We have seen a lot of companies branded "Web 2.0" popup with new ideas, re-hashes of old ideas, and some crazy ones. The ones that stick in my mind have some common elements: 1) they are useful -- you go back to them again for something you could not get before. 2) they look like they can make money. Ah.. I see it now, a NY Times bestseller "Making Money with Web 2.0 and other useful tips".
One article caught my eye this morning on techcrunch.com named "AllYouCanUpload". This got a very positive review from techcrunch. It allows you to upload images, then get a permalink so you can embed them on ebay, myspace etc. The amazing thing is it doesn't require any kind of registration -- just upload and paste in to your sites. Branded "web 2.0" like many others. Now my question is, how could this possibly make any money? It could create a brand with "allyoucanupload", but even that is pushing it.... Maybe you know :-)
A Web 2.0 Site that is more of a vertical named "Zillow.com", which takes all sorts of real estate data from many sources, and mashes them up to something very useful. You can zoom in on that house you want to buy, find out how much the others in the neighborhood cost, find out property tax info, look at upgrades made on the house. This is very useful -- before this, you would need to go to many different sources to get this info.
Stumble Upon (stumbleupon.com). Brock stumbled upon this site. I played with this at the weekend - a nice job... Check it out yourself - essentially it allows you to go to different sites on the web, vote on them, and it will suggest other sites and other people like you. It's pretty addictive. I'd use it again too... It's also collecting some useful data on your likes and dislikes.
Got any sites you want to share ?
Comments
As, for all you can upload ... I think the notion is to get them hooked and once you have them and know what they are uploading then upsell them on other services or may be serve pertinent ads .... if nothing else they can sell the data such as what collective masses have uploaded this week ... tricky but i think giving it away free and making money later model has some merit to it if there are investors out there willing to take chances :)
Two things I noticed:
- First, the HTML they provide for putting a thumbnail/link on a web page is a link to a Webshots page (with ads, 'sign up now' buttons, etc.).
- Second, the full-size image URL they provide loads incredibly slowly (2-3 minutes for a 4MP image). I noticed that the image id in that URL has a "_rs" suffix. My theory is that stands for "Real Slow." Conversely, viewing the image by clicking the link described above will show the image instantaneously (albeit only 600x450 in this case).
Based on this one example, I think that most people will put the thumbnail+links on their pages (and on blogs, and on eBay listings) which will drive lots of traffic to Webshots.
*Nobody* will put the full-size images on their web pages.
Our permalinks are better, I think (from the users perspective). But maybe we should provide thumbnail links to pages with ads and encourage people to use those to drive traffic to our site.
Link to thumbnail:
<a href="http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/viewimage?imageID=1467375787194215314"><img src="http://aycu19.webshots.com/image/818/1467375787194215314_th.jpg" alt="Free Image Hosting at allyoucanupload.com"/></a>
Links to original image:
<a href="http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/viewimage?imageID=1467375787194215314"><img src="http://aycu19.webshots.com/image/818/1467375787194215314_rs.jpg" alt="Free Image Hosting at allyoucanupload.com"/></a>
direct link to image
http://aycu19.webshots.com/image/818/1467375787194215314_rs.jpg