APRIL 17, 2006
Web Services
By Steve Rosenbush
Power to the People
New Web services are undermining the status quo -- not only in entertainment but for office tasks as well. The Establishment better watch out
When Pearl Jam kicks off its spring tour on May 9 in Toronto, seating will be limited to 20,000 or so people who can fit into the Air Canada Centre. Tickets won't be cheap, either. They will run from about $70 to nearly $500.
Fans who can't make it to the live show can experience it on the Web, though. One hour after the last encore, a high-quality digital soundtrack of the entire performance will be available from a page on the band's Web site. The music, along with photos and playlists from that evening's performance, will cost $9.99.
Fans love the download service, which has been distributing music from all the band's performances since late last summer. "We get e-mails all the time from fans. They just think it's pretty damn cool," says Joshua James, co-founder of Basecamp Productions, the New York company that designed the software Pearl Jam and other bands use.
That's just one of many "damn cool" services that are sprouting up all over the Internet. Web sites have become simpler and more powerful while putting more control in the hands of the individual. "The number of new tools and applications on the Web is growing fast," says Jeff Lanctot, vice-president and general manager of Avenue A Razorfish, an interactive ad agency owned by aQuantive (AQNT).
MY NEWS, MY WAY. Regular people are using these tools to make their voices heard, upsetting the balance of power in industries from software to entertainment. Consumers can tap into the expanding universe of blogs and social networking sites to provide constant and sometimes unwanted feedback on products and services, creating a challenge for companies that carefully defend their brand (see BW Online, 11/15/05, "Users Crowd into MySpace").
The combination of powerful new Web tools and the always-on communications ability of blogs is upending the old order in many industries. Journalism, for example, faces a huge online challenge, and not just from bloggers.
Readers can use sites like Newsvine and Digg to comment on stories and simply vote for which they think is most interesting. That creates a potentially threatening grassroots alternative to professional news judgment. With these new services, readers are able customize their news reports.
Pearl Jam fans have almost constant access to new recordings from the band, casting the concept of the big studio recording in a new light. Indeed, music continues to be at the vanguard of change on the Web.
Consider the potential power of Pandora.com. The free service allows people to enter the names of a few songs or artists. Pandora quickly spits back a playlist of similar or related music that the user might enjoy. It plays the music, too.
PIRATE RADIO. The site allows users to edit the playlist or easily hop to an online music store if they want to buy something they hear on Pandora. It could be a disruptive alternative to everything from mainstream radio to satellite and Internet radio, as well as online music subscription services. Industries that have sunk billions into infrastructure, such as satellite radio, must contend with a widening array of free rivals on the Web.
Many of the new Web services are linked to the growing popularity of video on the Web. VideoEgg gives people the ability to take homemade videos from all sorts of different devices and edit, store, and share them on the Web.
That used to be a difficult task, requiring a fairly advanced knowledge of rival technical standards. But VideoEgg, launched last year by three recent grads from Yale, works in the background to help devices communicate, so that users don't have to worry about the technical details. YouTube has grabbed an early lead in the increasingly important area of video search. And Veoh is an entirely Web-based TV network with a broad range of shows from cult classics to politics.
The latest generation of Web tools isn't limited to entertainment, though. Other seemingly mundane tasks such as word processing and contact management have been reinvigorated on the Web. Writely provides a free online word processor, 30 Boxes is a free online calendar, and Box is a free online document-storage site.
If these features become widely adopted, the implications could be huge. Manufacturers of expensive hardware and desktop software could suddenly find themselves on the wrong end of technological disruption. The only sure winner would be the individual, who would benefit from these powerful and free Web tools.
BETTER CONNECTED. The changes are driven by cheaper hardware and the growing popularity of faster Internet connections. Stewart Butterfield, founder of Yahoo (YHOO)-owned photo-sharing site Flickr, recalls spending $250,000 for 250 gigabits of storage a few years back. The same amount of storage cost $4,000 last year. Today it costs half that amount -- $2,000. "The price of such hardware has declined more than 95% over the last few years. That means you don't have to take as much risk if you want to experiment," he says.
The online audience has evolved, too. Nearly 70% of active Internet users now have a broadband connection, providing a market for more sophisticated services, according to researcher Nielsen Net Ratings. And the number of highly trained engineers and computer programmers is high, creating a ready labor force that can turn ideas into reality.
So far these tools have been embraced mostly by early adopters and tech-savvy users. But they're starting to enter the mainstream. Sites like Bubbleshare are designed to push photo sharing into the mass market. "The thing that frustrates me is that most of these services are too complicated for the average user. I love Flickr, but it's not for my mom," Bubbleshare founder Albert Lai says.
BANDING TOGETHER. Flickr automatically makes pictures available to the public, unless users specify otherwise. That might be fine for advanced users accustomed to blogging and living their lives online, but it can be off-putting for others. So Bubbleshare takes the opposite tack, keeping photos private unless users want to make them public. That could help push photo sharing deeper into the mass market.
The Web's first big boom was all about communications and efficiency, and moving industries online. The latest boom is putting more power in the hands of the individual. As those individuals come together in ever-expanding communities, they have the potential to be the most productive, or disruptive, force the Web has seen to date.
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