I agreed with Joel at http://pushnow.typepad.com/graphite/.

Reading the agenda--I don't see the fundamental question, which might be in the transcripts but I don't have time to read them: What is Web 2.0? Is it peer production? Have I missed something? Would it not be both a set of technologies and the application thereof?

Posted by charlie crystle , October 24, 2005 06:17 PM

One of the most glaring unaddressed issues with Web 2.0 is the resultant severly impoverished UIs that result.

AJAX? Spare me. It doesn't begin to address it. Pop quiz. Send me a link to three AJAX-ed sites that move a significant number of vectors (models) as opposed to GIFs/Jpegs (dumb data).

Loosely Coupled is a back end (plumbing) thing.

Posted by Douglass Turner , October 24, 2005 06:57 PM

To me Spolsky's piece on Web 2.0 was an amusing rant that needs to be taken with a grain of salt -- it's just Joel being Joel.

While I am not much for buzzwords like Web 2.0 because they are destine to be beaten to death and misused until worthless. However I've made my peace with them because for a time they help speed up the conversation with those who are familiar with them. Rather then dismiss them I use them sparingly for what they are worth.

Calling Web 2.0 nothing but "pure archtectural astronautics" is off the mark though. To me all this buzz is as much about a way of doing business as it is about architecture. The views of 37 Signals[1], the poster boys of Web 2.0 if there are any, typifies a lot of the companies being branded as Web 2.0 and yet those views have little to do with architecture.

[1] http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/less_as_a_competitive_advantage_my_10_minutes_at_web_20.php

Posted by Timothy Appnel , October 24, 2005 08:23 PM

Bravo!

Brad, that conference was the most hot-air I've ever seen in one place. The so-called brainpower in that room was misfiring dramatically. I tried, I really did, to understand what people were saying and what they meant, and no matter how hard I analyzed it (even poring over the transcript afterwards) I just don't see how anyone was saying ANYTHING.

Start with Yochai's opening sentence:

"I think the critical characteristics, as far as I can see, is that it is a set of social behaviors that have economic outputs, but are organized along motivational and organizational forums that are developed in parts of life that traditionally were on the periphery of the economy, that we understood ourselves as being engaged in producing social relations and producing psychological well-being, and so to the extent we thought about production of things of value and organizing them in terms of markets and firms, when we thought of motivations, we thought of material motivations and we optimize our systems of thinking about how we get people to do the things we want them to do -- whoever those other people are -- what it is that we expect will emerge out of these centralized behaviors, all of that was optimized on the motivation dimension on material well-being, and on the organizational level, either in terms of the price system or in terms of organizational lines of authority."

Does that mean anything? Is it too general to mean anything? Or is it just so much academic nonsense? It really looks like the output of a lisp-based AI program that generates bogus abstracts for papers given at an MLA conference, or a joke submission to a journal on semiotics by a Physics professor.

The sad part is that was the highlight of the discussion; it went downhill from there as everyone tried to keep the big bouncy ball up in the air, without even understanding Yochai (I know I didn't) and without saying anything of substance. The part everybody really loved was when Scott Heiferman told a joke using the word "F**k", although his joke had no point and was unconnected to anything, not that there was anything to connect it to. But he said F**k! ha ha! This IS the English Department at Columbia if that's what makes us laugh.

The level of conversation was not at the "architectural" level -- it was one or two level's *higher*. At those high levels, you can and do "run out of oxygen" by which I mean that nobody is saying anything that corresponds to reality in any way and therefore it cannot possibly be judged on its merits... it's too handwavy and generalized.

The way you could tell that nothing real was being said is that there was no argument at all. If people were saying things of substance you would have seen some interesting argument, some back and forth, and something concrete. Instead it was business-school -- just a bunch of highly educated kids with nothing to say, vying for airtime anyway to score points with the professor, but it leaves zero signal in the noise.

