Web 2.0 Clones - where is all the innovation?

Cloning has been one of the biggest themes to come out of my Read/WriteWeb series on international web markets. I've noticed that every country has its set of 'web 2.0' clones - bookmarking sites that look like delicious, photo sharing sites like Flickr, social networks like MySpace, community news sites like digg, etc.

Occasionally I find a very nice original app, such as Moltomondiale in Italy - a special automatic semantic news aggregator that became popular in the World Cup. Or Cyworld in Korea. Or dirty.ru in Russia. But these are far outnumbered by cloned apps. And even in America of course there are a lot of clones. New Netscape = Digg is one high-profile example.

There's a lot of money to be made cloning web apps, particularly in huge, growing markets like China (where there is a lot of cloning of web 20 apps). It's much riskier to create something innovative, untried. You have little idea how it will turn out and if there will be a market at all for it. Whereas with cloned apps in a foreign market, you have a well established product template and there are a lot of opportunities for 'localized' clones.

Social news site Digg is one of the most cloned 'web 2.0' sites. Here is a list of digg clones - and an example below:

The above is Mingaco, a Spanish version of digg. But at least with foreign languages, there is a reason to clone an english language web 2.0 success story.

I asked in the header: where is all the innovation?

Well one place where you won't find clones (generally speaking) is at the DEMO conference. Some of the innovative new products that caught my eye at last week's DEMOfall were BuzzLogic (social influence tracker), blueorganizer ('smart browser' extension), PostPath (a Linux version of Microsoft Exchange) and MojoPac (allows Windows users to save their entire PC onto a USB or iPod). Viva la innovation!