Om Malik recently wrote a gigapost on his blog, GigaOm.co, about Web 2.0 companies and their cross over potential to the mainstream where he mentioned Josh Kopelman's recent 53651 meme.

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Hold it right there. Who speaks like that last sentence to their non-techie friends? By friends, I mean the people who use the web every day, but don't subscribe to RSS feeds (yet), have never heard of Web 2.0, don't read Techcrunch, have never heard of Technorati and have never heard of Om Malik, Josh Kopelman or Ed Kohler (yet). Think about those friends for a second. Those are the people every Web 2.0 company needs to reach if they're going to "cross the chasm" from early adopters to the masses.

Om's post reminded me of a scene in the book Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson (available for a penny on Amazon) where Bronson describes the challenges faced by incredible programmers. While they can build just about anything they want, they're not necessarily the best at deciding which horse they should pick in the venture capital race. Should they accept a poverty wage in exchange for generous stock options? While this can be very rewarding, Bronson talks about great programmers who wrote incredible software for which there was no market.

Unfortunately, I get the impression that the programmers are, in fact, the founders of some of the latest start-ups coming out of Silicon Valley today classified as Web 2.0 companies. Programmers seem to be salivating over the opportunity presented by the latest web technologies, including AJAX programming, which allows them to program interactive front-ends to websites that will actually be seen by their friends and family. While the new web businesses they're building are certainly impressive from a programming perspective, I think many of them are too far out to achieve a mass following.

For example, online news sites have launched that are heavily AJAX driven, allowing users to click and read news stories without having to refresh the entire page. Unfortunately, this is far ahead of online advertising platforms, so it's extraordinarily difficult to monetize content served in this format. A few sites have popped up offering online photo editing where a user can easily upload a photo, then resize, crop and touch up the photo before saving it back to the user's computer or pushing it to sites like Flickr. Awesome feature, but not a standalone company. Maybe large photo companies will snap up feature-driven companies like this rather than build the same feature themselves? Apparently, that's the gamble. Probably the most common Web 2.0 model involves creating a service that already exists, then adding a new GUI that takes advantage of the latest and greatest web programming technologies. I think the success of MySpace, the continued success of MapQuest and the relatively slow growth of Gmail shows that a great GUI is only part of the equation.

So, how can great programmers determine which train to hop on if they want to build something bigger and reap some financial rewards? Share your thoughts in the comments below.