So, bravo, Brad, for admitting that you asked questions which you still "can't answer definitively". I think that may be because you disguised the real questions you had behind some fluff about Peer Production. I'm not sure what your real questions are, but I'll bet they're more like "what kinds of companies are worth investing in today," "how can we get more deal flow," "how the heck does a VC make money if today's startups can bootstrap and get profitable on one credit card worth of credit," "how can we build a community of interesting people around USV to get deal flow," and "how can USV get some cred with the technology geeks that are going to build the next generation of Google's and Craigslists?"

Posted by Joel Spolsky , October 24, 2005 09:39 PM

Stomach hurts.. dont *do* that Joel.. think of the poor people, like me, we cant buy a new keyboard every time we spit coffee all over it, laughing our heads off.. Jeezzz..

Posted by Mikael Bergkvist , October 24, 2005 10:16 PM

Joel, Yochai is trying to say "People work for money." :-)

Posted by Victor Zhang , October 24, 2005 10:33 PM

The quote from this Yochai fellow: is it really that hard to understand?

All he seems to be saying is that traditionally in business, you think of inputs (e.g. transistors, steel, etc.) and outputs (e.g PCs, cars, etc.). The basic problem is cast as "How do we organize and design and optimize the production of the outputs from the inputs (with the right dose(s) of capital)?" If we do that, the traditional capitalist thinks, we get money at the end from the outputs.

He claims that the distinguishing characteristic of "Web 2.0 stuff" is that it tries to monetize all these things that have no deliberate/designed place in a chain from inputs to outputs. An example would be a blog that's basically my personal diary that would generate revenue through contextual advertising. My personal journal is certainly something that's traditionally on the periphery of the economy. It has no place in any organized "production line" (unlike, say, an author writing/researching a book written under contract). This "Web 2.0 stuff" tries to extract value from the detritus of personal and social life.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a good or useful distinction (although I think it's not bad as an articulation of what might define this stuff), but only that the quote is not actually vacuous. It's only written in (unfortunate) academic-speak.

Posted by Rajan Lukose , October 24, 2005 10:40 PM

I'm impressed Rajan, I think you got it!

The problem is, it doesn't really make Joel's claims any less relevant. The thing is, while you were eventually able to work out what that quote means, I'm fairly sure you didn't "get it" instantly. So if you had been at the seminar and were listening to the talk, by the time you worked out what that one sentence meant (and it's a bloodly long sentence!!) the talk would have been over and you'd have missed the rest of it as a result.

Which is exactly what Joel means by "architecture astronauts." They talk in academic-speak so that nobody can easily follow what they're saying and by the time you *do* work it out, it's too late to voice your own opinion. Which kind of makes the whole discussion pointless.

Posted by Dean Harding , October 24, 2005 11:12 PM

Yochai's comment is simple to understand using this:

www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

Was that actually a single sentence? WTF? I wish I could get my hands on the dope these people are smoking.

Posted by kris , October 25, 2005 12:00 AM

I think that the question at hand here is how can we take the lessons we learned from round one and *apply* them to real-world problems?

Giving names to the set of ideas behind the newest crop of socialized, platform-agnostic, peer-powered whatevers is fine and dandy, but unless you make a connection with something tangible, you're just engaging in a glorified taxonomy session.

Posted by Ben Jackson , October 25, 2005 06:55 AM

Well I think some people are trying to see if they can re create the DOT COM bubble all over again by creating some hype over a very esoteric concept (like trying to build economic models around social/community behavior).

I feel all this is happening because of some recent acquisitions of companies like Flickr, Skype etc. Looks like the DOT COM boom is starting all over again.

I hope I get lucky on some big IPO atleast this time.

Posted by kc , October 25, 2005 07:08 AM

Addendum--hot air can be useful. We're talking about it, we're clarifying, the participants are likely doing the same, and no blood has been spilled. Yet. But I'm still with Joel.

Posted by charlie crystle , October 25, 2005 07:41 AM

The bubble is being recreated, alright. The funny thing is, people are actually falling for it all over again. Didn't we learn anything from last time?

