Why Rafe had a bad Webware day

If you follow me on the nanoblogs (Twitter, Plurk, Friendfeed, etc.), you may have seen me complaining recently about getting pitched on new Web apps that I find either derivative or confusing. Or both.

Now, in any entrepreneurial ecosystem, a big proportion of the ideas that people come up with will be bad, and many of those bad ideas will become actual products. But at the moment, the ratio of bad Web products to good (or even interesting) products is worse than usual. Here are few reasons why:

First, there are two big product launch shows coming up in a month (DemoFall and TechCrunch50), and the good entrepreneurs accepted to present at either of those events are in radio silence until then, leaving a press vacuum. Since bloggers need things to write about, in the absence of good stories, the pointless ones will have to do. PR companies have to know this.

"Quick start?"

Second, thanks to the favorable economics of the Web development, almost anyone can build and launch a product these days.

Third, venture capitalists, who need to put their money to work, are having trouble finding companies that actually need significant funding to build things, which means they're putting money into companies they otherwise would pass on. Entrepreneurs who get this money think that it validates their business' worthiness. It doesn't.

Fourth, since it's easier to get funding for bad ideas than it should be, entrepreneurs are getting lazy and releasing products that could use either a lot more development or a wholesale re-think.

It's a vicious cycle of mediocrity, leading to the incomplete, unoriginal, and confusing products I'm seeing right now.

I'm not afraid to name names. To the entrepreneurs behind these products I'm about to slam: This stuff sucks! Go back and do it better. I'll still be here and I'll give any good product a fair shake. The Web's users will be here, too. Waiting.

This week's losers:

SearchCloud. My colleague Josh Lowensohn covered this one this morning. It's a search interface that lets you adjust the weighting of each term in your query. Not an utterly terrible idea, but using the weighting tweak feature makes a simple three-word search query take five times longer to enter than just experimenting with multiple queries on Google.

Broong. This is a service that allows you to create little Web notecards with URLs and pictures that you send to your friends, or collect in your own account. For it to work as advertised, it has to be ubiquitous in the browser, and it has to be easier to use than just sending out URLs. It is neither. A mobile app might make the service useful, but it's not available yet.

Spendji. This is a tool for creating and tracking budgets. But it buries the user in options once they sign up, and doesn't link in to any real-world financials the way online banking services like Mint and Buxfer do. Spendji is a collection of record-keeping items for personal financial projects, but it feels more like a database (yawn) than an actual financial or collaborative application.

You know what isn't on my rant radar this week? Cuil. Yes, it flopped badly at launch. But it's a real business. Search is monetizable, and there are real engineers at the company trying to do something hard. It's not just a can of Web 2.0-colored spraypaint on a tired old concept.

Summary:

• It's hard to stand out in an orgy.
• Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
• Dumb money will cost you.
• To win big, bet big.

[counteragent]

This may be shameless self-promotion, but whatever. I've created a site, web 2.0 and all, called SuperLame.com (comic balloon pictures), Josh Lowensohn actually wrote about it maybe a month ago. Well, you say how easy it is to get funding for crappy startups, so, what about a good one? I'm looking to improve my site and can't for the life of me make any of the right connections to monetize what I (along with most of the press I've received) like to think is a pretty good site overall. If you've got any ideas I'd love to hear 'em.

Plus, I've got some pretty big ideas beyond this one too.

Thanks,
Jonathan B.

[madcasey]

To the Search Cloud team if they're reading this: Less tiers of importance! Why five different levels of importance? Seems arbitrarily complex to me. And have your engine recognize case-sensitive entries, a la: Google SEARCH competitors -- this way, you don't have to click six times to enter a phrase, your engine can just recognize "search" as the most important term.

Also, Jeers to Rafe for falling into the "Cuil is legitimate because they sent out a press release telling everyone that they used to work for Google" trap. The main criticism about their launch was that they went out and scored MAJOR pub (ie. Featured story on CNN.com), based purely on their claim that "We used to work for Google, now we're going to beat it!" This is a significantly worse strategy than the quiet-launch, tweak, then-wait-for-buzz approach that most tech companies utilize magnificently.

How ironic, then, that Rafe is willing to give their product's horrible launch the benefit of the doubt for the very same reason that the launch was so horrible.

