Will Marlow

I've noticed a number of fairly negative commentaries summing up the decade that's ending on December 31st, which made me want to point out some of the great things that have happened over the last ten years.

1. Wikipedia was founded in January 2001 (something that is useful enough to receive 7 billion page views a month);
2. Facebook was founded in 2004 (350 million of us like this enough to signup);
3. YouTube was founded in February 2005, and I think it will be remembered as a true watershed for changing human behavior and communications in a profound way
4. An African American was elected President.
5. And over the last ten years, Americans donated $2.6 trillion to charity (in the year 2000, Americans gave $203 billion, and by 2007 charitable giving began exceeding $300 billion each year.

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My friend DJ Smith over at WebDrivenGuy just posted the story about how Wikipedia is losing thousands of page creators each month. 

Even though I love Wikipedia, I also love reading stories like this. 

This is a great illustration of one of the most disruptive aspects of Web 2.0: when you build a modern web platform, your challenge is not to build an online destination that attracts 347 million page views each month (which is Wikipedia’s current monthly traffic).  Your challenge instead is to build a platform that attracts a small segment of people, but that engages these folks in an intense way, and gives them something productive to do that can be shared with others. 

If you succeed in doing this, you’ll join the ranks of YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, Wikipedia, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, craigslist, Squidoo, wordpress, Digg, TypePad, Topix, Photobucket, Scribd...and, although my company is a hybrid model, I'd include AlumniFidelity in there, along with plenty of others.

Quick side-note: don't be fooled by corporations that create instant hits like Hulu, which are backed by content that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create and market.  That sort of site isn't a modern web platform.  Everything about these sites are supported by dollars that were generated elsewhere, and they just happen to be on the web. 

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