I rarely get into any of the ‘conversations’ going on over at Techmeme, but this time something really interested me. Peter Rip (a VC) calls out ‘over and out’ on web 2.0, saying:
“We aren’t seeing much. Startup activity remains strong, but the consumer web landscape seems to be populated with the same bodies with different skins. Another video deal here; another social networking deal there, and social [feature] everywhere”
Maybe it is indeed time to put a fork in it – as Om Malik so beautifully states – and stop calling everything web 2.0. Web 2.0 and innovation are not the same anymore. Paul Kedrosky says:
“It’s long past time to move on folks. While the media, advertising, and technology transformations continue apace, let’s just call them what they are and leave the marketing mumbo-jumbo to others.”
I have to agree. I once read somewhere “web 2.0 is pushing the envelope and Windows Live is merely copying existing sites”. Is web 2.0 (still) pushing the envelope? With the MySpace for Finance, or the Youtube for advertising, … we could go for a long time here. Let’s move on, quoting Peter again:
“Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn’t going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn’t exist today.”
Let’s indeed just call it innovation, but then really innovate again, whatever the buzz word we’ll be using.
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