Web2.0 revisited

On June 4th I presented my Web2.0 briefing to 21 participants representing 17 companies at an event hosted by Matrix Resources. Matrix offers briefings to its customers as a complimentary service and from the comments I heard as people were settling in for my talk it seemed to be a much appreciated program.

During the event I captured some informal statistics from the audience on specific Web2.0 usage patterns.

As a percentage of participants how many:

Use Wikipedia?- 100% as reader. 0% as author.

Author a blog? - 0%

Use Digg? - 10%

Have a LinkedIn Account? - 76%

Have a Facebook Account? - 76%

Have used Craigslist? - 76%

Participate in Second Life? - 0%

Use Twitter? - 24%

Use Ajax to develop apps? - 15%

So what does this mean? Like most statistics with small samples... not much. But I like to ask people and see if any trends are appearing that are different then the official surveys.

Also during the briefing we had a lot of discussion about how companies developing web2.0 apps are realizing revenue. The table below is my analysis of some of the more popular companies I mentioned in the talk.

I have added this table to my Web2.0 presentation page 32. In general I found that the strategy for most of these companies is to give the functionality away for free and rapidly grow a large user base. As the application matures and more users are locked in they obtain revenue streams through a combination of advertising and premium services.