Christopher Alden presented Rojo, a new Web-based RSS aggregation service with social-software features built in, yesterday at Web 2.0. Alden, a former exec from Red Herring, gave a good presentation, and some of the Rojo features look cool — particularly, the ability to send specific RSS posts to contacts, so that you’re basically building a reading list for colleagues or friends.
But look at this photo — specifically, the fine print at the bottom:
Memo to presenters: don’t label the documents you’re presenting in public as “confidential”!
This is, of course, the exact label you see on presentations intended for potential investors, and no doubt it made its way onto a public screen by accident, when slides from just such a presentation got repurposed.
But still, the little slip was illustrative of the unusual dynamic here at Web 2.0: It’s definitely a wary mating dance between the tribes of the geeks and the suits, whose customs are not fully in sync.
What we’re seeing is that a lot of the ideas and technologies that have incubated over the last couple of years, and have been showcased at places like the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, are now on the radar of the venture-capital world. Ideas for new web companies built around RSS syndication and blogs, wikis and social software, innovative search technologies and mobile applications are hatching. And once more we’re witnessing the strange, messy process by which the enthusiasms and ideas of technologists are packaged, streamlined, prettified, sometimes improved and sometimes wrecked, as business people struggle to figure out how to make them work for the general public — and how to make money from them.
In terms of the evolution of the Web as a collective human endeavor, this conference’s name is a little off — I’d say we’re on Web 6.0 or 7.0 by now, at least. But in terms of the evolution of the Web as a place for people to try to invest, for a lot of the people here — “scarred veterans,” as William Janeway just described them, of the turn-of-the-millennium speculative frenzy — I guess it feels like only the second time around.
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