3by9

Web 2.0 Was Bullshit

I don’t know if we are still in Web 2.0 or not, but man it really did suck. Not in a “well at least we learned” type of suckage, but more of a “holy balls we didn’t learn our lesson” type of suck. I think we all knew it was bullshit from the start, but we just got over a rough couple of years and wanted to see some good stuff. We lied to ourselves and said user generated content was the way to go.

We believed that if you pulled a couple million visitors a month that the ad dollars would just blow right in. When you sit down and think about what was created in the last 4-5 years what sites really stand out as being successful? Who won the Web 2.0 race? I had to do some thinking of my own and was surprised when I realized it was a site that people did more hating on than praising.

But before I say what the site is let us look at the darlings of Web 2.0 To see how they have faired.

• Digg
• Facebook
• YouTube

I’m sure you have more, but those are the big ones in my mind. Digg will never go anywhere although many of us fell for that hype as well. It is said they will employ over 150 people by the the end of next year. To do what? Attend parties is my guess, not quite sure what else you do on a site where the public does all the work.

Facebook? Don’t get me started on that one. Why we believed this was the next Google baffles my mind. Great site and resource, don’t get me wrong, but no money, mo problems. (Let’s just stick Twitter in this boat as well.)

YouTube? Almost every other video hosting site has fell apart and the ones remaining don’t have more than a year left. Could you honestly see anyone besides Google keeping this behemoth up? Not many companies have enough bandwidth to make the costs seem minimal but Google can pull it off. Still, Hulu does a better job with advertising and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are pulling a profit.

You see what I mean now? From a business perspective Web 2.0 was bullshit from the beginning. We knew it, we just didn’t want to admit it. We liked the idea that anyone could create a site, make it big and slap some ads up on it until we got bought out. That’s the real American dream if you ask me.

The old school Web 1.0 giants learned that lesson a long time ago. Amazon and eBay don’t mess around with making money, they just get it done. When they tried to step into the Web 2.0 world things got ugly (eg Skype).

When the next great web revolution comes are we going to pretend that all you need is a lot of people to make money or are we going to remember there are some basic principles to business that when applied always work better than when we ignore them?

As for the site that is the most successful? Well I’m going with Myspace because they didn’t pretend to be anything else. They knew they were the ghetto of the web and embraced it. Slapped some ads up and made money hand over fist while keeping a majority of their users. And now they are slowly making improvements that put them on par with Facebook, while Facebook keeps on pretending it has a way to make money in the future.

I did love Web 2.0 for the innovation in technology. Lots of great new stuff came out of it and 99% of it was free so as a consumer I can’t complain. As someone who uses common sense about twice a year though I always had to scratch my head and wonder what in the hell were we all thinking?