Dave Winer points on the fact that "Facebook has a better advertising story than Google does (...) Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information."
Some people say that the bubble's going to take a downturn in the next year or two - that huge numbers of copycat startups are going to shut down, people are going to be out of work and Web 2.0 cheerleaders are going to eat their (our) words.
While startup churn is inevitable in any industry (thank goodness we're not restaurant founders!) I think this forecast is selling the future short. There are some big trends I'm really excited about for the web in 2008. Whatever happens to the economy, there's at least a whole lot of innovation to be inspired by right now. Ultimately, I think that will end up brightening the picture for all of us around the world
Welcome to Project SocialSite, an open source (CDDL/GPL2) project building Widgets and Web Services that make it easy for you to add social networking features to your existing web sites, including the ability to run OpenSocial Gadgets and have them backed by the same social graph.
Here are some of the key features we're developing:
* A complete end-to-end user interface for Social Networking in the form of JavaScript widgets that can be embedded into any site (Java, Ruby, PHP-based and more).
* A flexible Social Graph repository that can work in a wide variety of social networking scenarios. With configurable profile properties and relationship types.
* Comprehensive JavaScript and REST API access to that Social Graph repository: OpenSocial plus conforming extensions.
* Scalability via support for running in distributed configuration, table partitioning technologies, master and slave databases and distributed caching.