[Lwoodb]

Rafe,

You must have missed our release yesterday ;-)

Hotel Mapping 101: HotelMapSearch.com Launches Industry's First Hotel Price Map

The essence of the site is that you can see hotel prices on a map (instead of looking at an adjacent list). So you can start to see a heatmap effect occur as you zoom out. It reveals hotel properties that are priced lower or higher than the other hotels in the area - It enables the user to to "buy the cheapest house on the most expensive street."

You can also effectively mashup restaurant locations - I know that this was on your wishlist for Planeteye :-)
http://www.prweb.com/releases/Hotels/Price_Map/prweb1147274.htm

Thanks, send me an email if you want some more information!
Lynwood Bishop

[jmyates01]

Rafe, Let's see. To me Webware articles are a second level search mechanism. You run around finding new stuff and write about it. The most important information is what it does and what its URL is. Your opinions are yours. They may be good or bad but one thing is certain, they do not reflect my point of view at all. How do you rate your own product?
And another point about search, a hundred pointless, off the point or otherwise unuseful responses in nanoseconds is much worse than a little (or a lot) of extra time to get a few useful responses. Why do you think anyone reads your text? Because you have spent a lot of time to track down and catagorize a simple URL.

[hardaway]

I feel sorry for you, Rafe. At least I don't get paid to try this crap so I don't have to. I just get pitched to fund or advise the companies and they have begun to make me laugh. half of them don't even know who else is already in the space, and can't tell me why they are needed.

[rafe]

For the record, everyone: I love my job. I hear new ideas every day. I get to talk to passionate and smart entrepreneurs. My mind is always engaged. Sometimes the industry I cover (Web 2.0 at the moment) goes into an intellectual trough, but for the most part this is the best gig in the world. Just in case anyone was wondering, or cares.

[MiamiWebDesigner]

Web 2.0 Is Like Pornography

Like so many tech articles posted since Tim O'Reilly coined the term in 2004, this one references "Web 2.0" as if it were something tangible--or at least a concept with clear, concise definition. It is not. In 2006, Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee sagely observed that "nobody knows what it means":

http://tinyurl.com/y6ewzy

And now in 2008, the most honest thing we can say is that "Web 2.0" means whatever the techno-marketeer (ab)using it wants it to mean. Otherwise, why would intelligent people like Isaac O'Bannon still be writing articles asking "What is Web 2.0?":

http://tinyurl.com/5solok

And, why would McKinsey's just-released best-of-breed report entitled "Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise" ...

http://tinyurl.com/6sxls7

... include no attempt at defining the term other than to list the "Web 2.0 Tools" that comprise or enable it? And even there, the chief ingredient is identified only as "Web Services", adding more mystery to the mix as one ethereal term is offered up to explain another.

As originated in an Onstartups.com website design posting that no longer exists...

http://tinyurl.com/57a2u4

... "Web 2.0" is like pornography: Nobody has defined it, but you know it when you see it.

Bruce Arnold, Web Designer, Miami Florida
http://www.PervasivePersuasion.com

[new_media_works]

Sometime last Fall/Winter, there was a Facebook conference up in Seattle, and I "followed along" using Twitter.COM. Back then I wrote "Applications don't matter" and people reacted like I was some kind of lunatic (perhaps they did not "get" the underlying analogy with "IT doesn't matter" -- namely that because applications are now ubiquitous, they have become commoditized).

Thank you for writing ver. 2.0 of "applications don't matter"!

:D nmw

BTW: why is twitter successful (and jaiku *unsuccessful*)? Simple: the English language is *ALSO* technology, and twitter provides exactly what it is called. Jaiku is meaningless -- it could just as well be a site selling auto parts (BTW, pt. 2: I am *amazed* that two other longstanding myths -- namely that "hyphens suck" and that "dot com is king" are still standing, even amid ample evidence to the contrary [http://cf. auto-parts.org vs. autoparts.com |http://cf. auto-parts.org vs. autoparts.com ] ;)

[EngagoTeam]

It is completely true that currently you don't need VC funding to start up a web service.
The total amount of money is limited.
If a VC could bring customers, that would make a big difference.

We are currently running the Beta test program and next step is to launch using Press Release.
Will we need to participate in TechCrunch or other web X.0 awards?
Not necessary as these events don't bring customers: we know as we became Winner of Red Herring European 100.

Actually our web service reveals the company names of the website visitors, so we mainly focus on our own web service for getting customers and getting traffic to our website by lots of content and blogging.
The web service we build has several functions and features (even a CRM) in order to keep our operational costs down. Thus probably LEADSExplorer http://www.leadsexplorer.com can be used by many B2B companies.