How did Flickr beat WebShots?

Website technology is going through the next change that impacts big organizations, threatens them, in fact. The scavenging weeds are always hard at work pulling down the mighty oaks of industry. Sean Wise has a great interview with Don Tapscott on what is the biggest impact on technology for companies.

If you look at internet traffic for various properties, in each case, an old HTML web site gets eclipsed by a new XMP based community that harnesses the power of self-organization.

Don Tapscott says:

The immutable, standalone Web site is dead. In fact, I've banned the word "web site" from my company. Today, people are engineering software, databases, and Web sites so that they not only meet private objectives, but they can be used in ways the originators did not know nor intend. It's now getting easy to build new Web services out of these existing components by mashing them together in fresh combinations.

The result is that today's most exciting and successful Web companies and communities are stitching together their own services from shared databanks and Lego-style pieces of Web software. Rather than define the user experience and publish information for people to observe, they use Web services to create platforms for people to self organize and co-create with their peers. And it's pretty much true that when they built it, people came—usually by the tens of millions. In fact, 2006 was the year when the programmable Web eclipsed the static Web every time. 

• Flickr beat WebShots; 
• Wikipedia beat Encyclopedia Britannica; 
• citizen journalist bloggers beat CNN.com; 
• epinions beat consumer reports; 
• upcoming.org beat evite; 
• Google maps beat mapquest; 
• Myspace beat Friendster; and 
• Craigslist beat Monster.

That is a shocking list and well worth discussing with your team. If you are a good size business (revenues at $30,000) there is a great deal of exciting private equity out there looking to invest in smart business owners who are looking at the big changes.

Jacoline Loewen, Panellist on The Pitch.