I wrote the following excerpt to in a private email, following the stimulation of Voice on the Net Canada, another excellent convergence of the people driving the VoIP revolution. The recipient liked it, I’m posting it …
1998 — the internet will change everything
1999 - ecommerce, amazon, ebay, pets.com, the bubble
2001 — what a load of crap it was, we were so foolish, there will be a few survivors, and they will own it all. It all reduces to the sad fact of market spend on banner.
2005 — the internet is in fact changing everything, but as web 2.0, not web 1.0. destination sites being replaced with social / group / sites. This is the real power of the internet and the interconnection of people, Meetup, flickr, linkedin, orkut, 43 things, tada. That and personal publishing. It’s not last mile access, it’s fucking first mile access man. bloglines, odeo, podcasting, video blogging. And IP communications. The power of the stupid network. The death of locality. The beautiful simplicity and power of Metcalf’s law applied on a global scale. It is fucking exploding right now, most people don’t know it yet. Lots of sites / businesses will die, but the ones that get it right will grow virally like Skype. Enough people will try, Darwinism will sort it out. Long live the revolution.