Tom Altman’s Wedia Conversation

Wow - I had heard buzz around PageFlakes lately - but hadn’t had time to dig in…this is interesting, still a little complicated, but interesting.

If you look at this page CNN PageFlake, it shows how you can customize an entire page and publish it - or you can use a specific “flake” (nugget for a page) and customize that.

Here are two more samples BBC and TechNews (note the tabs at the top left).

So if you think about it as a MySpace for news or information - then you can see how interesting it gets. It could be a “replacement” for a newspaper in the future - people would contribute to a page - it is just an interesting concept.

Take a look, see what you think.

MySpace was THE social network that started much of the Web 2.0 social hype. This is a great quote from the mashable site “If you asked most MySpace-haters what’s their problem with the service, they’d probably say: it’s ugly. Meanwhile, people tell us they are switching from Twitter to Pownce because it’s prettier and easier to use. For those who prize beauty above all else, we brought together 10 of the prettiest social networks.”

So take a look and see what you think.

So, what will be the NBT (Next Best Thing) after social networks? The article I found which addresses this first looks back and then ahead.

Age #0 - eCommerce - the most primitive way of making money online. It’s identical to the real world…
Age #1 - Single Sign-on - Yahoo started out with a simple web directory, but their idea was to port traditional media business models to the online space. They weren’t focused on selling goods, but they brought great services together and glued them with a single sign-on mechanism.
Age #1.5 - Geocities - Geocities was one of many sites that provided free web hosting and web site creation services. However GeoCities was different in some ways. It was more like the social networking sites of today; the self expression level was high and the weird naming scheme based on city names gave it a human touch.
The Boom period (aka Dot Com) - The reason of the boom was the lack of calibration between the pace of internet applications and the internet infrastructure.
Age #2 - Search - What Google did was to offer a better search service with absolutely no clutter. Their sparse but highly efficient service opened the doors to big deals and hugely profitable online advertising.
Age #2.5 - On-demand Video
Age #3 - Social - MySpace kept growing, but it couldn’t take the necessary steps to become a real big thing…Only one company figured out the way of putting social interactions to the center of the web and it was Facebook.
Age #4 - Joost ??? - It’s hard to guess the 4th phase of the web because we don’t even have the 3rd one yet, fully. But what the past eras (see ages 1.5, 4 and 2.5) show is that we will end up with the rebirth of online TV.

So, what will be next? Who knows - I just know with the innovative things we are thinking, saying and doing - we will be right i the thick of it.