September 24th, 2008 // 78 Comments
Filed: Tech
Was at the EmTech conference at MIT today and suffered through a panel led by Robert Scoble with four geeks (Facebook, Six Apart, Plaxo, Twine) talking about the future of the Web. No prepared remarks, just totally random conversation. Basically they all just spewed whatever came into their heads, at top speed, interrupting each other and oblivious to the fact that an audience was sitting there, glazing over. A few people got up and asked questions and the geeks did manage to (sort of) address one or two but then they forgot about the questioners and just started rambling again, talking to each other and forgetting about the audience. It was like watching five college kids with ADHD and an eight-ball of coke trying to hold a conversation.
One thing that struck me is that in trying to explain what Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 is all about, the geeks kept coming back to this example of how they had been trying to find a good restaurant in Boston and how their cool social networking tools and collaborative filters had enabled them to do such a great job of this restaurant hunting task because, like, Facebook and Twitter are so much better for this than just a Google search because, like, I don’t need a Google search bringing up a list of every restaurant in Boston, I want a filtered search relying on people I trust, people in my network.
My first reaction was that in the greater scheme of things (economy in free fall, war in Iraq, global warming, energy crisis, not to mention the old reliables like cancer and poverty and AIDS, etc.) this challenge of finding a good restaurant seems like a fairly trivial and unimportant problem for our big geek brains to be trying to solve. If I were funding these guys I might go home scratching my head about what those kids are doing with all of my millions. Maybe there is a point to what they’re doing, but honestly, what great problem are these companies trying to solve? Sitting there watching this spectacle — watching these guys unable to simply explain what they do and and how they are going to make a business out of it – it was staggering to think that someone has entrusted these people with very large sums of money. But someone has. I weep for those people.
The real kicker was when I ran into Owen Thomas of Valleywag after the panel and he told me where he and the uber-geeks were having dinner tonight after all of their glorious collaborative filtering and scouring of their trusted online networks — the Union Oyster House. Anyone who lives in Boston or knows Boston will realize why this is hilarious. For everyone else, let me explain: incredibly bad food, appallingly slow and rude service, and ripoff prices. Lots of fake “ye olde Boston” charm and it’s close to Faneuil Hall but seriously, it’s a total joke of a tourist trap. Boston has plenty of good seafood places but this is not one of them. Not even close. So, um, great work, Facebook and Twitter. Those trusted networks sure work great. Seriously. Well done.
Ah, excellent insight. Best short analysis of the Web 2.0 trend I’ve seen yet.
excellent^(3.0). Dan is back!
Social networking is the killer application - but it will kill itself. Unless, of course, someone writes a SocNet app for getting laid by people within your WiFi range. You could go tap on funky Anime models to filter out those who are not your type or you could just go for “Clay Aitken” setting (or “Rosie O’Donnel” for the Ultra Adventure).
Who in their right mind would let Scoble on stage to share his knowledge? There is no insight or knowledge on his blog, why would it be there “live”?
I hope you got free soda and a flat sandwich.
What a scream. Good post.
I’ve stopped following the “look where I’m going now”, “see who’s coming down the hall I’m capturing on Qik cell phone video”, “I’m at this great party…and you’re not” crowd in favor of those providing actual value to the world.
Glad people like Tim O’Reilly (slamming Web 2.0 Expo goer’s about building apps of value vs. tossing sheep) and you are calling out the windbags and low value creators.
What are you doing? - sitting in the Union Oyster House. 21:32 PM September 25, 2008 from iPhone
What are you doing? - trying to understand what the @#@$ that ‘charming’ waitress just said about specials! (55) 22:00 PM September 25, 2008 from iPhone
What are you doing? - waiting on my food and listing to some crap about the Facebook redesign. (68) 22:30 PM September 25, 2008 from iPhone
What are you doing? - choking down some slimy, salty, mess. Who’s blog-advice did we take about going here! (55) 23:01 PM September 25, 2008 from iPhone
What are you doing? - in the bathroom throwing up on my ‘freedom trail map’. #%&* just dropped my IPhone down the shitter. (40) 23:03 PM September 25, 2008 from iPhone
What are you doing? - someone called ‘My Lucy Charms’ twitted a recommendation about The Purple Shamrock, sounds good to me! (38) 23:30 PM September 25, 2008 from GPhone
1.)What, you don’t have Red Lobster Seafood Restaurants in Boston? Next time any of those yutzes come to Dallas, I’ll bring ‘em to Cap’n D’s.