(shameless plug) my rant on this here: http://bender.on-no.net/2005/10/web-20-even-worse-than-10/

That's being slightly overly negative - there is some intrinsic value in all this. It's just that we're not nearly at a point yet where it's very useful. It _still_ isn't, years after the last bubble. Can we go for a more pragmatic approach when Web 3.0 rolls around?

Posted by Onno , October 25, 2005 07:51 AM

Man, Joel, I could just hug ya. It'd serve two purposes: 1) You'd be less cranky. 2) It'd demonstrate my great appreciation for your on-the-mark bluntness :D

Look, I'm an overeducated guy (3.5 degrees) and believe me, I can speak in abstractions and theories just as well as the next academician. But IMHO, the Web is about getting things done. Ship products. Refine services. Improve documentation. And (though I'm somewhat hypocritical in this regard) spend less time BLABBING about it all!

Posted by Adam , October 25, 2005 08:37 AM

It got reminded of something Feynman said. It's a nice piece. I am with Joel in this regard and no offence to anybody... :-)

"There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read - something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail or it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until I finally said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.

So I stopped - at random - and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The invidivual member of the social community often received his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People Read."

:Richard Feynman in Is Electricity Fire? in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.

Posted by Senthilnathan N.S. , October 25, 2005 09:30 AM

Finally somone saying the emperor has no clothes. Thanks Joel.

I've been around way too many of these "high-level thinkers", and while they impress the heck out of Management, it's only because Management has no idea what they're saying, and then incorrectly assumes it must be because the high-level thinker is so much smarter. The reality is that nothing of importance is being said, and when it comes time to turn the grand "visions" into code, Management is left with cost overruns, blown schedules, and buggy software.

Repeat after me, the "KISS Principle"....

Posted by Jay , October 25, 2005 10:01 AM

Wow. Coffee also on keyboard here. That was one of the best comments I have read in days. Bravo.

Posted by Sam , October 25, 2005 10:42 AM

I want my two minutes back.

Posted by Jeff Davidson , October 25, 2005 11:06 AM

Thank goodness someone with the smarts and visibility of Joel has finally come out and said it all. Thanks Joel, from everyone out here who codes to, you know, *do stuff*.

I'm saving these Joel quotes to re-read the next time I hear another nitty architecture astronaut try to justify his speaking fees with buzzwords and his inferiority complex with floating abstractions.

Posted by rafuzo , October 25, 2005 11:33 AM

Joel, kris, et al: There is content there, it's just buried in the jargon. IANA economist, but here's a free translation:

"When we think about making money, we're used to thinking about, (a), using money to motivate people to work, and (b), setting up markets and companies to organize working people. Now we're seeing a situation where people are organizing themselves, socially, and doing things together for fun, and yet still producing stuff that someone can somehow make money off of."

Not rocket science if you've been reading Slashdot for the last five or ten years, but still something a lot of businesspeople have trouble wrapping their heads around. (Benkler's original paper -- http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html -- is a much better read, though it may still sound like academic hot air if you're not used to reading economics papers.)

Basically, it's not about technology, at all. It's about what people do with it.

As for this Web 2.0 business, I don't know if there's anything to it, but I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand -- I didn't think there was anything to blogs or wikis (which, similarly, didn't add anything TECHNICALLY new), so I've already been wrong twice. :)

Posted by David Moles , October 25, 2005 11:57 AM

I curious to know what sort of due dilligence you do before investing in a company? If you think in terms of "Web 2.0" how on earth can you make an informed decision regarding the potential of the company? So most VCs either sit on the funds or invest only when it does not take much effort to perform due dilligence.

Your Limited Partners must love that.

Posted by jbilger , October 25, 2005 12:41 PM

Just because you can decipher the BS doesn't mean it's not BS.

As far as Web 2.0 goes, it seems just a perfect example of what a wise man said many centuries ago:

  those who know, don't talk.
  those who talk, don't know.

Posted by Lao Tzu , October 25, 2005 12:52 PM

In defense of USV (ya like apples, guys? how do you like these apples?):

They held a session with a lot of smart people. Not all agreed. They were open about it, documented everything, and provided it free for all of us to consume. They aren't stupid. They aren't rolling out the carpets for anything called Web 2.0. They talked about concepts, and now we're talking about those concepts. They started dialog, and dialog does advance understanding even when wrapped in jargon.

