Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Internet 2.0


Social Networking websites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster are clearly popular. They are the fastest growing phenomenon on the Web. People are flocking to them in droves. The idea of people linking to other people to get things done or find information is huge.

The idea of having millions of people edit the news (Digg) or an Encyclopedia (Wikipedia) would have been frowned upon years ago, but they are the new way of the 'Web. This trend towards users contributing and customizing everything to their likes is commonly called Internet 2.0

And the innovations continue. One new startup site, called Meetro, aims to link people in an exciting new way. The site works by importing information from MySpace, then allowing users to chat by linking all the common Instant Messaging programs together. But the key difference is geography. Meetro shows you which of your friends is nearby and how far away they are. In this ridiculously long article about the site, this example is given:

The [guys who run the site] are their own most avid users. After they first moved to Palo Alto, the guys used their new service to find their nearest user, who lived four houses away, to borrow a vacuum cleaner after theirs broke.
They only have 100,000-ish users now, but I think it will explode. Geographic tagging has been discussed before and once it goes mainstream, there won't be any stopping it. Google is already working with ads targeted to exactly where you're standing. Imagine once these services are all linked together and we have an Internet where not only is all information available to us, but it's custom fit to exactly where we are!

The future looks exciting!



  1. Woah, I totally agree. Meetro is going to blow up huge. It fills the one main thing that myspace leaves out and that's chatting with your friends. With meetro now people can connect and talk.

  2. i certainly hope it makes it big ;)