The Guardian reckons Web 2.0 is ready for the mainstream with its Weekend section dominated by a 15-page feature entitled ‘A Bigger Bang’. John Lanchester’s article provides the keynote to the section, in a piece which is well-written and clever:
a new wave of innovation on the internet, an innovation focused not so much on new technology as on the way people are beginning to use existing technology…
Quite a reasonable way to begin to describe these new sites and services, I would say. A certain degree of vagueness is almost inevitable given the breadth of quite different services that are described with the 2.0 label.
There’s also a certain amount of conventional wisdom in place, I felt. The idea, for example, that because certain properties have raised a lot of money then we are definitely in bubble 2.0 conditions. The ‘huge amounts of money’ ‘thrown at’ web startups nowadays are often fairly small compared to the hundreds of millions raised for dotcoms in the late nineties:
From the business point of view, the defining feature of this new goldrush is that established companies are throwing huge amounts of money at upstarts who have three things in common: they have grown from nowhere with astonishing speed; they have no revenue stream to speak of; and most of their content is provided by their users.
He goes on to divide this new wave into two rough categories. There are collective sites — such as digg and Wikipedia — and personal sites, focusing on ‘me media’, such as MySpace, del.icio.us and flickr. He allows that there is a lot of blurring between the two. Flickr, for example, is not just a gallery of your photos, but of everybody else’s. The distinction is reasonably useful, though, and allows for an excellent gag:
One way of putting it is to say that collective sites are useful (except when they’re not) and personal sites are interesting (except when they’re not).
The piece continues to describe the ‘800-pound gorilla’ that is MySpace. I got the feeling that Lanchester fundamentally dislikes MySpace and other social networks, though its size means that it’s certainly a subject of some awe: “if it were a country it would be the 10th biggest in the world, just behind Mexico”.
The piece ends on a melancholy note. For Lanchester, the social networking phenomenon is symptomatic of loneliness rather than the celebration of connection that others might see:
Sit someone at a computer screen and let it sink in that they are fully, definitively alone; then watch what happens. They will reach out for other people; but only part of the way. They will have “friends”, which are not the same thing as friends, and a lively online life, which is not the same thing as a social life; they will feel more connected, but they will be just as alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them.
If you’ve got the morning off, check out the interviews and profiles with some key players: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Craig Newmark & Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), David Sifry (Technorati), Caterina Fake & Stuart Butterfield (flickr), Evan Williams (Blogger/Odeo), Joshua Schacter (del.icio.us), Tariq Krim (Netvibes), Martin Stiksel (last.fm), Kevin Rose (digg), Sam Schillace (Writely) and Michael and Xochi Birch (bebo).
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