USV did a good thing with this, and the results shouldn't be dismissed. I don't agree with a lot of it, but I have a lot of respect for the players, especially Fred Wilson and Tom Evslin.

So let's keep the tone upbeat, the posts respectful, and talk about ideas. Cool?

Posted by charlie crystle , October 25, 2005 12:56 PM

Hey, I can think of plenty of actionable ideas to synergize the process going forward. Is that all I have to do to get some of your money?

Posted by Paul Holden , October 25, 2005 01:18 PM

The emperor is indeed naked. Now could everybody please just get back to work?

Posted by Paul , October 25, 2005 02:09 PM

Just to be clear… I agreed with Joel, that separating the world into two groups, one who “gets it” and one who doesn’t “get it” is just dumb. I also admitted that even though we learned a great deal at Sessions, there were still a lot of unanswered questions.

Joel went on to suggest that the conversation at Sessions was a lot of hot air. There, I could not disagree more strongly.

I have been going through the transcript of Sessions for the last couple of days. Yes, much of the discussion is abstract. Yes, it takes some effort to follow (in part because our stenographer was not a technologist). But for me, at least, the effort has been well worth it. There are some great insights there.

Posted by Brad Burnham , October 25, 2005 02:22 PM

Web 1.0 = "company towns"

Anybody here remember "company towns"? Wealthy barons invaded empty space and built utilitarian roads and simple schools and menial homes that all looked exactly alike down to the one color of paint.

"The company" essentially owned you ("You load 16 tons and whadaya get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don’t you call 'cuz I cain't go, I owe my soul to the company store"), while they raked in millions for the owners.

But eventually, enterprising people came to town and started support businesses, and the spouses and children of company employees started making their own independent money. While the wealth of the town increased, the power of the barons decreased. Which brings us to…

Web 2.0 = "public communities"

After a time, after the "easy big money" was gone, the physical assets of the company town were either purchased by small companies with a permanent stake in the area or given to the community. The two most important replacements for the company were (1) a local government and (2) a bank.

In the beginning, local governments were more about the bookkeeping of town assets and deciding who'd get access to those assets, rather than for things like law enforcement. Banks were primarily there to help entrepreneurs build private enterprises, and thereby earn returns for themselves.

Now here's the important question for this VC blog: How likely is it that you are going to be successful at creating a company town in 2005? I'd say the chances are next to zero, so why are you still talking about and looking for that kind of opportunity?

Instead, you should be focusing on building an infrastructure around a common goal and then providing access to money to build independent companies that relate to and tie into that goal and infrastructure. And then your "exit strategy" would to get those many successful companies to pay you back and then some, and to eventually sell your created "community assets" to the community itself.

Here is an example: Because of the clout of your cash, you could get a company like Star Bucks to partner in an enterprise whereby visitors to Star Bucks could print off their own personal newspaper, customized so that stories, columns, comics and even ads are relevant to their particular interests and needs. What is the community asset that would be produced?: the personal information and shopping data of the people who use this service. What are the relevant companies you could help create (or expand) around this goal?: the hardware and software companies that would build these newspaper dispensers, content providers who would supply the stories and comics and so on, advertising companies who would provide local and national ads… You could even help monetize existing companies. Craigslist would be a natural for this…customized classified ads, printed only for those people who are actively looking for a particular thing. These newspaper vending machines could eventually be everywhere, including next to the traditional papers on streetcorners. Input your username and password via your cell phone and out pops your paper as you're walking by.

VC's don't have much time left to get it right. The more we entrepreneurs are forced to do it on our own, the more capable and determined we're becoming of doing it without you. There are many solid, pratical, lucrative and actionable ideas that don't come dressed up in made-up proformas and other 1990s MBA bullshit that doesn't mean crap today. Demanding old rules for a new game isn't going to get your very far, IMHO.

