Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter feed put me onto Peter Schwartz’s Death of Web 2.0 article.
It’s an interesting idea the future of web2.0 technologies rests in the hands of social networking sites like Facebook.
Facebook incurs most of Peter’s wrath and I can understand that countless hugs, vampire bites and who knows what else is banal, but 16 year olds getting sick of this sort of thing doesn’t affect the business model.
The real question is whether Facebook can make money from those kisses and “most people like you” surveys.
Personally I think they will struggle because, as Peter points out, people aren’t prepared to pay for this stuff.
Whether this means Facebook is doomed remains to be seen, however it’s clear the site is not worth 15 billion dollars and online advertising is going to decline with the rest of the economy.
I suspect Peter’s right about Facebook being way overvalued, as was MySpace, Second Life and countless other web 2.0 properties, but that’s simply the effect of the hype that surrounded this space over the last few years. It really has nothing to have nothing to the underlying web 2.0 technologies.
Peter has a good point about the sustainability of many of these sites and it’s going to be very interesting to see how the business models develop as try to convince users these services are worth paying for.
But to call the web 2.0 as being dead simply because some web sites fail is a bit of a long bow.
What may be true is the term “web2.0” is dying. That probably wouldn’t be a bad thing as it was a bad, overused label anyway.
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