found it to be so much more personal. When someone sounds a little sheepish about asking a question, you feel for them. I like the term WYHIWYG (What you hear is what you get), like the WYSIWYG that described how revolutionary user interfaces let word processing (or desktop publishing) users see what was actually going to print out, this new type of forum, or discussion, truly brings a new intimacy and warmth to the notion of a forum.

By way of review, the site needs some polishing, but it works well. If you have used Evoca or Odeo, you will miss the superior audio quality that is more easily achieved there, but the forum concept really works well and got me past that single hang-up. I also missed having better control over playback. The player is rudimentary, but, again, in the spirit of Web 2.0 and the preaching by 37signals.com in their eBook, Getting Real, it is good enough for release, and I am one user that will keep coming back and participating in this new form of forum.

Vaestro is free. It is also available to be used for free in the context of other websites. I aim to explore using in the context of Podango's community feature set.

Check out Vaestro. And, check out the Web Immigrant Channel on Vaestro here. You'll be hooked. I guarantee it!

And, if you find you are not, leave me a comment here!

-- Lee

So How Does a Web Immigrant Feel?

This clip, featured in Vloggercon's promotional site listing, says it pretty well. Take a look!

Hopefully, this blog is the guy in the front seat as you take the web2.0 ride.


--Lee

Credit: The clip was produced by VlogBury

The Podfather v. the Fairy Podmother

Many in podcasting know Adam Curry as "The Podfather." (See here, and here, and here , for examples) The implication therefore is that he is everyone in podcasting's Podfather. Right?

Well, now I have met our Fariy Podmother! (And NO... it isn't Dave Winer!)

(Okay, Okay! It's like 3:35 a.m. right now, so bear with me... As it sometimes happens I woke up with an idea I have to get into Writely ! And, as usual, if I like it well enough once written, it might become a blog post! --Writely makes that really, really easy to do!-- The thing that wouldn't let me sleep is two very different stories colliding in my head and that little voice in my head will NOT let me GO BACK TO BED until I get it recorded!!!)

So here it is...

If you haven't seen Marlon Brando as the original Godfather movie, or if you aren't familiar with Disney's Cinderella , this collision of analogies may both not make a lick of sense and may also serve to reveal my age and the fact that I have young kids. But, its worth pursuing anyway, because it reflects a substantive contrast in style that has struck me lately and might help make an important point about not being evil...

Back to the colliding analogies: On the one hand, podcasters have a character who is set up as "The Podfather" and who is working to "making them an offer they can't refuse" by way of the PodShow PDN (Which, by the way is a right idea and is among the first to play an important role in providing podcasters a world class infrastructure and a way of making money for all their efforts.)

On the other hand, there is Evoca 's CEO Murem Sharpe (the e on the end of Sharpe is silent. Gratefully, Murem is not!). She routinely declares that everyone has a free voice, and that their voice should be able to be heard worldwide, for FREE.

(If you haven't checked out Evoca yet, you will be stunned at how unbelievably simple Murem and Diego Orjuela, her business partner, have made it for people to podcast. It is similar to Odeo, and yet refreshingly more open and community feeling, as it also provides audio search and Group forming capabilities that facilitate superior community building. Really, it reminds me of the story of Cinderella wherein she is sobbing, believing that her hopes of making it to the ball are dashed, and her Fairy Godmother appears and with her magic makes it all possible.)

So, here the podcasting community is, with Adam as "The Podfather" and Murel as our "Fairy (the y is silent) Podmother." One seems to be all about cherry picking the most commercially viable podcasters and their potential as money making media properties, and the other is about making it so even the most common lowly maiden can get to the podcasting ball.

(Now the little voice in my head is saying, "Enough already!" My friends and bizsociates routinely tell me that I don't know when to let an analogy go, once it has served its purpose. Now, you probably agree with them. And, I must admit that I am tempted to work Dave (Winer) in as Cinderella's late, forgotten, yet benevolent father... Hey! Maybe RSS stands for Really Sinister Stepmother!!! See? Now I KNOW you agree with the analogy criticism.)

Nonetheless, I couldn't help but be struck by the difference between my experiences and encounters with the spirit of the important yet very different contributions of these two very different leaders and their respective visions for what podcasting is and can be.

(I am going back to bed! You? Go check out Evoca. It's really cool! If you are Adam Curry, go back to SL! No harm intended here, dude! Keep blazing the trail.)

The Web Immigrant (Lee Gibbons, CEO, Podango)

Welcome to the Web Immigrant Blog!

Here, I post for two purposes:
1) to learn
2) to help others who, like me. are eager to become conversant in all things to do with the live web, or web 2.0.

I became aware of my web immigrant status when I attended CES 2006 and was able to spend some time with Paul Allen (he calls himself Paul Allen the lesser, because he isn't THE Paul Allen of Microsoft fame) and his COO, Phil Burns . These two guys really get it, and they have been a terrific influence on my learning. Paul told me of a conference session he participated in wherein the idea came up of older web users being web immigrants, not native to the web like people who have never know a webless world.

That idea sparked something inside me, and I decided I would explore web 2.0 and work to become not only conversant in it, but truly native.

What I have encountered since is that no matter how much I learn, I continue to feel like a web immigrant, because each time I experience the new, live web, I find it to be a new place. I haven't moved. It has. And it will.

So, welcome to the blog and podcast that document my experience as a web immigrant. I am sure we will learn much together, and who knows... maybe someday we can sort of learn to lose our accents enough to be thought to be web natives! Meanwhile, the journey is a fun one filled with learning and adventure.

Who could ask for more?