2.)What, are you too polite in Boston to stand up and walk out? Obviously, someone had the good sense not to record and upload this circle jerk to the web (Scoble, the most wired asshole outside of a colonoscopy, aside, of course). I know it’s rude but I always sneak in one of those $6.95 air horns to use in one of these conferences if these gabfests start to degenerate into self-absorbed verbal mutual masturbation marathons. Breaking out the firehose breaks too many ordinances and invites an unwelcome cold water enema from the local fire marshal. NOBODY touches his equipment without authorization.
But I digress….
Next time, either walkout or breakup the show.
3.)Any checkout Larry King tonight? Bill Clinton is starting to get a bit of tonsure!
4.)This is a nice follow up on why Apple may lose those developers, developers, developers.
Thanks for posting this. I swear that you and Michael Kanellos (when he was at Cnet) are the only two guys able to see through this shit.
I don’t mind that they are wasting VC money — that is the natural order of things. It’s just that the unspoken agreement of Web 2.0 seems to be that there is nothing more terrible than having to spend even a second alone with one’s own thoughts.
Real geeks don’t do coke…. they do pepsi.
Holy Ganeesh! Scoble’s idea of a good time would be cheddar popcorn for desert after a sustaining lunch of two Quarter-Pounders with cheeese and a large order of Fries followed by authentic New England chowdah at Legal Seafoods Logan International franchise. Melville weeps over the idea of tech idiots pontificating at MIT.
May the Mighty Ganeesh keep your bowl of lentils and raw goat’s milk warm here by your designated pallet at the Ashram overlooking Camp Pendleton.
10-4 Over amd Out
the original Anon on the Ashram.
Accept bno substititute homespun, Ever!
Actually, it makes perfect sense that the geeks can’t explain why they do what they do, only how. When you do something for a very long period of time, immersed in it 24/7 and constantly thinking about how to make it better or how to pitch it and praise it, you get so lost in the details you forget your elevator pitch. In your elevator pitch lies the reason why people should care about what you do. (If your elevator pitch is good that is.) Without being told why they should care, people glaze over and doze off.
What scares me a little about your post is how these “great geeks of Web 2.0″ have become so inanely self-obsessed and so into their own inventions, they don’t seem to realize that what they’re talking about was new in 2003. In 2008 it’s old hat. We’ve all been there, done that, bought the t-shirt and remarked that it’s not as great as it’s cracked up to be.
Dan! This was the best post so far on your new blog. Hilarious!! Making fun of geeks is always an interesting thing to read. I think you found yer olde self and we got our FSJ back, not like we thought we would, but the sense of humor and writing is clearly back, so this might be the voice that we were missing lately.
Thanks! Now, please try to get back to posting at least once a day
This is going to be a great day. Yeah!
@ Todd N
“It’s just that the unspoken agreement of Web 2.0 seems to be that there is nothing more terrible than having to spend even a second alone with one’s own thoughts.”
That is the single best criticism of Web 2.0 I’ve read. Eminently quotable. Well done sir!
I’m thankful that you got your act together Dan. Great post. I hate facebook.
Yawn.
Real Dan are you now trying to pretend your someone with something real to say. Jealous of Walt from WSJ and the freebies Apple throws him?
Yawn, time to read this post again so I can take a nap.
I was out for lunch with some old friends yesterday. We all (sorta) work in IT. One of them mentioned using Facebook and Twitter. I have very strong feelings about these…things, but I really didn’t want to spoil the lunch for everyone by starting ranting, so I kept schtum until the conversation moved on.
Real Dan hits the nail on the head here, pronouncing so much better than I can on these…contemporary plagues.
Great post… (I can feel the spectral presence of FSJ in the room)… and looking forward to more.
