Web 0.2.1
Saturday 10 December 2005 ◷ 19:02
While I was kicking it some time ago, Web 2.0 digs it's own grave a little deeper, as noticed by slashdot. The whole thing smells to much of a hype created by people who notice their pre-bubble-burst Lear's are getting outdated and try to perform the same trick they did with Web 1.0 in search of cash for new ones.
If it was just marketing bullshit I wouldn't care about it, but the scary thing is that they have some points that make it plausible when looking at an extrapolation about what has happened regarding the internet in the last 10 years. So let me explain the possible scenario's following Wikipedia's bullet point on the matter:
- Websites are becoming a computing platform: But who reads the legalese of that platform? The big difference between usenet and a forum is that the forum is hosted by some party that can censor and ban whatever they like, and the privacy statement and copyright issues on the content the users are contributing can also be tailored to the business model of the party running the app. I don't think society is moving forward by shifting a private workspace onto a platform owned by commercial organisations that only seem to be able to make a profit from abusing the information they can get from the users of their systems. Maybe they won't start out with that objective, but when selling out can save the company in a rough period I don't have the confidence most of the companies sitting on a huge pile of valuable information will have the morals to make a choice in the interest of their customers at that point. The choice will be in the interest of the shareholders, and a simple formula can calculate your profit from the number of users of your service that accepted the EULA but didn't read it, and how much a judge will allow those users to be punished for that moneywise.
- Decentralisation of authority: Users only have to believe what they want to believe, can lie, quote out of context, manipulate and be manipuleted just how they like it. Internet may have started out as a medium for scientists to communicate, Web 2.0 won't have a common goal of finding a scientific truth. Just because you will be able to read blogs that tell you what you already know for the rest of your life doesn't mean you're right.
- Categorized content: This only works for information and not for creative work, like most entertainment. What if the community will markup video content into categories and you could hook it up to your Tivo and do a SQL like select to discard punch-up jokes, filler material and other stuff that just isn't good enough to spend your valuable time on, on a detail level of single lines of text? Technically Web 2.0 would be the ideal way to set up a system like this, but what's the use? You could also watch movies at 110% speed to increase the content density and in theory make more efficient use of your time, but you also run the risk of ruining the delicate timings and subtle relations to context, making the whole thing pretty useless. Can the summary of a joke be just as funny as the joke itself?
- Shift in economic value: A boom will only indicate increased profits will be expected in the future, not that they will suddenly be made by selling end-user products. Google might be just selling adspace, but that doesn't mean what Google is worth now will ever be realised by profits on products sold influenced by those adds. There are enough steps between those two ends of the chain to invent any convergence ratio and semi-justify an overblown stockprice.
In my view Web 0.2 is the harvesting of communities. Communities are not individuals that enter them naively and leave them after learned their lesson and cut their losses, they are a constant stream of individuals that all fall for the same scam for a limited amount of time, but that stream can be powerful enough to keep it going and skimming a profit from it. Just like my impression of a lot of open source projects is that they get run by students until they get a real job, and other students take over. Some work gets done, but there is no future in it from the perspective of the moving timeframe of individuals. There will always be enthousiastic people that will make a community look like it's valuable, but don't be fooled by a steady stream of 365 enthousiastic newbies a year that all find out after only one day they were wrong.
ipenburg
Tuesday 27 December 2005 ◷ 21:50
re: Web 0.2.1
http://www.bright.nl/06-web-2-0-software-wordt-sociaal
http://digg.com/gaming/Guy_offers_up_empty_XBOX_360_box_on_Ebay,_and_some_Sucker_buys_it.
So that's the Web 2.0 business model?
web_2_0_and_some_sucker_buys_it