2006.0

We would like to thank all our readers and first users from 2005 for supporting us with valuable remarks and comments. The idea of Lovento came up to us in August 2004 and we have been developing and improving steadily since then. We went online this summer. In fact it was fun to look at our early design stages and the earliest ideas and it is hard to believe what has happened in just a little bit more than one year. We are proud to be where we are now, and that we have always wanted to keep the site free not only from costs but also from other barriers. Lovento is designed to facilitate the process of finding independent information about events and venues in your city and this is what we will also focus on in the future.

What are our challenges for 2006? We are currently working on the new design, which will probably keep us busy for a few weeks. We felt that the site is already packed with functionality which should make Lovento Web 2.0 compliant, the design was still from the previous century though.

The main challenge will be to further push forward the ideas and spirits of the current silent web revolution. Web 2.0 is just at the beginning, even if some people already start talking about Web 2.1 and even Web 3.0. There are still so many commercial 1.0 websites which offer a bad service for way too much money, held alive by an enormous amount of advertisement. Many people will understand more and more the beauty of autonomy and their independent role in the web. In the U.S. blogging is already so widespread and considered as important that university teachers give the task of setting up a blog as a homework. In other countries it still covers only a very small margin of the overall web content. The number of blogs is still expected to increase drastically, making more tools necessary to guide the web user to relevant information and keep him away from aggressive advertisements and spam (it is incredible how many comments I had to delete this morning in this blog). More and more users will find their information through other channels than just the brute-force method of using search engines, especially when it is at the beginning not clear what you are looking for. Social services will become more important and be a successful attempt against self-advertisement techniques, since the good users will always by far outnumber the spammers. On services like del.icio.us, digg, riff, wink and lovento
a self-advertiser has bad odds against the masses, it will only sustain if people like the offered service.

I hope that Web 2.0 will more and more liberate the people from the strings of commercial services. I remember a discussion on eHub, Emily Chang's list of Web 2.0 pages, where those new services where criticized about their lack of an innovative business model (it seems that the 99% of the business models consist in gaining web traffic and then putting Google Ads on the page). Who cares apart from entrepreneurs? The people will learn to love their new possibilities of participation and the diversification of information more and more. We are looking forward to 2006 with excitement.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Web2.0