Supernova was an interesting experience. It’s not my usual crowd, more a Web 2.0/Social Networking scene than my hard-core networking and tech policy people, but there was a fair bit of overlap. I met some people whose blog work I’ve read for years – Steve Gillmor, J. D. Lasica, Kevin Marks, Susan Crawford, and Kevin Werbach, the organizer. Some other people I’ve discussed and debated things with over the years, such as Joi Ito, were also there, but I didn’t have a chance to talk to them in the general rush of events and what-not, and Doc Searls was unfortunately too ill to attend. Doc and I have been missing each other at conferences for years now, so the tradition may as well continue.
While most of the discussion was about monetizing social networks, there were excursions into network policy and technology at several junctures, and Kevin committed to making these themes larger in next year’s show. The hard-core telecom guys were in Vegas for NXTComm, but they wouldn’t have contributed all that much anyway.
Regarding “monetizing,” it strikes me as odd to build a social networking site, get a million members, and only then start to think about making money from it. You’d think that any smart business would begin with a “revenue model” and then design a service around it, but this is a different world. There are only about four ways to make money from the Internet anyway:
1. Sell subscriptions
2. Sell ads
3. Sell stuff
4. Facilitate some sort of financial transaction and take a cut.
If I were in that business, I’d market exclusivity because there are just too many hooligans and ruffians on the Internet. Toss Metcalfe’s Law out the window and adopt Bennett’s Law, that the value of a network is the mean of the value of the individual members. If I want to mix with street people, I’ll go downtown. But that’s just weird thinking.
Several of the speakers declared Google the new Evil Empire, which is quite realistic and on-point, and the tussle between the search and ads monopoly and poor little Facebook featured prominently in one panel.
I explained that the Internet as we know it today – IPv4 with TCP and UDP – isn’t actually the be-all and end-all of innovation nurture. It permits experimentation among applications with limited requirements for bandwidth and delay, and a whole new set of applications will show up as soon as we have a network that can deliver more data with less delay.
Conveying that one point to an audience of eager innovators was worth the hassle of getting up at 6:30 in the morning, although it didn’t seem so until I caught up on my sleep.
Kevin is a great host, and the conference was well-organized and smooth. I hope to do it next year, when (real) networking is a bigger theme.
Technorati Tags: net+neutrality supernova2008
But you’re missing the point on how a lot of dotcoms make money. It’s almost never about making a viable business; it’s about the perception of someday being able to make money with a popular name and lots of registered (not necessarily active) users. It’s all about getting making revenue from venture capital and then hopefully getting bought out for millions and hopefully billions of dollars regardless of whether you have revenue or not. Everyone wants to be the next broadcast.com and strike it rich like Mark Cuban.
Right, Web 2.0 is mainly a swindle. I prefer to limit the analysis to things that might actually produce customer revenue, a very radical concept to be sure.