Pick a tool, any tool.
There's certainly no lack of tools, though many too many of them seem to do pretty
much the same thing, or something so specific that I find it hard to imagine that
there's much of a market for them, or, in some cases, any market at all. All too often I
get the feeling that much of what people "do" with these tools is simply
accumulate them. I've got accounts, therefore I am. Web2logo
presents us with numerous pages of logos of companies that are considered Web
2.0. When we click on their logos we get some statistics and user ratings. It
looks very impressive, and there's no doubt quite a bit of useful statistical information on
each company that's available in this way. But as of this posting, it seems that
only one person rated (for instance) Lijit. There are, apparently, too many tools
out there for us to actually use, so instead we simply glance at them, say "oh
wow", and move on to the next. (On the other hand, the excellent ReadWriteWeb
blog notes (albeit
in passing) that Lijit is "a simply fascinating service".
It's also rather unclear just how up-to-date the wow factor is here. Among the
logos presented on these pages are a number that have been purchased by Google (and
had their names changed) yet are still prominently displayed with their pre-Google names. More than just a few have already
gone out of business. We're invited to add new information about these sites that
will be displayed along with the statistics, and perhaps people do this. The latest
news listed for Lijit, however, is from half a year ago, and (by chance) while
preparing this column significant news about the company was actually released - news that hasn't yet found its way to this site.
On the other hand, if we click on the "who is blogging about ..." link,
we get to a Technorati page that really gives us the latest postings about the
company. I wasn't about to check out a bit over a thousand postings, but I did
find a few that actually wrote about the tool itself, rather than just listing
it as "yet another" new tool perhaps worth checking out. Still, it's
my guess that that's the bulk of them.
Go to: One tool to rule them all?