Pie in the Sky

I must have listened to 10 or more discussions about social networking at FOWA 2008 in London. The fascinating thing about the social web from a developer perspective is that it is starting to build a small but feable brain behind the cloud. Companies are thinking of new ways to connect people to information in brilliant new ways. For example, the news may remember what you read and will make sure you see similar articles in the future. You may have friends now, but soon you'll find yourself zeroing in on specific friends that interest you the most.

While these ideas are fantastic, I couldn't help but think of some of these companies as an ivory tower. Sure facebook and digg hit the jackpot with their advertising deals, but other companies presenting also relied on this same revenue model. The scary thing was that most of these companies didn't have these revenue streams in place.

Another thing that also scared me about the trends I was seeing at FOWA was how geared it was towards social applications. I'll freely admit that it's probably not ever going to be a viable source of income for me. This left me wondering how many other developers were at this conference pursuing a piece of the social pie? Of those pursuing social web applications how many might fail? With the growing global economic crisis this only doubled my doubts about new startups entering the overly crowded social space. What also disturbed me was thinking about how many useful untapped web applications were not being created because developers were trying to pursue less than .001% of the social market. There were a lot of brilliant attendees at this years FOWA, so I'm hoping they step outside of the current buzz and create useful products that will expand and grow the use of the cloud in new and interesting ways.