Earlier today, while home for the holidays, I heard my mom briefly discuss Box.net on the telephone with a friend. One key phrase which I overheard was her mentioning that our company was a part of the “two-point web.” This made me further consider the possibility that although we have a ways to go, we have come pretty far. I think it will only be a matter of time until people like my mom, and yours as well, begin to see the compelling solutions that many of us are developing right now. I used to have a contrarian’s view towards the “Web 2.0,” for the same reason as many (in that it is dangerous to broadly summarize technology like this)- but regardless of the name and the hype, we are in fact living in exciting times.

When we first started box, we sought after the least web-centric market possible. I won’t divulge any specific marketing strategies, but it was our original intent to capture the “soccer mom” group and pull them into online storage. Soon after we realized this goal would only be met with considerable financial backing, we worked towards practical outcomes (while keeping our long term strategy in mind). Thus, we began to balance our initial marketing-oriented strategy with a technology-centric strategy. This led us towards the development of RSS file syndication, and a whole slew of cool things coming out in our next release. The question at hand is, to this day, when will middle america begin to care about those “cool” things that we are doing? I want to be able to go anywhere and use the word “tagging,” without blank stares. I would like to mention RSS without my non-web friends thinking I’m a part of political organization. You get the point. The good thing, though, is that we do have some very important companies pushing towards this shared goal. The likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Google, all see this as the future- and believe me, they will decide what the future is. And in the meantime, there is no shortage of mainstream journalists yapping about the internet-evolution taking place.

So for those that are arguing whether we are living in our own little world, the answer is Yes, but only for a short period of time. Because, either our moms find it on our their own, or they will be force-fed it by big portals… so at the end of the day (or by the end of 2007) we will all be on the same web.