No future? The Well is well
I respect Dave Winer -- and, as the founder of UserLand, which supplies the software this and all Salon Blogs run on, he is a business partner and general godfather of our little corner of the blogosphere. But he wrote something today that I need to offer a different perspective on.
| | At a party last week I met the former CEO of The Well, Maria Alioto. We talked about her experience. A total parallel to AOL. Good start, probably was necessary for the Web to get going. The core of the West Coast Web. The meeting place for the future staff of Wired and EFF. All good things. But in the mid-90s when she came on, it had no future. As AOL had no future when Time-Warner was snookered into taking their stock. |
I'm assuming this refers to Maria Wilhelm, who was Well CEO at a time when, yes, the folks who owned the Well had a notion of trying to compete with AOL. That didn't work for a bunch of reasons -- including a very important one, that the Well's users didn't want it to be like AOL.
But to say that the Well had "no future" then is demonstrably wrong, unless "future" means "big growth that grabs the attention of Wall Street," which is not what I think Dave means. The Well had the future then that you can find in its present existence -- as a thriving online community with thousands of interesting posts each week. So what if it didn't grow to become AOL-sized? The Well was always a different beast -- a for-pay community when that was unfashionable, a "closed door" space (only members can read most of the conferences) rather than a fully public environment, and an online place where posting under your real name is the norm, and you pretty much always know who you're talking to. These attributes may not be what everyone is looking for as they choose their online homes, but they help make the Well unique.
Salon acquired the Well back in 1999 and from where I sit (as a Well member since, I think, 1990) it remains enormously important to us in many ways. Most of the Well remains "behind closed doors" to non-members, but if you're interested in checking it out, you can look at a couple of areas that are open to anyone to read: the "Inkwell.vue" conference, which features interviews with authors (Cory Doctorow's in there now); and the new "Pre.vue," a members-organized conference that offers a taste of the range and depth of the Well's conversations.
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