This caught my eye while browsing through some blogs with my morning coffee:
If you’re not sure what that is, you’re looking at no fewer that twenty-five links to different social tagging / bookmarking services gracing the bottom of a blog post.
Can anyone say “lessons of the last boom not learned?” Social bookmarking as a market has not crossed the chasm. It may never do so. Why any entrepreneur (or VC for that matter) would think that yet another “me too!” del.icio.us copycat is the idea that will make them millions is just beyond me.
18 months from now, my bet is that no more than nine of those links will still work, and of those nine, three will be basically ghost sites. Even that sounds more generous than it actually is, because another three of those slots have in all liklihood already been filled — by Fark, Yahoo, and the Yahoo-owned del.icio.us.
If it sounds like I’m hating on startups, I am not. I’ve worked for several and even had one of my own back in the Dark Ages. I’m just a little frustrated at the rampant lack of creativity. No matter what Dharmesh Shah says about trendspotting versus trendsetting, only so many people can jump onto any given bandwagon before the wagon is too full.
When I think about startups that I’d like to see, I tend to think more about video than I do geek toys like social bookmarking. Why? Video has long since crossed over into mainstream America, but despite the plethora of video uploading services, the potential of video has not even begun to be fully tapped. As Michael Mace pointed out a month or so ago, home video is very popular, but despite its having gone mainstream well over a decade ago, video still has some significant unsolved issues.
What are some of the possibilities out there? What about the ability to tag not just an entire video, but parts of a video, for more efficient searching? Or the ability to embed text within a video and make the whole thing searchable? How about more / better video editing tools for consumers? Maybe even some kind of online classroom to teach video camera owners how to shoot more interesting home videos so that less editing is actually needed in the first place?
Perhaps some of those startups are out there & I just haven’t noticed them, or possibly all of these solutions have been thought up already and they’re all off in stealth mode. If I had even half a clue about video technology I might even try to do a startup in the field myself.
At any rate, those are my Saturday morning coffee thoughts.