WEB 2.O... AN OPPORTUNITY FOR VENTURE CAPITAL?

Clarence Wooten at Venturepreneur Partners has a good article, "Web 2.0: An opportunity for venture capital, or just a boom in lifestyle businesses?", on the current environment for startups and building companies. He also has a little plug for GoingOn, but not sure if he knows what we're really trying to build since Marc's posts and the articles about us are everywhere:

I wasn’t at OSCON this year but I was told that Tim O’Reilly referred to the Ruby programming language as “the Perl of the Web 2.0 era” – I agree. Furthermore, innovation is being driven by the excitement surrounding Ajax coupled with development of open source programming frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django. These frameworks are designed to accelerate programming, ease Ajax implementation and improve code by enforcing the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principal.

By leveraging these platforms, a plethora of new Web 2.0 startups are bootstrapping and rapidly building focused WebApps such as Basecamp (web-based project management), Blinksale (web-based invoicing), Chalk.it and Writeboard (web-based white boarding), and many more that are fueling the creation of new businesses at a rapid clip (see TechCrunch for daily examples). Innovation at this level has not been seen for some time – It was ten years ago this month that Netscape had its wildly popular IPO. This was the tipping point that lead to the boom and eventual bust of the Web 1.0 era.

So what makes the creation of Web 2.0 businesses different from the Web 1.0 startups that preceded them? I believe, three things separate the two:

1) open source, 2) blogging, and 3) social networks.
.....
The impact of social networks.
In this second, Web 2.0, phase of the Web, networking has now extended from machines to people. The underlying networking infrastructure of the Web has become the foundation for a vast social networking infrastructure for groups. Popular social networking services such as LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, and MySpace are enabling like-minded individuals to come together and form social networks that are empowering groups to create value and share value like never before. The GoingOn Network plans to take interoperability between social networks to a new level. (full article)