The End of Web 2.0
Yesterday’s TechCrunch post, “For Sale: Used Social Voting Site, Asking Price $300 Million, Goes By The Name Of Digg,” is in subtle ways reinforcing what I’ve lately come to view as The End of Web 2.0.
As may last couple posts suggest (based solely on my own experience), infoglut is not just some phenomenon that will be accepted with no questions asked. Over the long term, I think that information overload will have real repercussions, and I have serious doubts that many trends we’re currently witnessing will persist indefinitely into the future. Much of the hype I think is driven by an increasingly large pool of tech geeks and early adopters and young people experimenting with new technology. In my experience anyway, this experimentation leads to a mental exhaustion from trying to keep up with the information flood, and a decrease in personal happiness arising from the shallow human communication and lack of personal interaction that the internet and its many new glorious technologies foster. Increasing asynchronous communication will never be as fullfilling and meaningful as actual face-to-face communication. Spending more time in front of the computer screen and engaging in any of the countless communities now out there necessarily come at the cost of participating in actual, real, human communities. You know, friends and family and such.
The reason the TechCrunch post is reinforcing my perceived shifts in the Web2.0 world is that Digg was once heralded as the NYTimes killer, a social phenomenon fundamentally shifting how we do things. I subscribed to the Digg feed for a bit. What I found in practice is that hours would be eaten up by following inane news that had no permanent value but rather satisfied some kind of other urge to read or see something interesting right now. In that way it’s like TV: a time killer that leaves you feeling empty and creating no lasting memories. This post, however, and the persistent rumors that the Digg crew is trying to unload the site and run with the money - unsuccessfully - give Digg a pitiful, wanna-be-Facebook-rich aura. In other words, it’s not as shiny and glitzy as was once the case - this being Digg, the exemplification of Web 2.0.
Speaking of Facebook, if you’re not sick of even hearing that word by now, I guess you never will be. A few months ago I jumped on the bandwagon to see what it was all about. I even downloaded the FB app for my BlackBerry (which is quite good). Do I now still use it actively? No. In fact, don’t those people who obsessively update their profiles and bombard you with meaningless messages, invites, and other time-wasting crap kind of give you the creeps? Even leaving recent privacy issues out of the equation, the question I ask is: Has Facebook/MySpace/etc. really enriched our lives, made it more meaningful and us happier? I really doubt the answer is yes.
Beyond my vague and abstract feelings on all these things, more and more articles catch my attention that seem to indicate that this current social-ajax-community parade will soon come to an end. That is not to say all of these overhyped trends will not continue in one way or another (after all, weren’t listservs and forums the original online community pioneers?), but the current craziness will have to get a reality check, and hopefully we can erase this terribly meaningless “Web 2.0″ concept out of our collective dictionary (I am a dreamer). Last week Silicon.com reported on a Gartner “Web 2.0 warning” to enterprises: “Social networking ‘white elephant’ warning.” But much more significantly, the voice of online reason and user-champion extraordinare, Jacob Nielsen, wrote this great chunk of content: “Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous…” The most interesting piece of the article to me was the following insight:
“The number of companies that chase the same advertising dollars as their only business model is a sure sign that we’re at the peak of Bubble 2.0. It would be much more sustainable if companies aimed to create services that users valued enough to pay for.”
This always puzzled me, the concept that you could make a living through ad revenues alone, that enough people in fact click on adds interrupting the content they are trying to digest to warrant companies spending pretty sums of cash on GoogleAds. Banner blindness is a real thing, and it doesn’t just mean actual banners. Do you digest GoogleAd content? I certainly don’t.
I will leave you with one last good article on Web 2.0, and its bubbleishissnous, by Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion: “The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid.”
Update: Good thing I’m not totally unplugged just yet; every once in a while a great and timely link comes along. It may be two years old, but Nick Carr’s post “The amorality of Web 2.0″ is definitely worth the read. Although he disagrees with Web 2.0 for reasons other than mine, he puts forth some interesting arguments. Courtesy of TechCrunch article “The Big Switch: 12 Signed Pre-Release Copies For TechCrunch Readers.”
Update 2: The Bubble 2.0 video is back online.