What Sustains Web 2.0
Finding fresh ways of distributing content in Web 2.0
I signed up for an account the other week at SproutBuilder. It’s a beta application that claims to allow anyone to quickly and easily “Build Living Content.” Uh, yeah. It came across to me as another slogan fit for a sound bite.
Looking more closely, though, the concept around the entire thing is interesting at the least. In SproutBuilder, you create what are called “Sprouts,” which, in a nutshell, is simply a snippet of flash content that you (or SproutBuilder) propagate to the blogging and publishing sites that you use. You can add many kinds of content to your Sprout — images, text, sound, video — as well as mix in any number of SproutBuilder elements such as calendars, buttons, and charts to enhance your design.
For example, I created a Sprout to announce the awesome party I’m throwing tomorrow. I added some images of everyone going wild at the last party I threw, plus the usual info — when and where and what you should bring (just yourself and a party “toy”). I click Publish, choose my blogs and personal site from the catalog, enter my credentials, and voila, my Sprout appears on those sites and all my avid and rabid fan-readers get notified of my party, and that they can expect to spend their evening tomorrow having the finest time of their lives (again).
If, say, I maintain my party blog at Wordpress, my hip tech blog at Blogger, and my ultra-cool personal site at Piczo, then this means that I can broadcast all this cool information using just a single, centralized and convenient interface. Another advantage is that if ever there’s a change I want to make to any of my Sprouts (like if I wanted to move the party *tonight*), then I just go into SproutBuilder, modify that Sprout, republish, and that’s it — the content at my blogs and personal site is updated!
SproutBuilder may be on to something here, because, if anything, content is what makes social networking and the Web 2.0 world go round — but not just any content, it has to be *user-generated* content that the masses (that’s us) are able to create with the lowest possible barrier and propagate with also the lowest possible barrier. It’s all about enabling the “viral” behavior of user-generated information.
Which brought me to another interesting thought — how difficult is it to allow information to be viral? Facebook was able to do this by opening up an API and allowing thousands of applications to be developed that allow generation of content from users (this is what Facebook got right that many others didn’t — hence OpenSocial). SproutBuilder is trying to gain a foothold through the use of this concept, though it’s just one of the budding tools out there; its strength however is that it can publish to a host of platforms, including Facebook, Wordpress, and a lot more.
At the bottom of it, getting information to or from other applications is not where the hurdles lie — rss, web services, mashups (a la Y! pipes), and direct user mediation make this possible; what people are looking for instead are ways of mixing things up differently to come up with something that has the greatest novelty and utility for users. And the rewards for a smash hit way of bringing content together are not trivial — it is estimated that ad revenue will climb to around US$20 billion for 2008. Grab half of half a percent of that and you can’t say you’ll be in bad shape.
Me, I’m taking over the world by building this cool app that gets ads with address information from craigslist.com and mashes that up with Google Maps, so that users can easily find what they’re looking for. Neat, huh?
Oh, wait.
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