MBA, class of 1993

Posted by Dawn Douglass , October 25, 2005 04:49 PM

Oh, is that all Joel was complaining about? Thank goodness, I thought it might have been something important.

I think most of the people building 2.0 companies would actually find that they are on Joel's side if they read this thread.

Posted by Paul Montgomery , October 25, 2005 05:06 PM

Lao Tzu: And just because you call it BS doesn't mean it's BS. Like the man said:

The truth is not always beautiful,
nor beautiful words the truth.
Those who have virtue,
have no need of argument for its own sake,
for they know that argument is of no avail.

Posted by David Moles , October 25, 2005 07:20 PM

Joel is right. Fluff. Reminds me of an Orwell piece that far too few people have read.

google it: "Politics and the English Language" orwell

Posted by cc , October 25, 2005 10:32 PM

I'm commenting. Is this Web 2.0? I find it tragic that the commons has become so common. Oh well, we might as well capitalize on it.

Posted by Jerry , October 26, 2005 03:06 AM

It seems to me that the conference was indeed quite worthwhile to Joel.... and to all that are digesting the 'long tail' of postings.

If it helped him, and others, crystalize a view that much of what is going on is hot air and not fully baked; that is an incredibly valuable insight. As a VC, who participated in the nuclear winter of '00, where there were simply too many new and similar companies being started and funded, I can appreciate an informed contrarian view and see its importance...both to him and the industry.

He will stay away from spending time with many 2.0 entrepreneurs. And probably be involved with other souls that have the potential to do incredible things in other arenas.

The software world is a rich mosaic of niche (some become huge niches) specialty companies. To the extent we, as an industry, have a sense of balance in creating, investing, and using great software, whether it be 1.0, 2.0 or x.0 we should increase productivity and prosper.

Posted by Charlie Federman , October 26, 2005 05:24 AM

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.

—Niklaus Wirth

Posted by Bob Aman , October 26, 2005 03:20 PM

The only thing that I can agree about Web.nextVersion() is that the humanists need to own this communication form.

Everything else is meaningless. People talk about social networks like if you can build it in 7 days. There's no Bible 2.0, no 10 commandments. I can't attend a lecture and learn how to improve my business. There's always something else to learn, a new concept to acquire, parallel services that converge nowhere.

The internet can produce information at a faster rate than we can manage. I am still TYPING MY THOUGHTS. You guys need to figure out how I can make questions faster, because my imagination isn't confined to a fixed resolution on this monitor screen.

I just know the next problem, not the next solution ^_^

Posted by Julio Nobrega , October 26, 2005 11:48 PM

I agree with Ben Jackson's comment:
" I think some people are trying to see if they can re create the DOT COM bubble all over again by creating some hype over a very esoteric concept..."

Or perhaps, no concept whatsoever?

Metricom, during their pre-2000 high VC days, bought into a very small Internet marketing company. One was a young charismatic gay black fellow who could blow WWW-marketing smoke up your ass all day long. The VCs fell under his marketing spiel (which meant nothing at all). They paid millions for empty marketing advice and in the end, of course, nothing came of it. It was incredibly exasperating to watch this process unfold.

That fellow made more in a month than I made in my career. And IMO he knew exactly what he was doing.

Posted by Sammy Lin , October 27, 2005 12:58 PM

David: "When we think about making money, we're used to thinking about, (a), using money to motivate people to work, and (b), setting up markets and companies to organize working people. Now we're seeing a situation where people are organizing themselves, socially, and doing things together for fun, and yet still producing stuff that someone can somehow make money off of."
...
Basically, it's not about technology, at all. It's about what people do with it.

Or rather, it's not about making money out of technology - it's about making money out of what people do with it. More specifically, making money out of things that people are already doing with technology, without money being involved.

(Which is why social software does not equal Web 2.0 - on which see http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2005/10/good-neighbors.html.)

Posted by Phil , October 28, 2005 08:51 AM

So, am I an idiot because I get what Yochai said? He's basically talking about how it's possible to make money off of people's ability to self-organize and desire to communicate. Granted, he's not giving away the answers on how to do that either, but I think that was the point of the meeting. I think USV would *really* like to build optimal business models designed on leveraging this phenomena in order to make a lot of money.