And if you’re ever in Dublin, Bar Italia in the IFSC does excellent Italian fare, reasonable prices, real Italian waiters, and (the clincher) no crappy Italian pop music while you eat.
Tangierino.
Heh, FWIW the dinner we crowdsourced was the previous night, which landed us at East Const Grill, which was a great spot.
Dan, you might as well know: Apple marketing executive and Steve Jobs keynote sidekick Phil Schiller was the one who recommended the Union Oyster House. So much for Apple’s impeccable taste!
this challenge of finding a good restaurant seems like a fairly trivial and unimportant problem for our big geek brains to be trying to solve
Chowhound was a Web 2.0 collaborative site launched in 1997. It was, and is still, the place to go for the really savvy tips (heavy on completely unsung treasure) who don’t exist in even the same universe as Union Oyster House. Chowhound gets over 2M visitors/month, it’s been written up in mainstream press (including Newsweek, where I once did an irregular micro-column), and these big brained geeks who missed it are frigrons.
But the reason such a tool is important (and the reason I spent eight crushing years running it at a loss before I sold it to CNET, now CBS) is because the restaurant scene is soon destined to become like the hardware store and bookstore scenes. Big biz is locking up not only the low-end (McD’s, Burger King, etc having long ago killed countless diners and coffeeshops), but also the mid range (newspaper reader polls inevitably place Olive Garden as “best italian” and Red Lobster as “best seafood”, etc) and now even the upper range (Wolfgang Puck and Jean George, etc., neither of whom will ever touch your food in any of their zillions of establishments, are the Ronald McDonalds of the high-end…even there - ESPECIALLY there, e.g. Luis Vitton and Gucci - branding is everything).
Chowhound (and, to a lesser extent, the dumber, fuzzier mobs at Yelp et all) is the loyal opposition to that. So that’s why it’s important.
In fact, it’s more important, still, because in an age when advanced marketing techniques have persuaded people to consume for every reason BUT quality, quality is, in many realms, sinking like a stone. Getting consumers to wake up to this, and to shake off the powerful misdirection (from advertising and from the “conventional wisdom” which is generated almost entirely by advertising) is essential for preserving at least a precarious foothold for high quality stuff. And that’s important.
It helps to start the process with food, because while everyone can’t/won’t appreciate a great bebop solo or abstract expressionist painting, a punch-the-table great plate of lasagna can really inspire people to question their previous consumption patterns.
Jim Leff
Cofounder
Chowhound.com
For Those Who Live To Eat
He used restaurant selection as an example of web 2.0 applications failing to take into account ideas of trust and a social network. Chowhound if anything is an illustration of this failure.
Chowhound is basically a glorified forum board, and anyway, we all know that it’s basically rendered useless by random censorship Go shill somewhere else please. This is off-topic.
I followed the pre-panel Twitter-hug-it-out between you and Scoble… and then followed your twitter comments through the event.
I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Scoble as you slowly ripped the panel to shreds.
Thanks guys. Glad you are finally catching on!
Went to watch to see if it was as bad as advertised. Costs $79 to watch.
Apparently emtech has figured out this whole Web 2.0 monetization problem….
https://www.technologyreview.com/emtech/videos/08/index.aspx?page=&redi=T
Good post. Original. Funny.
Great Post Dan! Good to have you back in usual form.
Hilarious post Dan ! In the trail of O’Reilly (and others) rising voices about the current state of web 2.0 applications.
A post like this a week is much better than 3 crappy posts a day
As a Bostonian, I’m personally insulted that Union Oyster House was even considered. Next time I’d suggest those geeks head to the Daily Catch or No Name. Actually asking someone who lives here would’ve been better for that…
Union Oyster House?!?!?!? That’s where their gadgets told them to eat? Total rip-off! Just go inside to Quincy Market and get a pizza, or some chicken teriyaki that’s always on special (you get a lot of chicken).
I’ve heard No Name is good. But since I only visit about once a year, I’ve yet to make it there (and have no clue how to get there taking the T).
Whenever I’m visiting, I always make it a point to go to this little Chinese place in the Theater District, Shanghai. Really good food, really good prices, big portions (you can share, or take it home if want lunch for the next day), and it’s close to the Doubletree (they have good cookies).
