It seems that Web 2.0 is finally over
ByIt’s great to see some sense being written every now and then. An article on TechCrunch discusses the death of Web 2.0. And the reasoning is based on search traffic recorded by Google. Nothing like a touch of scientific evidence to make a point.
What is quite interesting from the analysis is that the main search for Web 2.0 came from Asia that is India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia with India having the highest numbers. Russia is the language used more often than English when searching for the word.
I have always considered the term Web 2.0 as describing a non-event. With other words the internet is developing and morphing into a new entity all the time. There never seemed to me a point in its evolution that one would find to be a major breaking point.
The point that the internet somehow launched itself into social media never seemed right to me. The first time I went onto the internet was round about 1996 and besides using e-mail I tried a chat line. Great hilarity when we discovered we were chatting to somebody one block away from us. This was dial-up access at its slowest. But fun nevertheless.
Using e-mail and chatting in a chat room is for me the start of social media. Sure I’m now chatting on Twitter and communicating via Facebook. I can’t even remember the name of that chatroom I started my internet life on but it was not much different as a communication tool.
Let’s hope that we don’t have some new term that gets coined and bandied around. It’s just so painful to hear self-important marketers and social media ‘experts’ throw these terms around willy nilly. Mostly they don’t know what they are talking about and hope to confuse everybody around them. One hopes!
5 Comments
February 14th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I think you’re right saying Web 2.0 was basically a non-event. It was described as some sort of dawning of an era or something, but if we’re going to number eras the internet must be on something like Web 2,000,000.0 by now!
February 18th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
There was far better social interaction on the internet in the old dialup BBS days of the early 1990s, when few people had seen the web. The technology was bertter adapted to interactive conversations, and there was some real communication — and that was in the days when ALL South Africa’s internet traffic to the rest of the world went over a 9600 bps modem line between Grahamstown and Oregon.
It was so good to be able to communicate at all that people just seemed to spout less rubbish.
And like the banks used to be, it was simpler, better, faster.
February 18th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Sorry, but I can’t agree. Web 2.0 was/is a kind of episode, but social networking was never that strong as in the last years. Social interaction is more then e-mail.
February 18th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Oh yes. Those were very very slow days! i remember the excitement when they introduced 2800 speeds.
February 26th, 2009 at 8:59 am
The number of start ups that contact us and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message is visibly dropping and I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore on other technology blogs and news sites eithe..