It’s an interesting statistic that people in the UK who pass their driving test the first time are more likely to have an accident in their first year of driving than those who attempt it twice.

I only found out that statistic recently, but I’ve never really trusted anyone who gets things right the first time. For me the second attempt at solving a problem, the second draft of writing a blog post (which this is) is bound to be better than the first.

Taking a second whack at the ball means you’ve had the chance to learn from the mistakes of your first. But it also shows that, despite things not being quite right the first time, you still have confidence enough in eventually hitting that same ball out of the park that you’re going to stick at it.

If, however, the second attempt is still rubbish, and the third, and then the fourth then it’s probably time to give up. You’ve given it your best shot , but the idea’s just not that good to come together. As W.C. Fields famously put it, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again. Then give up. There’s no use being a damned fool about it.”

James Dyson may have taken a million attempts to perfect the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner but, for me, 2.0 is the magic number.

Nowhere can that fact - and it is a fact - be more keenly seen than in the world of New Media. Web 1.0 - a business in search of a model - proved that the Internet had the potential to change the way we communicate and to create a truly global economy. But only the potential. We didn’t have it quite right. We thought that content, not community, would be king, that he who moves first moves longest and that the eyeballs = revenue was an absolute.

But, despite the crash, we knew we were on to something. We knew it could work. So we - by which I mean everyone who believed in the Internet - went back to the drawing board. Boo.com became ASOS, Altavista became Google, Salon became Facebook, dial-up became broadband, HTML became AJAX, ‘all the rules have changed’ became ‘plus ca change’ and this time it worked. In web 2.0 people are actually making money out of this thing, social networking has dethroned porn as the number one way our kids are being corrupted by technology. Your mum has a Myspace page.

This ‘first time lucky, second time right’ principle works on a micro level too with successful dot com businesses.

Take eBay. The now ubiquitous auction giant started life as ‘Auction Web’, a technology parts buy-and-sell service tucked behind a fan site dedicated to the ebola virus (I shit you not). The site’s founder Pierre Omidyar created both sites when he was at university and, as the ebola page was getting more traffic, that was the page he chose to be the homepage of ebay.com (short for echobay, his company name). The auction service was at ebay.com/auctionweb and worked by asking succesful sellers to send Auction Web’s cut from transactions by check [sic] in the mail. It was only when Omidyar realised where his core strengths lay, dumped the ebola page and made ebay.com all about the auctions that the rest started to become history.

Meanwhile, over in Silicon Valley, a new company called Paypal secured funding for a technology that would allow users of Palm handheld computers to send each other money electronically. The technology was fantastic but no one cared until a bright spark at the company realised that they had the focus slightly wrong. Instead of PDA-to-PDA money transfers, they binned the Palm idea, moved over to sending cash by email and became the Paypal we know, love and use today.

Closer to home, my favourite example of first time lucky, second time right is my chum Richard Moross and his business, Moo Cards. Moo started out as ‘Pleasure Cards’, a brilliant idea that allowed new and talented designers to create images that could be printed on the back of special half-sized personal business (or Pleasure) cards. Visitors to Pleasurecards.com could browse thousands of designs and have - if they wished - a different one on the back of each of card they ordered. The cards also came printed with a unique ‘PEP’ number that recipients could type in to the Pleasure Cards site and be taken to a profile page all about you. No need to get new cards printed if you change numbers - just update one online profile.

It was a great idea but, as I’m sure Richard will testify, it didn’t quite set the world alight. Orders trickled in. The printing technology Richard had developed was brilliant, the cards looked amazing, but there was just something about the execution that was wrong. So Richard went back to the drawing board and reinvented Pleasurecards. A few months later, Moo.com was born. The cards still looked small and beautiful, the printing technology was still astonishingly clever, but this time, the designs on the back of the cards were provided by the punters themselves. The idea was to take your online images - your Flickr photos, your Second Life or WeeMee avatar, whatever you like - and have those images on your cards. Withe Moo Cards you could take your online identity offline.

Other examples? Facebook opening up to the world and not just college students, Last.fm sticking a Pandora style instant player on their front page, Flickr moving from chat-with-photos to just photos, Wikipedia trusting the wisdom of the crowds, Craigslist moving on to the web...

If you’re in any doubt about how any of those turned out, check their current valuation and traffic. Or in the case of Moo, empty your pockets after any creative or technology networking event and count the number of small, beautifully printed cards that you find. First time lucky, second time right.

I mention all this because on an as-yet-undisclosed date in August, Fridaycities 2.0 is launching. We’ve been in beta mode since February and we’ve discovered an enormous amount about which parts of our idea worked, and which really didn’t. The new version of the site - which we’ve been working hard on for months - will have a much stronger focus on the former, and will do away with the latter. We’re all very excited about it, and we think the Fridaycities community will be too. I just wish I could say more about it, but that would spoil the surprise and tip any potential rivals off to some features that are just going to blow you (and hopefully them) away.

From a personal point of view though, as well as being exciting, it’s terrifying. For the three of us who founded Fridaycities, this is our make or break moment. If the principle of first time lucky, second time right is right (and I believe more than anything that it is), then this will be the version of the site that will either give Fridaycities the unstoppable momentum required to change its particular corner of the word forever, or it’ll mean that everything we’ve believed in until now was completely embarrassingly wrong.

Of course I know how melodramatic that sounds - it’s just a website, just a business after all. But then again isn’t he love of your life just another relationship, or the great American or British novel just a series of words on a page that might never have been put together? We’ve all been through the mill to get here, and there have been obstacles like you can’t imagine, and this is our one and only chance to prove that we were right all along.

The good news is that we really think we’ve nailed it.

So don’t wish us luck. Wish us right.

And then watch this space.