After Google: who will be the next web sensation?

Author: admin

16 Aug

Nothing lasts forever. When Google launched, Yahoo and AltaVista controlled search. When the web started to grow, Compuserve, AOL and even the Microsoft Network considered it a poor cousin to their gated communities.

Today, Google dominates search, but there’s always another major player around the corner; a revolutionary service that comes from nowhere to change the way we use the web. Right now, Twitter is the darling, but will it last? And what’s next?

As a general rule, the internet doesn’t reward big showy launches. Almost everything begins low-key, attracting the early adopter crowd with impressive sounding technology and the chance to get in on the ground floor, before widening out with some form of soft launch and then finally hitting the mainstream.

This approach often works best because the early tests have given the creators a better idea of what people want to do with the tool in the real world. Twitter is an excellent example of this, having gone from a side-project at a podcasting company to a microblogging service and now a huge sprawling empire filled with everything from personal status updates to celebrity stalking, social media services and real-time updates on developing news stories.

The podcasting service, which was originally intended to be the creators’ bread and butter, has long since been sold off into obscurity. So just because a tool hasn’t set the world on fire right now, there’s no reason that it can’t in the future. Even if it doesn’t, an idea that nobody got excited about today might be tomorrow’s next big thing, or vice versa. Next >>