Oh I want to go back. I used to go every weekend when I was in college.
- Barry
At least it appears that Scoble was smart enough to skip out on the whole tourist trap dinner.
But this is just insulting!
” @iSlappy Fenway reminds me of United Airlines: the seats are small and hard. Hah.”
They’re original, fatso! And for your info, the fatter people can sit comfortably on one of those stools you find up higher. Or in the Monster Seats.
Just when I thought you’d lost your touch on the pulse — you toss in “an 8 ball of coke”
bravo. hahaha
Great insight! I see a lot of problems with the assumptions made about “web 2.0″, the first of which is that it is “revolutionary”. Web 2.0 allows us to communicate in new ways (or by using new platforms), true. But what about all of the noise? What about the fact that while you can be altruistic and productive using web 2.0 technologies, 99% of people out there are just posting useless comments on Facebook? I am excited for the days when the IT guys ban all of the web 2.0 sites from corporate networks due to the massive amount of useful time is wasted doing useless things. The Chowhound guy made a great point about quality: Mostly everything out in the web 2.0 world is irrelevant and of low quality, yet constantly “consumed” because everyone has the erroneous belief that web 2.0 is some sort of revolution.
It also bugs me that people keep trying to figure out what web 3.0 is going to be. Ummm, what else COULD it be? What are people turning to the internet for that it is not currently serving? There is one-way communication, which has often been referred to “web 1.0″, and now we have multi-way communication, which is often called “web 2.0″. Sure, new websites will come and go, but I am not sure how else the internet can evolve in terms of what it is/does.
Dan: Write. Every. Day.
Don’t listen to what the people at Newsweek tell you — part of the allure of Fake Steve was the frequency of his posts. I would refresh the browser screen all day to see what you had to say.
So, um, in short: Work harder! (Sorry.) But that’s what it’s going to take. Either that, or get some Iulias and Natashas to ghostwrite for you.
Thanks, buddy.
beavisandro
ah the internet: worst app ever. still in beta too.
Hey, I resemble that comment! The internets is good apps.
Amen to that my nerdy friends.
Web 2.0 == some marketing bollocks sprinkled over pointless projects.
I like facebook … but not for finding resturants.
Twitter … i tried it … not sure what the point is really.
This just in. McCain has vowed to further suspend his campaign to help the Web 2.0 Monetization Crisis.
Finding a restaurant in Boston, what a challenge. You can’t throw a rock in a big city without hitting a restaurant. Maybe if Facebook can line me up with some awesome Malaysian food in Unionville, IN, I will be impressed. Also, wtf with these new media people and their books? Scoble and ‘Naked Conversations’. Biz Stone from Twitter wrote some lame book. Books are old media! Unlike new media, there’s a chance you might actually make money from a book, but these people need to Cowboy tfu and eat their own dogfood and believe their own bs. They should do like that Japanese guy who lived a whole year on nothing but his winnings from mail-in contests. They should go up against that guy. After a year, Scoble will be some skeleton at a card table, and the Japanese guy will be eating a giant ham he won from a grocery store. My condolences to you and everybody else who attended that farcical farce.
Great software that solves great challenges such as global warming, AIDS, or free-falling dollar valuation isn’t what investors are looking for when they hand these kids over those millions; they’re only looking for cashing out some phat returns from eyeballs and ad click-through. It’s a shame, really.
@about internets: you bring up an interesting point. What if genius CEOs from bestandbrightest companies were doing spam marketing instead of funky finance? They would have done better. And they would not have to shower every (other day).
Shame on me for paying my mortgage. Shame on all of you for paying yours too. Shame shame shame.
Now I have to double my downpayment on a Turbo.
Social networking? Have politicians heard of it?
Hey Dan, can you post “rough cuts/notes” for your newsweek prose? Have HRtards closed up that gap or has cut/paste become a pain in the neck?
@Dan: Dan it is YOU who is catching on. To your own blog. Audience: have you heard of it?
Check this out guys. I just loaded up a new app to my jailbroken iPhone. It is called “Fcuse me” and it is designed to help you track down the best fusion cuisine. If there is none within your range, it defaults to closest McDonalds. By the time you get there, burger is waiting for you.
