Before their time

I was in college when the Internet bubble burst. It wasn't pretty.

Many of those companies that are so panned in the press now (and then) were actually decent ideas. So much of the "well, they never really had a business plan" criticism is valid, but looking at the landscape now, you see plenty of companies that are in the "build an audience first, figure out the revenue later" mode that characterized so many of the failures. And a lot of them are basically copying the ideas of stuff that failed the first time around.

That's why studies like this are important:

According to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 50 million Americans per day used the Internet as their primary news source in 2005. That's up from 27 million in 2002. In fact, checking the daily news is the third most popular activity on the Internet, the study found.

Pew attributed the increase to the rise in broadband availability and subscriptions in the home. Since 2002, the number of home broadband subscribers has risen from 20 million to 70 million, the group said.

The media is calling this new generation of Internet companies "Web 2.0". I suppose that makes us one (but only by association -- we've got the business model figured out, thank you very much). What's different now isn't so much the product (although with new technologies like AJAX and such, there are definite differences and improvements) but it's the potential size of the audience.

Let's face it: The web sucks on dial-up. Any page that takes longer to load than I take in the bathroom after lunch is bad news. So a company that tried and failed at something in 2002 now has over triple the potential market it had before. That's not an insignificant number.

So all the naysayers who have already rebranded Web 2.0 as "Bubble 2.0", look at the size of the market -- there's plenty of pie to go around.