One can tell the gold rush is on again on the Web to establish the next social media Instagram. What is different from 12 years ago at the apex of the Dot.com bust is the emergence of 3 things:
1)enormous computing IT capacity in 3 areas – chips + memory = cheap but huge computing power, nearly unlimited data storage and rapidly growing Internet bandwidth;
2)the emergence of new client computing consumer devices with smartphones, tablets and other high portable gadgets; which changes the equations on who and how one dominates in the market
3)the adding of touch screen operations to the OS that run those devices makes even leadership client computing an unsettled question
But what is the same as 12 years ago is some fierce computing rivalries. So much so that with gloves coming off vis a vis patent wars, new technology ultra-secrecy, and buying start-ups as much as home-brewing competitive advantage.
So just as Apple has displaced Microsoft as the leading arbiter of how consumer computing devices are designed, Facebook has now wrested social media, eyeballs and face time from AOL, MySpace, Yahoo, and Google. But just as Apple’s leadership of consumer client computing is under counter attack from Microsoft and Google, Facebook faces the same opposition from Google, Yahoo and a bevy of startups. Wavii is one such start up. And despite this editors poor record with products with a wave in their name, Wavii is worth attention.
Wavii is making the RSS Feed world much more GUI savvy and integrated. Here is how it looks:
Now wait just a darn minute isn’t this the business that Reddit, Stumble-on, Delicious, and Digg among maybe a dozen others are in on. Yes and No. Yes Wavii collects stories and use crowd feed data ratings to rank those sources. Yes, Wavii wants you, like Google+ and Facebook and most other social media, to invite your friends to the site and discuss and interact there.. oh and click on advertising But No Wavii is not waiting for the crowd to supply the data sources but rather is using a corp group of data feed in a range of topics to provide you with discussable topics. And in its key innovation, Wavii will show you all the sites that are discussing this specific issue and a collection of related articles. Its sorts of like what you see in the sidebar at the NYTimes, Wall Street journal and any other blog/news source worth its blogging salts. However, unlike its rivals, Wavii has a wide range of sources for related articles that it can show you .
Having said that let me contradict myself and say that the round-up of feed sources that Wavii currently uses is quite thin. For example, for technology articles, Wavii relies primarily on one source – Tech Crunch. Yikes, I could suggest a couple hundred more sites and blogs that could provide vitally interesting feeds, So despite the nifty display technology at work at Wavii – just sample selectively until you find the feeds commensurate with your interests.