It’s in­ter­est­ing to read Paul Graham’s Web 2.0 ten years later. Some thoughts:

  • The web­sites Paul most praises—Google, Wikipedia, Reddit—are stronger than ever in 2016.

  • I’ve no­ticed for a while that the stuff I read on in­di­vid­ual peo­ple’s sites is as good as or bet­ter than the stuff I read in news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines. And now I have in­de­pen­dent ev­i­dence: the top links on Reddit are gen­er­ally links to in­di­vid­ual peo­ple’s sites rather than to mag­a­zine ar­ti­cles or news sto­ries.

    • This is no longer the case. ☹️ Today’s top sto­ries on Reddit in­clude no in­di­vid­ual peo­ple’s sites.

  • Craigslist has largely de­stroyed the clas­si­fied ad sites of the 90s, and OkCupid looks likely to do the same to the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion of dat­ing sites.

    • OkCupid is still one of the most pop­u­lar.

  • I would­n’t be sur­prised if ten years from now eBay had been sup­planted by an ad-sup­ported free­Bay (or, more likely, gBay).

    • Nope. eBay has fewer and fewer auc­tions, and more and more peo­ple just sell di­rectly, some on eBay and some on com­peti­tors like Amazon.

  • The ul­ti­mate tar­get is Microsoft. What a bang that bal­loon is go­ing to make when some­one pops it by of­fer­ing a free web-based al­ter­na­tive to MS Office. Who will? Google? They seem to be tak­ing their time. I sus­pect the pin will be wielded by a cou­ple of 20 year old hack­ers who are too naïve to be in­tim­i­dated by the idea. (How hard can it be?)

    • Google, of course, did come out with the free web-based Google Docs, but Microsoft and their web-based Office 365 are do­ing fine.