Linkbait web2.0 title here
More old news. I’d read this article titled “Top Ten Reasons Why Web 2.0 Sucks” a bit ago. You can’t deny the abject link-baityness of that title, can you? I didn’t think so. Some of the reasons are ok, some are stretching it a bit. But I really wanted to post about it so I could quote this awesome line:
I’m in ur domainz, droppin’ ur vowelz.
God I love that.
Anyhow. Starting with the bad, he says that Web 2.0 sucks because it hasn’t opened the carrier world and not enough is accessible via mobile data. While it would be nice to have more mobile apps, I wouldn’t say anything sucks because it hasn’t opened up the carriers… by that logic pretty much everything in the world sucks. Also he suggests that it is a conversational vacuum populated by a small group - citing trying to find a twitter user outside of the Valley. What about finding flickr users outside the Valley? I’d guess there’s a few of those…
He also has some gripes about content licensing - where music and video copyright owners are good sharers. This is true to an extent, but they’re figuring it out and more importantly I think the heart of web2.0 is really more about user generated content than copyrighted content (huh, what’s the opposite of ucg?). It’s true that people love that copyrighted content, but I’d wager that if you took all the copyright content away, web2.0 would still look pretty much the same whereas if you took all the user generated content away, it’d look an awful lot like web1.0 with gradients and rounded corners, no?
And he wants more data - like from his credit cards and medical records. I think the problem with this is less about Mastercard and more about shuttling this data around freely and securely… I can already get all my financial data onto yodlee and it’s a hop skip and a jump away from being an rss feed - but I’d be scared as hell to turn on that feature….
Still he brings up some good points. One problem that everyone is coping with is that it takes very few bad apples to spoil the bunch. I’ve been watching community develop since very early on and at some point every successful community has to handle the trolls. Sometimes crazy methods evolve like Slashdot’s karma system and at the other spectrum if the tools are provided to the community they can effectively police themselves. However, it’s definitely something that needs some better tools to manage - it’s a constantly moving target.
I think my favourite of his points is his second - “Too many people building features, not applications, or, gasp, companies.” I love this because it’s very insightful, at least to me, I hadn’t really thought of the problem that way. The big new thing is these tiny sites and tiny widgets that do one thing and you spread them around. It’s creating a proliferation of all sorts of craziness that is working right now - but eventually (and you can see it starting already) people are getting spread too thin. Profiles everywhere, homepages everywhere, 14 different metrics for analysis and discovery. Something needs to give there…
And he talks about how the big corporations are buying all the successful web2.0 startups and crushing them. Too true, but maybe, just maybe they’re beginning to fight there way out from the inside. Google gave up google video for YouTube and now Yahoo gave up their photo site in favour of Flickr. That’s a trend worth watching.
I think it’s an interesting read, but 10 points was too much - it would have been a better and tighter article to go with 5 or so. Savvy?
