Bradley L. Jones

I bought this book to learn more about the people and personalities behind the more important internet success stories of the late 2000s. There are some insights here, but Mr. Jones' sophomoric insistence on asking exactly the same questions, worded slightly differently each time, of eighteen men and two women, will drive you to distraction by the end. Just when any of these highly creative and interesting individuals starts to say something interesting, Mr. Jones prods them back to his show more questionnaire. And so we have twenty people saying Web 2.0 is more than Ajax and that Web 3.0 is perhaps the Semantic Web, but it's too early to say.... Over and over, twenty times. Certainly there is some variation in their replies, revealing something of their personality and interests, but I would have preferred the author to just let them ramble in whatever direction they chose. We might have had real insight then into technology, business, management, society, their past, their families - but alas, that will be a different book. show less

This book is a quick read consisting of interviews of 30 important influencing people in the Web. The interviews of designers and founders of LinkedIn, Twitter, Zoho, Skype, StumbleUpon, De.li.cious and other important tech companies. The book was published in 2008 and the interviews focused mostly on what existed then and what people saw the tech world will shape up to be. Things have changed a lot now. We do not see Google Gears being talked about, so is Adobe Air. They predicted then that show more Social networking was on rise and mobile was on rise too and talked about importance of customer engagement.

It is not a technical book, but consists most of views of these pioneers. They are posed the same question, which is kind of boring, but it is good to listen to variants of their answer. Postively, this book is a quick read to get an idea of web company and also while reading you can reflect how the internet world has changed and the pace at which the changes have happened.

Surprisingly, I did not see a mention of HTML5 in this book, written in 2008 and could not see emphasis of Javascript, except for the mention of Ajax at some places. One interview by internet.com founder was striking as he started his company in early 90s and leads us through the changes which has happened since then. Things like it costed him 50,000 dollars to setup a server for one of his company in 1995.

I thought, if the questions were little more tailored to the individual, then the book could have been even more better. But it is definitely a worth read for anyone who cares about web companies. show less

A good book, although 21 days is a bit of a underestimate unless you spent every waking moment. Although maybe the basics by then.