Remember the Venice Project? Back in 2006 people were sure this mysterious IPTV solution would ‘kill YouTube’ and even Om Malik wanted an invitation. So, what happened to it? It was released as Joost – a service which offers quite high definition video but still lacks major shows (their offering primarily being a few series of Babylon 5 and Peep Show in the UK) and more often than not has content already available on other sites. They even abandoned their desktop P2P-based approach to taking a more accessible streaming Flash browser video one. Joost definitely is not one of the greatest Web 2.0 services like many expected it to be!
Perhaps you recall ‘Citizendium‘, a wiki encyclopedia which unlike Wikipedia had strict editing controls. The site was co-founded by Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger. Despite coverage from major news outlets (from newspapers to tech blogs), Citizendium has failed to ever seem to reach a reasonable size: only 9217 articles in over 2 years. That’s roughly the size of Wikipedia… in Chuvash (a language spoken in a small Russian republic!).
What about coComment? The service in many respects seems to have been usurped by Disqus etc. yet coComment’s aim of unifying fragmented conversation has still gone unachieved. coComment used to be extremely popular, but now I do not know any blogs, nor bloggers, who use it.
Another example is AllPeers. AllPeers was basically a service which allows people to set up ‘private’ P2P networks so friends etc can share files. This was all done through a Firefox plugin. Demand for invites was high, but it has now shut down despite its old popularity!
Web 2.0 was the era of “hype”. This often led to disillusionment and disappointment, but we should not forget the success stories… I know people through this blog who have made a small fortune.
Citizendium is still going strong, and its two year anniversary is coming up in March. Wikipedia wasn’t so big or important after two years, and it didn’t have Wikipedia to compete with, either.
Citizen: I think Wikipedia was about the same size if you look at Wikipedia:Statistics
Hype nearly always disappoints. When ideas and companies spin up to fast, they can rarely live up to the expectations built on fantasy. That said, it doesn’t mean companies shouldn’t talk about what they do. They should just do it clearly and consistently, in order to try to build a clear understanding in the market.
Hype or not hype is not always easy to measure and can show a totally wrong estimate of the actual site traffic.
coComment is still here and the usage still growing in the commenters community. Maybe bloggers and commenters are not the same?
Some commenting systems are competing on a small part of coComment features. Tracking and sharing conversations on any sites is still something that is quite unique to coComment.