More Lists; Less Thinking

Tim O’Reilly says “Web 2.0 is not about these bubble com­panies, it’s about the new approaches we are trying.” Try has he might to focus on lever­aging and inter­secting data­bases, the world prefers lists of sites with funny names. Perhaps we ought to call this the digg world to avoid confusion.

Wired news pub­lishes a quickie article about the winners and losers in what it calls the Web 2.0 world. Author Michael Calore intro­duces the list, which is actually a subset of another list:

There are plenty of good ideas in the Web 2.0 world, and an even greater number of bad ones. In the interest of brevity, I’ve chosen five sites from each category. The web services industry cer­tainly has more than five winners and five losers, so we’ve only high­lighted the exemplars.

Winners:

flickr
odeo
writely
deli.icio.us
netvibes

Losers:

myspace
squidoo
browzar
fo.rtuito.us
friend­ster

Haven’t got any problems with the winners, though we don’t know enough about their balance sheets to ser­i­ously rate them. But MySpace is a loser, is it? Reason given: it’s ugly. ZeFrank has, as usual, some­thing clever to say, “Ugly as a rep­res­ent­a­tion of mass exper­i­ment­a­tion and learning is pretty damn cool.” I agree, but even if you don’t buy that idea, their numbers aren’t bad either. They project $350mn revenues this year and $700mn next, moving into profit about now. If only we could all lose as badly as that.

Friendster? That would be the Friendster that just secured an extra $10mn in funding, would it? The one that also secured a poten­tially very luc­rative patent on elements of most social networks? What losers…

And Squidoo is a failure, eh? I’d say that building a library for children in Cambodia, and giving thou­sands of dollars every month to other char­ities is a pretty solid success.

Ermm.. and how exactly is browzar a web 2.0 service? It’s a wrapper for Internet Explorer that may (or more likely may not) improve your online security. Not exactly ‘web as platform’ in my book.

I’ll give them fo.rtuit.us — the service intro­duces you to complete strangers on a random basis — and then you’re supposed to talk to them online for four weeks. A bit like speed-​​dating without the speed, or the drinking, and quite possibly the worst social network idea ever.

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