Internet Apps: Value Added?
CMM July 10th, 2007
With my new experiment ivvj.blogspot.com, I’ve taken an interest in driving traffic through freeware and zerocost advertising. Following the blogs of folks smarter than I (i.e. Marc Andreesen), I picked up a few Internet applications that can drive traffic. This includes digg, reddit, and stumble upon.
So far, I’m not really sure what value any of those applications bring my Internet user experience or my blog author experience. Stumple upon is kind of fun for killing time, but I don’t need a value-add for killing time. After all, that’s what facebook is for, right? (insert sarcasm)
My issue with so many of these online applications is that they bring no real value to my experience. On the rare occasion that they do, there is a substantial learning curve for use. With all this venture capital money flowing into social networking and online applications, I’m concerned. Are we creating another Frankenstein’s monster; a self-generated, larger-than-life, flawed creature that can’t survive without the guidance and protection of its maker?
For all you computer geeks out there, if you really want to make bank while making a difference in the digital space, focus on ease of use and practical application. Make it real and trendy, but make it useful to more than just the 50,000 early adopters. The rest of us don’t have the time, patience or understanding for it.
UPDATE: Bay Partenrs are actually doing a VC investment experiment called AppFactory. The whole point is to push mini-vc investments into application development. I think there is huge potential, but how do you focus the creative spirit of the developers without breaking their spirits? Without the focus, you are going to end up dumping money into a bunch of small applications that provide no real value to the user. Sure they look cool, but the tech early adopters aren’t a large enough market to warrant a 250k investment.
