Avoid the Bubble; Proceed Cautiously
March 4, 2006 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Computers
I’m telling you, these days I don’t know what to think. The web developer in me looks at all the startup action going on, all the Web 2.0 companies that are just dying to make my life easier and I say more power to them. I’m loving some of the things I’m seeing in the works and I like documenting them here.
For instance, check out Crazyegg, a service which has yet to be released (par for the course these days) which allows site owners to get a "heat map" or other numerical representation of how well a site is performing. It looks at the site, maps out the links and creates a hot-spot representation of where people are actually clicking. Now, how cool is that? Talk about figuring out if an advertising campaign is working for me. Or if some new feature I’ve implemented is interesting to anyone other than me.
Or how about Podbop, the strange new service that offers users the chance to quickly find what concerts are in their area? Apparently, Toni Braxton is coming to Baltimore on April 3rd. Will have to tell Sean, a huge TB fan.
I’m thrilled with all of these services, and I hate to be a broken record, but I have one word of warning for all of these new startups and companies: 1999.
Proceed with caution, mates. History repeats itself. Don’t make the mistakes of your predecessors. Think of things in these terms: Can the world live WITHOUT your service? Note that I did not ask would the world benefit from your service.
If you can honestly answer yes to your question, then you are a prime candidate for failure and Bubble 2.0. That doesn’t mean you won’t change the landscape or make gobs of money, but think real hard before you 1) put yourself at risk for loss or more importantly, 2) put this country and world at risk. Remember the post-Bubble 1.0 recession that affected the world? Don’t put us through it again. Please.
Proceed with caution.
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but the world can live without digg. the world can live without del.icio.us. The world can live without cocomment.
The real question, I think, is to ask
“Are we good enough to make people forget how they managed without us”
I could live without google maps. I’d just use paper maps more often. People did it for hundreds of years. The key is that google maps are so good that you forget how you got along without them
“but the world can live without digg. the world can live without del.icio.us. The world can live without cocomment.”
And my point is that they may be the first victims of a bubble burst, eh?
uh……cocomment was a really bad example. Bug digg, slashdot, delicious, technorati, myspace, wordpress.com….I think they’ll be around for a while
Great points, Aaron. I think we’re seeing a combination of bubble-bound start ups and some pretty interesting new businesses that are solving real-world problems. One nice thing about the start of this latest potential bubble is early developments were bootstrapped applications rather than heavily financed concepts. They either work and grow, or simply get no traction. No glorious flame-outs like pets.com. Of course, as money returns to web start-ups, we’ll see large volumes of dumb money thrown at nothing more than concepts.
Thanks for stopping by, Ed. I agree with you pretty much. I just see folks like Michael Arrington making it rich off the rest of us. That doesn’t bother me in itself but I just don’t want to see another economic fallout. Steady gradual growth is always better that quick inflated growth.
Aaron,
Thanks for the Crazy Egg mention. You hit it when you said “Talk about figuring out if an advertising campaign is working for me. Or if some new feature I’ve implemented is interesting to anyone other than me.” The purpose of Crazy Egg is to provide people with a visual representation of their webpages that is more then just numbers. We are working on tracking more and more things on a webpage to make sure we can allow people to understand their what visitors are doing on their website. Crazy Egg can already tracking form fields and buttons, such as submit buttons and other javascript functions.
If you’d like more information, feel free to contact me at info at crazyegg.com
thanks,
Hiten Shah
Crazy Egg
gah! Aaron…these people must spend all day on technorati. Either that or the whole world reads your blog
Jesse,
We just find it very important to listen to people who are talking about our company, thats the only way we can seriously improve our offering, at least until we get our own blog up and running :-)
Hiten
I actually find it very impressive when companies pay attention to bloggers and take the time to respond.
When you have people who pretend they don’t see bloggers, they end up looking foolish because the bloggers are the ones who bring them down.
now how to hack the site to get my beta invite…
Jesse, all you had to do was ask :-)
If you do not receive the contact form I filled out on your website, just give me a shout at info at crazyegg.com
Congratulations, Jesse. :)
coolest. company. ever.
thanks a lot. I look forward to getting my grubby hands on it
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