eToys (as in the orginal company which launched that website) got the bright idea to buy this community and turn these moms into buyers before they were moms—measured in terms of lowering customer acquisition cost, this was great for the business model.
Why just find out what's happening during the 3rd week of the second trimester when you can also shop for a crib and find out which one is least likely to asphyxiate your newborn?
This was before eToys IPO'd to the tune of an 8 billion dollar market cap which lasted all of a few days. It worked out so unbelievably well eToys was sold to Kay-Bee Toys in excess of 1 whole million dollars during bankruptcy.
Johnson & Johnson bought Babycenter.
Since then, J&J hasn't ticked-off its community of moms with imported lead cotton swabs, so it has since acquired other social networking sites and baked them into Babycenter. Go to mayasmom.com and get redirected to BC.
Social Networking in today’s world comprises these basic features: profiles (about me/interests and avatar), comments, friends, blogs, photo galleries, groups, forums, and, most importantly, robust apps.
Robust apps used to be delivered by snails to real mailboxes from companies like Compuserve, Prodigy, and, most famously, America Online. If you were really smart, you didn’t need to pay for all that commercial UI baloney and untarred your robust apps of choice from the command line.
Now just about anyone can download their apps to a phone and sync them back to their desktop.
Versioning the web is a way of saying it’s a work-in-progress. Not a place for only for kids, nerds, crooks or gamers. A place built by regular folks for all the people on the phone out there.
It’s not all kid stuff either. Try the Scotts Fertilizer website on for size.
http://www.scotts.com/smg/
Is this late-breaking news? No. But the Scotts website is vibrantly active with user contributions—Go Fertilizer!
Its the same story on the Weber BBQ website—people spend time online writing and reading about the products they buy or plan on buying. Moreover, they expect to be able to do this on the manufacturer's website, where the feedback will do the most good.
This has implications for search engines. People see the URL on a bag of Scotts Fertilizer before they even buy one. Search doesn’t have to be a discovery, it can be a convenient substitute for bookmarking a webpage.
This is Web 2.0 in action. It doesn't stop being in action after Web 3.0 comes along.
The web cannot empower users unless it really empowers them. Web 3.0 will boil down to what links appear on your profile and who can make them appear.
It's about users granting other users admin access to things which can be hosted anywhere. We're not just talking about merging photo galleries from two different websites or meeting the next American Idol because you have an 'avid fan' badge on a profile somewhere.
Today's CEOs blog about what's happening at their company. Tomorrow’s CEOs will be able to wiki-fy a version of their financial projections or performance or product roadmap and get private tweets in response from trusted sources, not to mention be able to share a completely different 'inside look' at the company to the general public (and to people who aren't logged in!).
Paying customers have so many choices it highlights the businesses’ motive in the customer loyalty equation—keep the cost of being loyal lower for the customer than the cost of switching.
Customers know where they spend money is good for the company's bottom line. After news of the banking crisis came to light, no one is going to want anymore surprises from places where they choose to do business, even if the 'cost' of switching is countered by attractive incentives shoved in your face from an unavoidable comparison shopping feed.
But Web 3.0 isn't about holding onto customers by communicating how well a company is run. It's about what your profile can do for you.
Suppose the time you spend on a health website like Livestrong.com can be turned into points for health services by your health insurance provider. One of Livestrong's robust apps is a calorie tracker which real users tout as being the key to losing an extra 5 or 10 pounds. Calories can be tracked on a phone. No need to go to the desktop. Obesity is public enemy number one, so widespread use of an application like this can positively affect the bottom line of a health insurance company, if it knows its bottom line is being positively affected. Allstate car insurance already advertises a points system towards accident forgiveness to drivers who fit the profile.
For any of this to happen, Web 3.0 companies have to be more successful and better managed than eToys, which didn't go into bankruptcy until after its fourth holiday season.
That was the year it thought it would make almost as much money as Microsoft has invested in Facebook so far, but it only topped 100 million dollars. This wasn't enough to meet the demands of Wall Street. eToys employed a lot of smarty pants graduates from state schools and the Ivy League—its stock paid off a few college loans and car loans.
Amazon launched with the intention of filling orders for books, and it promised to ship many of those within 3-5 business days at the click of a button.
eToys launched to make birthdays and important holidays special gift giving occasions (and to make life miserable for European artists who called themselves etoy).
Doesn't every parent of today's teenagers recall how totally awesome birthday reminders were at first?
Which is the other lesson to be learned from the next version of the web—no matter how exciting it is, we'll get over it, no matter what our profiles can do.
Bottom line: There's more technology ready to use for creating complex, not to mention flashy collaborations and there's more phones ready to access them than ever before.
And, yes, as long as people drop what they're doing with it when M-O-M shows on the caller ID, it's a phone.
Indeed, most of it requires know-how, but the exponential growth of the web is because technology is providing for more transparent connections between dots. The only thing connecting these dots are people who are both forward thinking and forward doing.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are three of the biggest, most successful technology companies in the world. Each one wants to give you a great deal on hosting your revolutionary app, or your plans for one. And so does any open source initiative that wants to be like the Apache Foundation. Google allows its employees to devote a portion of their time to personally motivated projects—get some of them to do the heavy lifting!
To become Web 3.0 ask for more from your profile, because you’re getting profiled. Your thoughts on soil count. So does your niece’s next birthday, especially when the two of you are playing in the backyard.
Technology is making it difficult to not be heard, so if you’re on the web—don’t just participate. Take a programmer out to dinner!
