I couldn’t agree more with Ron on this point.  Wesabe is a real innovator in the financial services space.  I believe Banks (generally) are not in e-commerce.  They have merely automated branch transactions/ paved the cowpath. The promise if Wesabe is to harness the power of the web, in ways that Amazon, and eBay have done (more here).  While social media proponents talk about the community-building aspects of this new movement, the Cranky in me says that it’s still about me. Letting my voice be heard, validating my opinion. Wesabe holds out the promise to help consumers validate their financial decisions … Continue reading Wesabe brings financial services in to the e-commerce space

apophenia makes a great point and defines the prediction on social networks well.  Users will tire of large-scale, portal-style social network sites like MySpace and Facebook in 2007″ but the framing of it as “social network fatigue” reveals the inherent problem in this prediction. Users aren’t going to tire of their friends but they will tire of problematic social spaces that make hanging out with friends difficult. Source: apophenia: some thoughts on 2007 (advertising, bullying, and mobile) I see this as a healthy shift.  I personally don’t buy social networks as a business model per se.  That’s like suggesting operating a … Continue reading A new dilemma – ‘Social fatigue’

 Brad from Union Squares, produces one of those seminal posts asking the right questions, that I see aligned with how social networks are evolving.  Hat tip A VC. The progression to date has been up the stack in a classic architecture diagram, data is on top of that stack, and nothing sits on top of the data. I disagree. The genius of Craigslist is in its governance system. It is its lightweight governance system that allows 21 people to administer 300 sites in 35 countries. I believe that the basis of competition in web services will shift from the data … Continue reading Whats next in information architecture after ‘data’ – trust management

Dave Winer enjoys controversy, but I have to take issue with his recent statement about the next bubble burst, and how it will be represented by Google stock crashing.  Now the New York Times have picked up on it, quoting Dave here: Web 2.0, according to Mr. Winer, is nothing more than an aftermarket for Google. So many start-ups rely on Google – both as a basis for creating Web sites and as a channel for selling Google ads – that the entirety of Web 2.0 (the new generation of sites that rely on interactivity and open systems) will stand or … Continue reading A Bubble Watcher Watches Google – New York Times