Seems pretty simple to me!

Posted by Jake Kaldenbaugh , October 28, 2005 11:11 AM

Jake, how come you could say that in a line and a half, and Yochai took half a page? I think that was Joel's point: if you want to offer up a though-provoking topic, just do it, don't recite a dissertation of dairrhea...

Posted by Andre , October 28, 2005 06:33 PM

Andre, I would argue that in order to create optimal business models that lever this (or any) phenomenon, you need a deep understanding of it. The type of people who are willing and able to analyze topics like this usually tend to be very precise and structured in their analysis. Accordingly, they tend to speak in the same way. Yochai seems to me to be very thoughtful about what he is trying to say. His research is cutting edge and I think he just wants to make sure that he is accurately conveying his emerging theories.
I respect that and I wouldn't denigrate him or an entire segment of innovators and entrepreneurs because of it.

Posted by Jake Kaldenbaugh , October 28, 2005 06:47 PM

Joel; here's a translation to layman's English that I blogged up which may help you understand what Yochai was saying. It was actually one of the more substantive comments from these fascinating sessions. When you disagree with some-one smarter than you, you should really keep it to yourself, chances are, you just don't get them.

# the "non-economic" activities we all undertake in our every-day lives; our chores and hobbies ... have recently been discovered to be valuable to economic production,
# ... and are increasingly favored as a preferable operating strategy in new business plans and economic models.
# This is a NEW way of getting things done, it is creating new OPPORTUNITIES and will also result in new PROBLEMS to be solved, the most important of which is how to,
# ... use this new output for GOOD, while not exploiting and corrupting the social values and systems that gave rise to it in the first place.

Posted by David Gibbons , October 29, 2005 05:24 AM

Nobody understands that kind of meandering diatribe (It's like a drummer tyring to hit every drum in his set at the same time) when spoken. Whether or not it had meaning has at this point become incidental. There still remains the fact that his ideas weren't CLEARLY (as far as I can see/read) expressed.

Doesn't that count for something?

As for Dean Harding, thanx a million for the "Web Economy Bullshit Generator" link. Awesome! I knew there was a reason I got turned off when someone attempt to blow smoke up my bottom with this "vapor speak".

Posted by Terrence Cox , October 31, 2005 08:58 AM

"We believe that it is possible to talk about technology at that level and that if that work is combined with critical analysis; we believe the output can be very useful."

I challenge you to demonstrate this with a concrete example.

I've listened to too much MBA BullSh*t over the last 20 years to believe that anyone who talks in these terms knows what they're talking about.

Joel is a refreshing return to earth and concrete. You astronauts can go have your cool-aid party without us, thank you kindly. We're busy building stuff that actually does something useful, rather than wasting oxygen spewing gibberish

Posted by Wayne Stoker , October 31, 2005 04:37 PM

It is very very likely people talked about the first computers, or even the CONCEPT of computers, this way. And now look what we're all using to have this discussion :)

To name some more, I think the same goes for computer screens, democracy, those highly astronautic 'everybody should be able to think what he wants' philosophers right before the French Revolution, that funny guy with the white hear who had this 'mass is a form of energy' idea...

Sorry if this contribution isn't really a contribution.

Posted by wauter , November 2, 2005 11:00 AM

Yet, strangely, the talkers don't seem to have personally benefitted other than having their legacies venerated. The *DO-ERS* and their subsequent *USE-ERS* received the actual benefit/reward.

Since most of the people responding here are doers (builders) and users, is it surprising that they find the explosion of speculatory verbiage unproductive? The bane of my existence is the difficulty in transitioning from talking about things to doing them!

Posted by Oluseyi , November 7, 2005 11:19 AM

the best search engine in hole internet - http://google.ca/me

Posted by google.cz , January 27, 2006 07:00 PM

http://losbird.org/bbs/messages/6363.html complimentwhosewondered

Posted by jessie , April 18, 2006 10:38 PM