What makes a winning Web 2.0 website?
I forget to mention on the welcome post, that I will also use this blog to post my thoughts about Web 2.0…
Have you ever wondered what makes this Web 2.0 web sites so great? What make them different from the old web sites? If you look closley, and search for similrities among them (and you can take Flickr, Digg, Del.ico.us, Technorati and more as an example) you might find things like:
- Tags
- RSS
- Comments
- API
- Community
This five technologies/concepts drive the Web 2.0 to success. Are they?
I believe not. They do bring new concepts to the Web, and changed our web-usage experience, but it doesn’t explain why some Web2.0 websites are just GREAT and others are just “okay”. It doesn’t explain why some being ranked as no.1 in their field and other standing behind them.
Examples for this you can find everywhere - Blink.com was launched long before Del.ico.us, and had more capital, and still Del.ico.us took the crown of no.1 bookmarks sharing web site (why? read some explanation here).
Vimeo was the first internet video sharing service. Google Video was launched in June 2005 (beta) - just 4 months after the foundation of YouTube. But hey, that’s GOOGLE and on the other hand there just two geeks. And still YouTube became no.1 video sharing service, and Google had to buy them out.
Why you ask? So you can blame it on the fact the Google didn’t give the ability to immediately playback videos, or blame it on the fact that Blink didn’t have tags or some other features right on the beginning. But that’s not reason - it’s the effect. The cause is simple and was perfectly introduced in Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich Book. What all this guys had was - desire, faith, imagination, persistence and a lot of love to their user community. They didn’t just made a product, they lived their product and always strived to make the user experience better.
Anyway that’s what I believe what made them so big. On the other hand maybe it was just plain luck 
Arik
P.S.
I’m not a native English speaker, so please excuse me for the language… I will try to get better.