How web 2.0 will fail

Friday, 5th January 2007, 1 Comment »

What are the key concepts of Web 2.0 that will make it crash and take us web people along for the ride.

As I see it, there are some key concepts that may not translate well into the ‘real world’ and thus the perception will be ‘web 2.0′ somehow failed. Now I’m not to keen on reliving those years of the dotBust, where the job title ‘web designer’ was looked down on. But I believe these concepts have to be addressed.

Companies aren’t flexible or have a iterate approach to improvement.
The agile process will not work in a large existing corporate environment without a huge scale re-focus internally first. That approach has got to be implemented in all aspects of the organisation and aimed at incorporate a ‘community’ aspect into the majority of business decisions.
Advertisers still don’t get the web
This is something I’m reading and hearing about a lot lately, even Russell Brown made a comment at Webstock Mini about them. Advertisers are creating (as Juha put it), “cringe-making and embarrassing” viral marketing ploys to promote they’re clients. Yes, word of mouth is how some of the web 2.0’s high flyers got so popular, but word of mouth came about because they are really good products and they weren’t wasting their money on advertising campaigns.
Core ‘Web 2.0′ concepts are being misconstrued
As Kathy Sierra notes, concepts such as the “Wisdom of Crowds” are being ‘twisted and abused‘. Sometimes through malice intent, but most often people simply misunderstandings the ideas or principles.
A business can’t have a strategy for improving people’s lives
The cynic in me says this can’t be done. Companies can not improve people’s lives and the communities around them and still stay faithful to idea of maximising revenue. Sure a lot of companies pay pretty good lip-service to it and there is craigslist (but they get laughed at). Your company motto might be “Don’t be evil”, but someday you’ll end up doing that.

I still believe the ideas, lessons and implementation practices that make up ‘web 2.0′ are basically a maturing of the medium. Sure, there are other factors that may effect the future of web 2.0, e.g business not in it for the long haul and expecting a quick buck, copy-cat applications, etc.
But I see these as being results of the ‘hype’, than of the under lying philosophy. It’s the philosophy that we need to intergrate back into the ‘real world’. This philosophy could become intergrated into the ‘next version’, like ASPs, but we have new names for them.

One Comments to “How web 2.0 will fail”

There’s common sense in your entry :)

The advertisers - or should I say, ad agencies - not getting the web is partly due to the medium though. Everyone knows advertising done right is very effective. There’s been a lot of work done within traditional media like print, radio and and TV to work out why, and that’s what advertisers, agencies, media buyers and others rely on… only to find that said research doesn’t work for the web.

It’s still early days for web advertising, and I believe there will be creative ideas coming up that not only make better use of the medium but also work around its limitations (how do you create a beautifully art-directed and laid-out double-page spread on a web page that people will spend more than just a few seconds to watch for instance?).

Juha