Awesome, not? AppStore is now asking me to change the app (fcuse me???) and add Whole Foods as a default, not the friggin mcdonalds.
@SamG: What if there is no Whole Foods in the area?
The closest one is 2.5 hours away.
- Barry
@FBO: Warm burger and a clean room for a diaper change is always waiting at McDonalds :)))))
The real kicker is that you can drag and drop food on your phone to get your juices flowing. Say you want a fusion of Swedish and Polynesian cuisine. You may be directed to the grocery store, my friend because nobody makes that stuff. I am thinking of partnering with Emeril and then going Bam!
@ SamG: fcuse you. please take your off-subject comments over to Twitter.
This whole social networking thing will implode, just like the mortgage bubble, when people realize that it has to be PAID FOR by someone. All of this free, superficial crap will evaporate as expendable corporate income for ads that don’t work anyway. Besides, when the depression hits, there won’t be a lot of time for twittering, twiddling and twaddling about idiot weblebrities, new hip toys and other trendy shit; we’ll be spend our time just trying to stay alive.
great post dan. nothing new from an investor perspective but you do bring out a pertinent issue that’s screaming for attention. while social networks are changing the way we (well, some of us) interact with our friend/colleagues/peers, we really haven’t figured out how we can translate all the ‘posting’ noise into something useful…i.e. strengthening relationships. i really don’t need to know what my 200+ ‘close’ friends on FB are doing at any given moment but i do want to share what’s important to me (and to them) using something like FB. for some reason, emails still seem to work better.
I can give you a real purpose for web 2.0–rescuing American public education from irrelevance and thus student from being underprepared to make the kind of contributions we need. Facebook and twitter are not the peak of web 2.0–it’s blog comments. It’s blogs. It’s wikis. It’s a chance to get involved in problem-solving projects with people from anywhere that share that interest via all of the above. Higher level thinking, clear and insightful communication…do you all realize that instead of these what we seem to be mainly teaching kids is still to take multiple choice tests and remember facts? Solving the money problem of web 2.0 *is* important–right now all of this is provided free to teachers. Schools just have to get us connected and let us at it. And because every minute is already chock-full (schedule-wise and content-wise) what seems old to you is as good as brand new, in fact still unknown, to many teachers & schools. (We don’t need depression not to have time for Twitter or Facebook.)
In a real sense, education is our past right now, instead of our future. I just came from a conference run by a superintendent’s association and the panelist who is doing some research on web 2.0 had to first *define it* for the audience. That is where we are at over here in K-12. Feel free to throw your efforts our way or at least take a look at what we are doing with it and give us some tips…because we may know good education but with this stuff we are virtually all self-taught hacks.
Just sayin’ that the root of the word twitter is “twit”…
@Same old G:
Couple of things. Possible infringment of an online moniker in your case.
Another thing is that I wouldn’t touch twitter with a stick. You have got to read beyond the ASCII to get my comments. Metaphor, have you heard of it?
Great insight! Too many people seem to measure business success as ability to raise venture capital - not the ability to make significant improvement to society at large. (and by that I mean technologies that move beyond the purely “geek” crowd)
Web 2.0 is Internet technology’s answer to Quants in the Finance. Lots of BS designed to confuse the investors into investing billions of $$$, then losing trillions, then saying “sorry” and waiting on the good ol’ govt to pony up some, ink, paper and a printing press to save the day.
At the end of the day, we are still in the Age of thwe Gutenberg press. Or Heidelberger, whatever they use at the money printing shop.
the mental image of “five college kids with ADHD and an eight-ball of coke trying to hold a conversation” reminds me of those National Geographic dung beetles wrestling each other over a big ball of poo….
Even the yelptards are mostly agreed that Union Oyster House is not a good place to go for dinner:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/union-oyster-house-boston
Interesting points, Dan. Reminds me of an experience I had with Scoble a few months ago.
One of my contacts on Flickr’s 80+ year old grandfather disappeared. They weren’t sure what happened to him; his truck was found near a gas station in a small town near where he lived in rural Kansas, and from what the authorities could tell, there was no foul play….he might have just wandered off.
