(logs in)

Wow. I have oodles of friend requests pending — people who join Orkut are a very friendly bunch — and I can’t approve any of them.

“You can only have up to 1000 friends. Before you can add more friends, you need to remove friends.”

Oh, the humanity.

That said, I do like the idea of connecting the billions of primates typing on billions of keyboards in better ways. So many people spend so much time and energy creating content and making connections — wouldn’t it be nice if all that effort actually had more significant payoff once it achieves critical mass and momentum?

I love the idea that the people I connect to and the content makers I trust could actually serve a higher purpose, such saving me time and giving me better experiences with the time I do have, by suggesting the most appropriate things for me to read and to try and to write about and to buy.

Eventually all these competitors are going to push themselves and each other — and us, and the world — there. The faster, the better.

A similar point was made a few days ago by Stephen Baker (http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2005/07/how_to_appeal_t.html)… about the need for mechanisms that would allow blogging to incorporate publishing of large amounts of data – that would increase the appeal to audiences that do not have the inclination to be active media producers… but would rather just browse or search for useful information.

I am currently working (in my company) on a new Web 2.0 platform called AidPage that combines (1) a simplified self-publishing capability – good for the non-geek, (2) a high degree of automatic contextualization of content, (3) easy self-tagging, (4) total mutual behavioral transparency and visibility – the reason people go to public places – to learn from each other by just seeing each other’s behavior, (5) capabilities for automated publishing of large amounts of data – an API is coming soon, (6) sharing of ad revenue – to keep larger publishers interested, and (7) search across all the space.

We, at AidPage, are very excited to see that ideas we’ve been working on for some time already are emerging in the discussions about the future of the Web 2.0 platforms.

Compare this to the fact that Yahoo! has indexed just over 1 million pages of GOOG content, who in turn have just over 7 million pages of their own.

This is a key difference between Google and Yahoo!. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. Yahoo!’s mission is something else. Something that includes creating and publishing a lot of unique content. Google has a few very small things such as Google Answers, but they are in fact very small. I don’t know whether to consider Google Catalogs or Google Print unique content; unique to them perhaps. But those things certainly aren’t flooding the results (yet), and won’t be indexable by other search engines.