Ecosystem 2.0

With all the talk lately of web 2.0 and whether it is a real or just an arbitrary designation we may find ourselves discussing the wrong topic. There are many who wonder about web 2.0 asking what it is and if it is worth anything more than web 1.0. Google obviously thinks YouTube is worth almost 2 billion and these guys aren’t fools. Even Steve Ballmer has public comments about the YouTube/Google deal but he is careful to question web 2.0 valuation without dismissing the websites of the 2.0 world.

But what is web 2.0? One of the best definitions in my opinion is sites fostering a sense of community and in a viral fashion at that. Think of this as ecosystem 2.0 and we will see many new companies looking to make money from this concept.

For concrete examples point your browser at digg and more recently companies like innerTee a site currently in private beta. The way this site works is artists can upload graphics and get royalties when their designs are used. Anyone can go to the site and drag and drop images onto a tee-shirt to generate a unique fashion design.

Pete Cashmore thinks this site can be a niche at best – and he is likely right. But what he may be missing is how a niche site like this can expand. If Amazon can go from books to iPods then innerTee can move to putting cool designs on gadgets, socks, pants, and even cars. The site could morph into innerArtist over time and become the defacto ecosystem for those people looking to have products that look unique.

InnerTee in my mind shows how the future of the e-world will look. We will be able to leverage resources from across the Internet and put together products and services that are more customized than ever. Customization will be the ultimate takeaway for consumers as they will be able to tap ecosystems and even ecosystems of ecosystems to design or gain access to the products and services they want.

There is no limit in my mind as mashups and other technologies such as SOA will come together more frequently to kill off the concept of applications and websites. Instead we will have an ecosystem made up of micro eco-economies.

The electronic world will be one huge interconnected place where anything becomes more likely to be possible.

Who will own the majority of this new ecosystem is unclear but companies in the running so far are Google/YouTube, MySpace and few others. This is virgin territory and perhaps we will one day all set our home pages to InnerEcosystem.com.

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