Quick post to let you all know that we’re finally sending out more invites to Goplan, our online collaboration and project management tool. We’ve also launched the Goplan weblog, which will carry regular updates about the application and its features.

If you’ve requested to be in the beta before, stay close to your inbox. If you didn’t, drop by the goplan weblog and leave your name in the comments. There will be more updates later. Have fun trying it out!

There are new web applications and services being launched every day around the world. Most of these products expect an audience (a real one) to sustain themselves and stay afloat - but the problem with Web 2.0, is that it’s probably a little ahead of time, as the rest of the world doesn’t “get it” yet.

Blogs like Mike’s Techcrunch, Richard’s Readwrite/Web and the rest of the guys over at the Web 2.0 Workgroup report on the latest products and trends, but isn’t their audience restricted in itself? Are web application developers expecting a number of users that just doesn’t exist? Read on.

On failure and natural selection

Web 2.0 has made it extremely easy to launch products. It isn’t hard to bootstrap development costs, so people with ideas pursue their ambitions of getting them out there. This is creating an atmosphere of innovation dilution (you’ve read it here first) where key forward-thinking ideas don’t get the attention they need (or deserve) amidst all others.

The question of whether this is a bubble has been asked many times before, and I keep thinking and saying we’re not a bubble in the financial sense, but definitely are in one on the wow sense. And the theory is when the bubble bursts and the novelty fades, many of the products launching now will fade away with it.

Now, even though I love web applications and love it when people decide to pursue their intentions of launching new ones, I believe we do need more failure happening in order to learn with the experience and truly innovate.

Clarifications

Despite the fact that we may indeed need failure to learn with our mistakes and create the path for a new wave of innovation, we still need new products. We still need people to try their best, and make compelling solutions to everyday problems.

I guess what I mean by all of this is that we should all keep innovating, but we (as in, the mass of people doing new things with the web) shouldn’t be afraid to call something a failure and move on. And we do need to create new things and avoid the me-too’s we’ve been seeing lately. Lets fail more in order to learn faster and create more and better web applications.

This past weekend we organized the first portuguese Barcamp. The event was a success and made us consider working closer to the portuguese IT market - something we’ve been kinda skeptical about mainly because it always seemed like it wasn’t ready for the kind of services we offer. Check out the event photos over at Flickr.

Anyway, speaking of Barcamp, I definitely need to mention Shift, a conference happening on the 28th and 29th of September in Lisbon - with a schedule so surprisingly good that you can’t really afford to miss it if you’re close by (heck, anywhere in Europe, really). I’m definitely looking forward to hearing Peter Merholz, Luke Wroblewski, workgroup-partner Stowe Boyd and Ulla-Maria Mutanen (among many others, just check the program) speak.

Part of the team here at Webreakstuff is going to be present at the event and we’ll most likely be showing Goplan to some people, as well as giving out beta passes to the application (emails to the people who’ve asked previously will be sent sometime this week, so keep an eye out). We’ll see you there!