This week's rant finally broke after a conversation with
Flo last week regarding the amount of utter bollocks up on web 2.0 sites such as the
Tube, the rampant and often hysterical misuse of the humble yet much overrated inverted comma, and an email from
Yasmin regarding
corporate sponsorship of live music.
Where do I start?
It is clear that the novelty factor surrounding video on the interweb is wearing off, and I for one am starting to get very worn down by all of the
user generated rubbish which cloggs up an otherwise fantastic medium.
YouTube? YouShit I say; for the majority of the clips that you find are poorly shot, badly compressed and contain little of worth in terms of the value in their content.
Last Week saw the Tube announce an increase in their upload limit from 100MB to 1GB. Tech talk aside, this looks to me like a desperate attempt to raise the perception of their site from the
MacDonalds of video on the web to coming on Burger King status. While this might work in the short term, those of us in the know have been far more interested in more future facing services like Joost, Hulu, Stage 6, Vimeo etc for quite some time and it'll take more than a full fat option on a dying dog to temp us away from our rising stars.
But the trend only starts here.
Web 2.0 has, unfortunately, become just another excuse for people to upload more rubbish onto the interweb, dream up new services (often missing the point of UGC) and all too often simply repackage dynamic services in a new wrapper to sell back to the clients who already paid for it all the first time round. Even worse, is the recent growth in well executed bad ideas.
For example - the nice guys at
Twitter sent out a news letter with a great new service called
Foamee. Just another I owe you a pint dot com. I really see no point in this sort of business at all. If you owe somebody a pint, or more importantly if somebody owes you a pint then go and reclaim it; don't blog about it via a twitter based web2.0 mash up plugin type text message. Here you start to miss the point of the owed pint in question: a reason to meet up, share banter, stories and communicate in that 80% of the way digital communication currently prohibits.
Then there was
Jott. This is a web based dictation service which only costs you as much as the call that you make to the automated response system, when then charges you a for a
text message back telling you what you just spoke into the other end of the telephone. All rather silly if you ask me. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to carry a
note book for the thinks I need to remember, and text twitter just to show off to everyone in my web 2.0 sphere of influence what a rock and roll life I have.
And so we return once again to these reoccurring themes of:
1. Being swamped with data, a Tube that's far too crowded with mobile phone videos of happy slapping incidents and no way to filter the good from the bad, or ugly.
2. Digital Pioneers, who face the future alone, as opposed to cashing in on the now. The innovate, they push the boundaries of what we can do with the technology, however they are still branded as Geeks.
3. Finding the great idea; at the center of a project which effectively combines the thinking of Geeks, Freaks and Future Thinkers and then makes it work.
So, web 2.0? Web 3.0? or a Really Useful quagmire of good, bad and ugly? Something has to change; and I for one hope that this change comes in the form of a shared feeling of responsibility. Now the novelty has worn off we need to take command of our ideas. When a client says "I want a face book application", we need to look them square in the eyes and ask them why they want a facebook application. Will it really help their image? Is it really right for their brand? Or are they just jumping onto a bandwagon that is running out of steam.
Labels: Interactive, rant, twitter, web 2.0, youtube
