A few Web 2.0 things :

Yahoo Mail Beta

Google Calendar and Spreadsheet

Things considered Web 2.0 but aren’t really :

YouTube.com

Digg.com

MySpace.com                                      

Flickr.com

Facebook.com

Deliciou.us

The real truth is this. Web 2.0 means that investors are coming back to the table looking to get rich quick.  Things that use human collaboration are of greatest interest.  The reason for this is that: by using user collaboration, you are in effect LEVERAGING people, thereby making them your virtual employees.   Stated another way, average (and above average) people are adding value to whatever your product is.

 Examples :

Youtube.com is nothing more than a place for people to upload videos from their camcorder or cell phones.  It also allows visitors to search the text that accompanies these videos.  Sold for 1.7 BILLION dollars to Google.

Flickr.com is nothing more than a place for people to upload pictures from their cameras or cell phones.  It allows visitors to search the text that accompanies those videos.

Sold to Yahoo for $35 Million.  Insiders say it could have gone for over $100 Million.

MySpace.com is nothing more than a place for teens to add text (a blog) and their mp3’s (which play when you visit their page) whereby other teens can view the text and hear the MP3. Sold to FOX (R. Murdock) for 500$ Million – Now valued at $20 Billion dollars.

Facebook.com is a slightly cleaner version of MySpace which only allows high school and collage students to use.  It enforces this by requiring a recognized .edu email.   Because of the exclusivity, people agree that Facebook is better than Myspace.com

Yahoo buys facebook for $1 Billion.

Delicious is a website where people add their links (been done since the 90s)  The links are searchable.  The difference is that these are people’s ‘favorites’ and categorized by subject. Purchased by Yahoo for untold tens of millions.

Digg.com is a web site where people add links to internet stories.  Other people review the title (and text sometimes) of these stories then click ‘digg’ if they feel they are good.  If they get enough people to click the ‘digg’ icon, the story goes to the front page (digg.com)  Where millions view Digg.com valued at 100-200 Million.  Owners are in discussions with buyers.

(Side note.  Digg.com is now one of the top 125 websites on the internet – awesome site - check it out) 

The common thread of these sites is this.  USERS create the value of these sites.  They do not rely on company employees to generate value.  They rely on everyday users.  Look Ventures have several ideas that fit nicely into this niche.

Most of the businesses above do not generate a profit from ad sales commensurate with their sale value.  While they do generate income, these businesses have offices and employees which drain and large profit.  Because of their traffic however, they are very hot commodities for purchase. The reason companies buy them is because, brought in house, with existing employees to maintain servers, they generate almost pure profit with little overhead. 

Look Ventures proposes to have the best of both worlds. The addition of the search engine front end allows Wholelook.com both to provide sponsored results provided by XML feeds from search engine powerhouses like Google, Yahoo, and to sell premium result listing in its own right.

Sponsored listings is why Google became a multi billion dollar enterprise with Yahoo hot on its heels within a few short years since 2006  after both suffered multi million dollars losses year after year prior. Both offer their sponsored results to other search engine sites for a share of the profits when the site has worth while traffic, starting about 100,000 visitors a day.

Prior to that Wholelook.com can still earn revenue from sponsored results from second tier advertisers like --- - - - -  -. Until the traffic has risen high enough for the major links.

An Idea :

Create a facebook.com type site for only High School and College students.  Investigate Facebook.com on the internet to learn what it is.  The difference would be that we would have the user complete a ‘profile’ page which would then match the student up with other students for various compatibles.. .example : this person would be a good study partner.  This person would be a good potential date.  This person would.. etc.  Imagine facebook.com melded with eharmony.com  .. You could also think of it as an eharmony.com for high school and college students.

Pluses :

Tight demographic.  The reason Facebook is valued (sold) for more than myspace is that it is a tighter demographic to market to.

Easy to build.  This project could be completed by March 2007 and in full operation for promotion to various media

Promotion.  Using Myspace and Facebook, a robot can use the contact form built into them to let all the millions of people under 25 know about the new LOOK.COM  Almost instantly you would have hundreds of thousands of users.

Minuses :

Although I have great server capacity to begin this project in earnest.  Initial ad revenue would have to cover server costs for growth.   This is true for any idea, and since the model is closed.. IE only students, The server costs would be minimal and possibly even non-existent as I have a couple of severs that I don’t use at all that could be used for this purpose.

There are many other collaborative ideas whereby users enter in content making value for the domain name..  Like Models and actors submitting their portfolios.. Lots of people would want to LOOK.

For Sale By Owner – Homeowners could submit their home to LOOK.COM whereby people could browse their area at homes for sale (agents could add their listings also)  Then people could LOOK at homes.

At this point you have the idea.  The key is to have people add the value to the LOOK.COM website (domain) thereby creating a very profitable and or saleable domain name (site).

Be sure of this.  Web 2.0 means that money is back in town and the next year, two or three represents another chance to cash in big on the Internet.