A study by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Hitwise, which measures Web 2.0 audiences, shows that only a tiny fraction of people using social media actively participate. A miniscule 0.16 percent of visits to YouTube actually involve people putting a video up on it, according to his online surfing data. All the rest are visits by people watching the videos of that tiny fraction.
More at Businessweek blog
As far as I’m concerned, web 2.0 is still in it’s really early stages, and the reason is because the data isn’t all owned yet.
The network-effects play is about how you get increasing returns by everybody using your stuff, which is really what Microsoft did on the PC. Here we see it again, where these are winner-takes-all games. The internet looks like an open platform in the beginning, but once somebody gets a lead, their service gets better fast enough, if they’ve harnessed all the right levers, until it becomes a real barrier to entry
More at wired.com
The Yahoo! Mail Web Service is a big release for Yahoo! and the Internet, and it’s only the beginning of what you’ll be seeing from Yahoo!. Jump into our code samples for Java, .NET, PHP, Perl and Python, and build your dream mail app today, then be sure to give us feedback on your experience so we can continue to make the API even better. Be sure to leverage the online Yahoo! Mail Web Service support group where you can get help from the Yahoo! Mail Web Service team and your fellow developers. We can’t wait to see what applications you will build when you add your imagination to the platform. Maybe you want to build an application that backs up Yahoo! mail targeted at a large number of Yahoo! users, or maybe you just want to add a niche feature that makes Yahoo! Mail better for your mom. For inspiration, we’ve gathered a few applications: