I attended a talk given by Dave Nielsen entitled “Marketing to Web 2.0 Developers” at the Marketing SIG of SD Forum. I spoke to another CEO of a widget making startup, so the crowd was interested in the topic. But the talk was more a disconnect with what the crowd was expecting.

Dave Nielsen is best known as the author of PayPal Hacks, a great book if you want to use any of PayPal’s more advanced features on your site. The info in his talk was at too high a level for most people. That CEO that I mentioned above left the talk early. It just did not give him the practical info that he wanted. The talk was spent mainly defining terms. Ironically, the speaker did not even mention Web 2.0 until the last 10-15 minutes of the talk. Mostly it was ancient history. In Nielsen’s defense, ancient history for the Internet is last year, and his audience was a mix of technical and non-technical people.

The biggest issue that I had with his talk was his definition of “developer”. Nielsen defined developer very broadly as anyone who uses an interface to customize something. Our biggest disagreement is that he seemed to use “developer” interchangeably with “early adopters”. By this definition, the first users of YouTube to upload and share videos with their friends were developers because they “created” their own YouTube page with the YouTube interface and spread the gospel of YouTube to their less technically sophisticated friends.

In my point of view, such early adopters are your first customers who are using the product that your engineers designed in the way that it was designed to be used. They are customizing the product to their wants into something that has not been produced before, but they are not developers. I would think that a better word than developer might be content creator since that is what these customers are really producing that is unique.

On the other hand, I do believe that a person that creates a new widget or app for Facebook is a similar site is a developer. While they are using an interface developed by, for example, Facebook engineers for third parties to develop apps on Facebook, these new apps really are like new programs being built in the “Facebook programming language and interface.”

Tags: Developers, Marketing, Open Source, programming, SD Forum, Web 2.0

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 3:42 am and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.