A View on View :: The Poor Prognosis for Portals

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The Poor Prognosis for Portals

by Mark Evans on Sun 10 Dec 2006 04:19 PM EST | Permanent Link

Edgeio has one of those blogs posts that forces you to take some time to digest it. It's a post based on the idea the gap between the giant portals (Yahoo, AOL, et al) and the rest of the world will shrink/has been shrinking - and we're entering an era of de-portalization (a term coined by Fred Wilson). For bloggers and blog networks, it's a thought-provoking thesis because it suggests that people will consume information in different ways and go to different places to do it. The question is if it's not the portals where people are going to get what they want, then will a new mass market vehicle emerge to supplant them, or will the audience disintegrate much like the TV universe has splintered in 500+ channels? For more, check out Scott Karp (who's back in the blogging saddle after being strangely quiet for awhile) and Mathew Ingram.

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Re: The Poor Prognosis for Portals

by Stephen Hayward on Sun 10 Dec 2006 08:41 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Your example of the TV is interesting as it was the old portal and we are finding items like YouTube, Google and Others as new alternatives that people can use to get access to content in new ways. Now add cellular, IP TV and other mediums, new portals to the content emerge.

Re: The Poor Prognosis for Portals

by Imagina on Tue 12 Dec 2006 01:25 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

I find portals useful for almagmating news feeds, stock quotes, fantasy sports, comics, weather and so forth and pushing the relevant content in an easy to use fashion. However, the majority of web users are not skilled data miners and should not expected to be so. As such, I do not believe that de-portalization will happen anytime soon. In fact I see very targeted portals being built in the fashion of Wikis that allow what you get with a Yahoo combined with a YouTube or MySpace and then following with business intranet implications as well. People want information fast and easy and want to collaborate in the same way. Portals will enable that through whichever device they choose, wireless or wireline.

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