Facebook Youtube & Myspace

On my flight back from Delhi, India to London yesterday, I read 'The stories of facebook, Youtube and myspace - the people, the hype and the deals behind the giants of Web 2.0' by Sarah Lacy. Sarah is an award winning journalist and writer for Businessweek.com and lives in San Francisco.

I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for some great insights into the Web 2.0 workings of Silicon Valley. I read it non-stop.

Here are just a few snippets that inspired me, and maybe they will resonate with you too:

- we are now dealing with proven Internet business models, dramatically lower costs of doing business, and the now billion-person-strong Web audience.

- Blogging, Sharing videos. Sharing news clips. Sharing restaurant reviews. Sharing photos. Sharing friends. Every single one of these sites is about meeting people, staying in touch, or witnessing people's own personal quirky forms of self-expression.

- Eyeballs, then cash.

- to get Digg up and running. A thousand bucks went to a coder, who actually built it. Server space, rented online, was going to run him $99 a month. The domain set him back the most, $1,200. Ouch.

- But most important than entertainment, self-expression, or ego-boosting is the human need to connect...sites are frequently described as addictive.

- No other place has mastered and utilized community the way the world of open source software had.

- Both Linux and Mozilla succeeded because they made people feel they were a part of a movement, something bigger than themselves.

- By August 2003, Niklas sent some text messages to his friends telling them to check out Skype.com. They told their friends. That was the extent of their marketing. Within a month they had 1 million users.

- The Web would know you, and as a result what you would like

Ron Young

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