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.