Web 2.0 is dead, long live boredom

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What is Web 2.0? 

Web 2.0 has been described as many things by many people.  The truthiest definition would be from the guy who coined the term – Tim O’Reilly.  It’s a shift in business models.  Evolution would be a better way to describe it but that word scares the Christians and they’re about due for another inquisition so let’s just leave it alone. 

The most commonly touted definitions cite no sources and a handful of examples that focus on a few common elements in a few mega-popular sites.

1.  Cheesy graphics with gradients and rounded corners and bubbles and stuff
2. Excessive use of (multiple) bloated JavaScript libraries to achieve minimal effects
3. AJAX, a marginally more efficient way to request data from a web server, but crippled because it’s one-way communication.
4. Social tomfoolery.  The user’s in charge, the user’s writing the content, it’s all about the user, bla bla bla.
5. Tagging, that method of categorising that works oh-so-well until you get multiple people redundantly describing the same thing with marginally different words – celebrity vs celebrities, game vs games.

These factors form the foundation of the ‘pretend’ web 2.0, and the cornerstone of many web 2.0 ‘business technologies’.

The life of Web 2.0

Going with the public misconception of what Web 2.0 sure was fun.  We saw thousands of new services produced that offered to do everything from manage your bookmarks to manage your bookmarks somewhere else.

During this exciting time innovation shone briefly but brightly, resulting in a handful of cult sites creating, defining and dominating new markets.  Flickr, Digg, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace, Delicious, PageFlakes and more.

We also got to see media redefined; newspapers, cds and dvds became obsolete because of blogging, citizen journalists and p2p file sharing.  Well not in our reality, but millions of teenagers couldn’t possibly be wrong, right?

The buzz of Web 2.0

Much of ‘the other Web 2.0′ was about hype.  New offerings were to be admired, respected, loved and cherished – during their 15 minutes of fame.  The audience for the other Web 2.0 is vast and through just a handful of sites, able to create the impression a new service is hugely successful.  Until the next spin-off comes along.

The hype was easy to capture and even easier to distract.  To win the affection of millions of teenagers you declared your service to be “open source”.  I’m still not 100% sure why this matters since the overwhelming majority of people aren’t going to do anything with the source, or even download the source.  Most people simply don’t have the required skillset to truly take advantage of open source. 

Some self-proclaimed affiliation or connection with popular software like Firefox was another way to become an instant, albeit temporary success.  Riding someone else’s success has always been a popular and occasionally sustainable business model.

Through some careful wording and submissions to easily manipulated crowds such as digg, reddit and netscape a new service could be exposed to 10’s of thousands of people in a single day.  With luck prominent blogspammers like TechCrunch, Engadget or Gizmodo would do a little reword of someone else’s blog post and throw a link at your service.  For the very lucky, sites that actually write their content like ars and wired would mention you.

Almost inevitably the hype would subside as rapidly as it formed.  The pretend Web 2.0 crowd, while loving, is fickle and has the attention span of a cat with ADD.

Sites that thought they were a smashing success soon found their active users were a very, very small portion of their registered users. 

The flavours of Web 2.0, or Why Web 2.0 is dead

Have you ever seen a movie where some man or woman is getting their **** on with someone, when they discover that special someone is dead?  Nobody did it better than the gmilf Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin.

Web 2.0 is that dead guy.  The pretend Web 2.0 crowd are a younger, uglier Goldie Hawn.  You don’t have to wipe yourself off and join the army but it’s an option.

For all the hype, for all the great new services, for all the new services that are still being released, I believe Web 2.0 is over.  It’s finished.  It’s dead.  All that’s left to dispose of the corpses is to wait for domains to expire or hosting bills to go unpaid.

There’s two very sound reasons why the pretend Web 2.0 is dead -

1. Nobody is doing anything new
2. The winners are selling up and getting out

There’s a chance that you’ve heard of TechCrunch (there’s a similar chance you’ll win the lottery, let’s be realistic). It’s the blogchild of Michael Arrington, where he and a few other authors profile hot new websites in this pretend Web 2.0 age.

Our first sign that something is decomposing in the Web 2.0 world can be seen in their archives.  A great place to look since Arrington’s been profiling new businesses in this imaginary industry for nearly 2 years.

The first thing you’ll notice is the annoying trend of bastardising or inventing words for business names.  Beyond that you’ll pick up a pattern with what exactly these ‘innovative new companies’ are offering.

The vast majority of these websites fall into just a handful of categories.  The amount of innovation shown is negligible, it’s degenerated into a competition to see who can convince the most users that their marginally different way of doing [short list of categories] is marginally better then the dozens of marginally different alternatives.

How many new online word processors do we need?  Who needs more ways to manage their bookmarks or host their photos or publish videos or blog or share links or have a free email address?  The markets have been defined, created and dominated.

There’s a directory of Web 2.0 sites that categorises an insane number of me-too’s.  The most popular niches being ‘new’ search engines that don’t do anything better than Google, MSN and Yahoo!, bookmarking that does the same stuff the bookmarks in your browsers do or delicious does, and lots of ‘myspace killers’ that do everything better/faster/prettier, except get users.

AllThingsWeb2 highlights what we’ve all secretly known for a long, long time.  The ideas that form the cornerstone of the pretend definition of Web 2.0 have all been had, done and either died by disinterest or aquisition.

I can’t wait for Web 3.0

Web 2.0 was about the evolution of business models but it appears to have stopped evolving at “ad supported”.  Even the much hyped “alternative definition” has stagnated into a handful of topics that just keep being redone and redone and redone.

We don’t need new ways to publish videos and photos in the same way we already do.  We don’t need new sites to manage our bookmarks the same way as the “old” new sites.  We don’t need identical-alternatives to the RSS readers we already use.  We don’t need more and more “online office suites” that do the same stuff in the same way using the same technologies.  We don’t need more ways to interact with our friends, we already have phones, email, myspace, friendster and instant messaging – your “innovative new social networking site” is redundant.

If you’re days away from releasing your “Digg Killer” or “YouTube Killer” or whatever other me-too site that does pretty much exactly what the successful site does in pretty much exactly the same way, save yourself time and effort and just let it go.   You’re years too late.

I can’t wait for Web 3.0, new concepts (hopefully) using new technologies instead of the equally comatose technologies behind “1.0″ and “2.0″.  Shock and awe me with some cutting edge applications that do new stuff, or at least old stuff in an *innovative* way using Apollo or XAML.