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Guarding The Gates: Web 2.0 Barriers To Entry

This post was spawned from a comment left at TechCrunch where the commenter had this to say about Meebo:

“Iâ€™m still curious how they plan to turn this into an actual business, and how they plan to deal with the non-existent barrier to entry in their space. I wish them the best of luck!”

I responded to that comment with this:

“Matt – the barrier to entry isnâ€™t trivial by any means. Interoperating with the major IM services (since they update their connection protocols often and like to lock-out 3rd parties) is a major pain, so these guys deserve all the credit theyâ€™re given.”

Vongo Says I Have An OS Failure

I was watching TV tonight and kept seeing funny ads for a service called Vongo. The ads were pretty nebulous, so after the movie I tried visiting their website:

Not a browser failure, but an OS FAILURE! Kinda odd too, considering they stuck “Mac OS X” in the right hand “Minimum System Requirements” column. There’s a little red circle next to Mac OS X though, but still, the name of the column shouldn’t be contradictory to what their error message is saying. I’m guessing that Vongo uses ActiveX…. any Windows Vongo users out there know what’s up?

Alexa Totally Unreliable?

Many people use Alexa as a generic “site comparison” service, but is it accurate? Here are some oddities I found:

I guess building to flip isn’t always a bad thing

“Building to flip” is a term that means that you’d build a company, product, or service specifically with the intent to sell it. This strategy is not often the best strategy, since you remove customer from the equation and simply try to make the service attractive to prospective buyers. Good for you, bad for all of us. But is this always the case?

Blogs to Riches: Popularity and Traffic in the Blogosphere

Clive Thompson’s article Blogs to Riches over at the hot new New York Magazine website has got to be the must-read article of the year so far. The premise of the article is that the rich keep getting richer, and in the blog world this translates to blogs with the highest traffic keep gaining more traffic, separating themselves from the B- & C-list blogs who fight tooth and nail to move out of the 4-digit daily pageview count and into the 5- and 6-digit realm of the real money-makers. I do believe there’s a divide in the new media world of weblogs, however just like with any other “rule”, there are exceptions.

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