Few days ago I read the story of Excite told by Joe Kraus in “Founders at Work” (great book btw). He mentioned how each time a new medium appears, no one knows how to use it properly and they start copying the old one instead:

“When a new medium comes out, it adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old medium—which fails, and then the more appropriate models get figured out. For example, all the television programming in its early days looked like radio. It was literally the same guys reading the radio program on television, and it was extraordinarily boring. And advertising was radio advertising—the announcer reading the ad.

We too (Excite) adopted the business model of the prior medium, which was print.”

Joe’s statement was about a business living its days back in 1998… 10 years ago. And you may think: We have evolved a lot. We now have Facebook and Twitter. We passed that!

Well… we at uberVU believe this not to be true. We moved from print to desktop. And from the desktop to the web… but we are somehow locked in the desktop and print world. We are very frustrated on how a lot of start-ups and big companies alike replicate classic mediums on the web. We have a dozen companies doing online word processing (with a twist), online spreadsheets applications, bookmarking tools and many… many more. The same with video. And social networks. What’s the deal in having a bunch of friends you mostly know in real life, anyway? (Poking is more fun in real life too). We don’t deny that evolution has happened. Content democratization is good thing… but we are are only beginning.

It may be a crazy goal: but we are trying to solve some of this issues. You will see it when we get there!

Techcrunch reports that Google Docs is getting more and more like Microsoft Office. And soon it will have all the most important features of its desktop counterpart. That’s fine but I believe Google has chosen a wrong path.

You see: at uberVU we love Google Docs. We do most of our writing inside Google Docs. And we do it because of the sharing capabilities, not because of the extended set of publishing features. We don’t care about all the fancy features that Google is adding to make it look and behave more like Word. We don’t care about those because we rarely print anything that we write from inside Google Docs. However, we do publish a large percent of the documents. Online. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Email, Online Magazines etc. And a web page is so… so different than a printed page that I am wondering: Why doesn’t Google make a good editor … for the online world?

Most people see the distributed web as a chaotic and uncontrollable space. We see it as a big opportunity. And it is not just us. Bellow is an article by Daniel Waterhouse (sector partner at 3i Venture Capital).

One of the enduring and real elements of the web 2.0 discussion is the new way in which online businesses are reaching their audiences. This has spawned some buzzwords, such as ‘open APIs’ and ‘widgets’, and has added a layer of complexity into building an online business. Those who succeed in harnessing these techniques command a competitive advantage. As an investor I am always looking for teams which react fast to changing market dynamics - effectively utilising the distributed web is one such test of reaction speeds. But what does this all mean?

In the first iteration of the web, it was enough to publish your web site and try to drive people to it, to use your service and buy your goods. Perhaps you closed a few deals to get other sites to carry a version of your service and you certainly spent some money on advertising. All of these channels to get people to your site cost money - unless you stumbled upon the ingredients of word-of-mouth marketing which a few notable sites (e.g. Google) did.

In the past few years, however, several high-profile examples of new ways to get your user in front of your product have emerged, including open APIs and widgets. APIs are application programming interfaces that allow people to interact with your product/service/data/technology.

Opening up part of it to people outside of your organisation may sound like a recipe for losing control. However, when done successfully it can be very powerful. The best example of where this works well is Google Maps. Littered across the web now are Google Maps embedded in other web sites. The site owner has not made a deal with Google but has just utilised the open API it provides. In return, Google receives free marketing for its product on thousands of web sites (and will most likely start embedding adverts into the maps at some point and make money from this free distribution).

Widgetising your product involves allowing the mainstream internet user to embed your product into their personal page (blog, MySpace page, etc). YouTube is a great example - on every page is an ‘embed’ code which users can insert into their pages. YouTube gained huge traction early on via users viewing videos on MySpace pages which contained YouTube embeds. Several other large businesses have been built in this way, where the user interacts with their product on a blog or MySpace page.

This new form of distribution is very cheap and can be incredibly powerful. The downside is the inevitable loss of control and also dependence on the policies of the likes of MySpace which have been known to ban certain embeds. Using these channels effectively will become a core competence of many online businesses, especially as audiences fragment to more niche locations in the ever expanding world wide web. The companies that exploit this most effectively will be successful and we at 3i look forward to talking with them in the future.

The article was published in MicroScope magazine.

We’re really glad to announce that we’ve been selected to present our product on the stage at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, 3-4 April 2008.

We’ll have our presentation alongside other really cool companies, such as eBuddy, coComment, Netlog and many more.

This is an important moment for us, as we’ll also be launching our Private Beta at this conference. We know you’ve been waiting for quite a while for it. We’ll start letting you in during this conference. So stay tuned around the 3rd of April, it’s a big day.

The people at The Next Web have been kind enough to provide us with a company booth in the Company Area, so you can meet us face to face. We’d love to have a chat with you about our product and the Web in general.

If you’re also coming to the conference drop us a line at hello@ubervu.com or on our Twitter account.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

I have so called “friends” on many so called social sites. And each time I try to have conversations with my friends, those sites tend to gently pat me on my shoulder and remind me that the medium is the message.

I have to conform to the 140 characters that have been kindly offered to me by Twitter. I want to post a message to the thread in Facebook Groups, but I can only reply to a single person’s statement. Conversations on the web seem to be trickier than one would expect.

But what are conversations really about? What are you actually doing when having a conversation with someone face to face at your favorite restaurant? You’re talking about SOMETHING with SOMEONE. So what should actually matter to you on the Web is THE SUBJECT, THE PEOPLE and THE CONTEXT. NOT the platform.

The technology doesn’t really matter. Moreover, the technology should be transparent in the conversational Web. All we should see are PEOPLE we want to talk to, and THINGS we want to talk about, connected by a CONTEXT that shows us how the conversation is unfolding.

Some call this the distributed web, but it’s really not. It’s a lot more than that. And I’ll tell you what it’s not also. It’s not FriendFeed and it’s not LifeStreaming. It’s not about seeing your friends’ tweets and pokes in one place.

The interesting Conversational Web that I’m seeing only shows you what matters, the content and the people. And it lets you interact with both without caring, or even knowing where they come from. You may be talking about golf with a friend and about photography with another. The golf friend might be using a regular forum, or even a newsgroup to contribute to the conversation. The photography friend might be using both a blog, a photo sharing site and an IM service to share his opinions and examples. And you wouldn’t know or care about that. You’d see it all the same. All you would care about would be that you’re having a meaningful conversation in a very rich way.

There are a lot of challenges to using this approach. There’s the authentication and security, that OpenID might take care of. There’s the problem of finding a way of showing meaningful information about someone so you know who you’re talking to in that context. If you’re talking about photography lighting techniques, you might find interesting to know that the person you’re talking to is a professional photographer. But you might not care about that if you’re talking about parenting.

There’s also the problem of making all these services work together so that you can actually interconnect them. And there’s always the problem of providing CONTEXT. There are millions of interesting conversations about photography around the Web. How you find out about them, organize them, get them in front of the user and keep track of the participation across platforms is very, very tricky.

I honestly think it can be done and it must be done. The way the Web is going today, I see a flood of noise grouped by way of some social order (Graph, if you may). People keep to their current communities, limiting themselves to the same group of people that say the same uninteresting things. Some friend everybody, flooding themselves with information that they never intend to process and in the end having lots of shallow interactions.

The Conversational Web can be a great thing for us. But it needs a lot more tweaking if we are to be able to have lots of meaningful conversations, meet lots of new great people that we deeply connect with, all without wasting all our time in the process.

Think about it, please.