Startuping has been on my mind a lot as of late and as a result there were over 600 unread items on my google reader. So, I finally sat down and started marking things as read without reading them, un-marking the ones that seemed more interesting, starring, reading the ones that were short enough to be quick, and that sort of a thing. Annoying. Why doesn't the reader do this for me? It should know by now what I like. It is a good friend of mine. I go see it every day. But wait, this is a meta-problem: why doesn't do this? It should know how I use it and organize my data accordingly.

The web 2.0 bubblevolution seems to be about two things: putting applications on the web so that they are accessible from anywhere and put users' data on the web and organize it in some naive way. Continuing with my reader example, this is exactly what it does: keeps me from having to download and install a news reader and it is available anywhere I go. Secondly, it organizes my feeds into categories of my choosing (I have to tell it which feed goes where when I subscribe to it) and it presents my data to me in some naive ways: organized by date and by feed or by date in the "river of news" format. The web 2.0 has been a good thing, but it seems that it is largely done. It is difficult to come up with truly new products that aren't just mashups of variations of existing ones.

Introducing web 2.1. The name of the game is not to figure which applications and data to move to the web, but rather to drastically improve the services that already exist. Come to think of it, that is what gmail did. When gmail launched in 2004 everyone, their mothers and grandmothers were using hotmail, yahoo mail and handful of other web-based email services. M$ had been the owner of hotmail for seven years! And in came gmail and taught everybody how email should be done: search, conversations by subject, lots of space, filters & tags and spam block. Bingo.

In a nutshell, dramatically improving a service means keeping more data about the user and the ways she uses the product, and do intelligent, non-evil things with it. Make smarter things, not new things. Automatic and dynamic customization. Oh yeah, and web 2.1 is never beta.

Most of what is in this post came from a conversation with Walter, but I had already posted in that style. Sorry dude.