Thing 19: I'd like to thank the academy. Or curse it, say the 2.0 gurus...

Thing 19 is the 2006 Web 2.0 awards and the tools revealed therein. I have to admit that one of my best laughs of 2006 was when I read, in the Web 2.0 Awards publicity that "one thing is for sure, these tools will be around a long time." Because of course, that's not how the web works. Things change constantly, and good ideas tend to be quickly adapted by corporate players like Google, Yahoo, Micrsoft, News Corp, etc. This tends to leave the creators of the ideas holding the bag. For the the YouTube folks, the bag was filled with cash, though, but a lot of web 2.0 award winners probably don't go on to web 3.0 quite as rich.

In the Webby listings, I tried out the two "winners" for personal planning, "hippo cal" and "planzo". The idea is that they give you a web-sharable, easily updated and flexible calendaring utility. Since the awards, hippo cal was bought by Yahoo. And not to be critical, but both were pretty weak. Hippo Cal had real user interface problems setting up recurring events... which is not hard to do in outlook, groupwise and other 1.0 resources. Planzo was more or less laughable -- it says to add an event, click the "add event" button. There was no "add event" button. I asked the contact us. They never answered. I think Planzo is a ghost ship at this point.

But hey, you want web 2.0 calendaring? Try Google. Gmail has a calendar feature that is awesome. You can share your calendar with the world, with people (using their email addresses, no google account required). You can color code (wish that was in Groupwise). You can attach documents. You can use an event search and one-click add events to your schedule. (You're thinking, why would I do that? How about seeing when the Nats are going to play the Braves this year? Or concerts? Or professional conferences? How'd you like to get the events you're gonig to on your personal schedule with one click?).

My point, I guess, is that the web has always had plenty of folks trying to break big with new applications. But those innovative ideas are subject to market forces, and those forces tend to concentrate resources. So the useful ideas will eventually (and this is web time -- eventually is months) be integrated (co-opted?) into offering that will enhance the position of the biggest market players. The Long Tail exists, yes. It's true that the web challenges institutions to be innovative and to collaborate and to mash up, and to let go control. But that doesn't mean that major players will not seek more control by glomming on to the good stuff they see. A net plus for users, for innovators (again, rich YouTube guys), for everyone, because it makes the web into a lab, with low R&D costs. If Parmaceuticals or Renewable Energy research could work the same way, think of the possibilities.