Web 2.0 hype cycle

Research company Gartner has given a cautious thumbs up to a host of Web 2.0 tech­no­lo­gies including AJAX, Social Network Analysis and Location Based Services in a press release pub­lished on 9/​7/​06. Interestingly, it also believes that the use col­lective intel­li­gence tech­niques will start to become the norm in business before too long:

Collective intel­li­gence … is expected to reach main­stream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intel­li­gence is an approach to pro­du­cing intel­lec­tual content (such as code, doc­u­ments, indexing and decisions) that results from indi­viduals working together with no cent­ral­ized authority. This is seen as a more cost-​​efficient way of pro­du­cing content, metadata, software and certain services.

Gartner’s thinking on trends is that they go through five stages. This is what it calls the ‘hype cycle’. The ‘tech­no­logy trigger’ is the period when it becomes possible to do some­thing for the first time. The rapid adoption of broad­band over the last four years, for example, has made it possible to have mass media Web 2.0 services.

The trend then becomes over-​​hyped and described as a panacea for all mankind, the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’. All kinds of dreadful services get hyped just through asso­ci­ation. (I’m too nice to provide links there, despite the tempta­tion). Soon after, though, people realise that the trend is not quite as won­derful as it was described by its hottest advoc­ates, and it enters the won­der­fully biblical ‘trough of dis­il­lu­sion­ment’. People decide Web 2.0 is broken and no use for anything. This will be the period when the fash­ion­able start-​​ups with no revenue model run out of cash and go bust.

The last two phases of the Gartner hype cycle are when the hype has dis­ap­peared and we get around to dis­cov­ering exactly what really is useful about these new tech­no­lo­gies. We climb the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ to arrive at the ‘Plateau of Productivity’.

So where are we now? Well, of course, it isn’t quite as cut and dried as the model may suggest. There are plenty of people cheering for Web 2.0 and a whole bunch of other people who say it’s a fraud. That’s human nature, I suppose. As soon as some­thing becomes popular, others want to pull it down. We’re not quite at the tipping point into the ‘trough of dis­il­lu­sion­ment’ yet, but it will come.

Probably at about the point my book comes out. Sigh.

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Possibly related:

• Another Hype Cycle
• Hype Cycle
• Now We Are 2.0