My contact and her family were frantic in their efforts to find Grandpa Jack and I offered to help by twittering, brightkiting and using my flickr stream to post his photo and info about his disappearance. I even tweeted for my contacts to please join me and see if we couldn’t broadcast the info as far as possible. Many of my twitter contacts joined in. But many of my twitter contacts are just casual users and have a very small number of contacts. So I thought it would be a good idea to contact a power user and get their help. Since I have met Scoble many times and know him well enough via the tech community in San Francisco, I direct messaged him and asked if he would retweet the info. He has, what, some 20K in followers? And if he used his influence to ask others to retweet, maybe we could find the man before anything bad happened to him. I mean, how hard is it to tweet some info and a link a few times?
Scoble never even responded to my request.
I’m not saying that it’s Scoble’s responsibility to be a one man amber alert for missing kids, pets and grandparents, but when we’ve all heard the stories about how twitter has helped free people from jail and so on, one cannot help but to think this is a fabulous use for technology. And that we need people who have some influence to shine a light on that. Regardless of how I personally feel about Scoble’s “influence”, he does have people who think he’s got something to say that’s worth listening to. It would be nice if he actually used that position for something other than promoting himself or his friends.
A footnote: Grandpa Jack Lee Howe was found dead in a cornfield about a mile from where his truck was abandoned, 27 days after he went missing.
http://scotthawker.com/blog/ladyhawker?tq=Jack%20Lee%20Howe
Alright, warm burgers! I hope the palmetto bugs are free.
- Barry
This whole “finding a place to eat” example that everyone is using nowadays reminds me of the 70s when all the early microcomputer companies claimed their kit was ideal for “storing recipes” at home. 95% of those early companies went bust by 1980.
The whole conference scene also shows that for once in his life Larry Ellison was right when he said recently that the IT industry is as fashion driven as the women’s fashion industry (I’ve said for years that working in IT is like working in fashion - without the models, glamorous parties and nice clothes). People get up and make statements unsupported by any evidence as if they are facts beyond dispute and everyone in the audience is expected to take them as gospel because the people making them are “in” at the moment. “Web 2.0 is the future”, “brown is the new black”, “social networking is the new Google”, “it bags are the new must-haves”, “PHP is the hot development language for Web 2.0 apps”, “mid-calf skirts are the hot new length for winter”.
Internet “experts?”
I love it. Bang on. And that’s why I read Valleywag too, because they also have the right idea about all this Web 2.0 silliness.
@Lane H: Shame and fie on Scoble. Because you said you had actually met him in person on a number of occasions. I can see him not wanting to help some random stranger off the Internet. But an actual contact? Someone he knows? Maybe you are not best buds, but you shouldn’t have had to be for that.
Shame, shame, shame.
Help me. As a foreigner visinting Boston perhaps one / two times a year, I’d have headed to Legal Seafood across the river in Cambridge.
That a tourist trap as well ?
Great post, sensible and funny.
It takes ole’ FSJ to debunk some of the web 3.0 stuff that’s going down at the oh so awesome and cool geek gatherings these days…. Why have none of these guys made it easy to book an entire trip on the web by now? Still takes hours of clicking around on a half dozen sites or more!
awesome post, I can easily imagine the scenario you spoke of.
Of course Dan you might be missing the point. In a depression, the last thing anyone wants to think about is their, social responsibility to others in financial/health/other need… the best way to forget about starving kids in Africa, is to find an restaurant with really good food and get drunk.
I’m joking… but not really. Cheap distractions are a valuable commodity in a depression.
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Ok great insight, perhaps they were talking anything but web 2.0 because it is now old hat? I wonder if they touched anything beyond 2.0? check out http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/thinking_beyond_web_20_social_computing_and_the_internet_sin.htm
But think also of all the business logic, the customized apps created uniquely for you. Just look at what Facebook does to make it extremely painful for users to move. That’s a tiny taste of the cloud.lig tv izle
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sohbet The tradeoff, of course, will be that you’ll sacrifice a bit of freedom in exchange for convenience. Fair deal? Maybe. But I think Stallman is on to something here