Web 2.0: Top 10 Issues ?

Dion Hinchcliffe has posted a thoughtful piece on the issues he perceives with Web 2.0:

1. Excessive Hype
2. Lack of Simple Definition 
3. Aging Poster Children 
4. Needing A Permaconnection
5. Ajax as the Official Web 2.0 Experience
6. Excessive Attention On The Technology 
7. Really Bad Adherents 
8. Blogging Instead of Doing
9. Not Facing Hard Truths
10. Adopting The Lightweight Creation Model
11. Web 2.0 is too Silicon Valley focused (one commenter added)

Accepting the pragmatic fact that Web 2.0 is the new generation of the Web (the “Furrier definition”), #2 and #7 disappear.#1 and #8 are linked in sort of a virtuous circle. #4 is not an issue, it is good news - we need the next generation of the web to increase the penetration of broadband, as opposed to holding it back – Minitel anyone ? #3 is sort of natural: there are so many new services popping up all over the place that our attention is dispersed and noone service has made it to the top of the list universally.
#6 is a superset of #5, and whilst there are fundamental pieces of standards and infrastructure enabling Web 2.0, it is true that many applications seem to want to be a collection of tech buzzwords and forget that humans are using all these damn things. Web 2.0 is about to put users back in the driving seat, fostering participation, etc. but in many cases is barely unusable. I’ll elaborate on this in a forthcoming post related to Kabooble, the shopping/research bookmarking company I recently got involved in.
#9 is true but figuring out a profitable business model was the deciding survival factor in Web 1.0, and it is still the case here.
#10 is not an issue, it is a new development philosophy that matches users expectations. The fact that large companies have had a hard time to put in place is not really surprising (though I would point out that Yahoo’s agile implementation of their Podcasting directory and their new Maps is pretty good).
Finally I am sympathetic to #11, but most services will be extended beyond Silicon Valley.

So all in all ? Deliver value to the user, extract revenue based on that value creation, and we’ll be OK ?

Comments

[Eric Rice]

What. A. Concept. /snort