The BTO team was in town on Wednesday, and I got treated to a nice dinner along with the other acceptees. Of the many interesting topics covered during dinner, a former Goldman analyst made the comment that while he was at Goldman, investors did not want stock recommendations from him - what they wanted was an “understanding” of the industry.
This observation led me to think about the web2.0 world as it is today - I think one of the missing features is that people do not feel like they control the aggregation process. When you are talking about large impersonal sites like digg and reddit, the quality of your experience is largely dependent on your ability to conform to the tastes of the community. On sites like netflix, on the other hand, your experience depends on the expertise of some unnamed team of programmers. What is missing in both is the feeling that you are consciously controlling and refining the aggregation process yourself.
I think the development of taste is a very personal experience, and there exists real demand for the feeling that one’s taste is not an objective unchanging thing waiting to be discovered, but rather something that is actively and consciously being developed and improved.
