outbreak

I started reading TechCrunch a while back and what struck me today is that Web 2.0 (or whatever you call it) looks like a bubble.

Let me explain. At the start of the first bubble everybody had his own business idea and a new way to improve the world with IT. It’s true that the first time around people thought that throwing money at the problem was the way to go. Somehow they didn’t get that not every web app has a market to cover a few millions of expenses and earn the investors the few hundred percent they were hoping for. The bubble burst. Many companies died and the web looked like a forest after a fire.

After a few years of almost zero development some smaller companies started doing great things. A few old technologies were discovered[1], a few buzzwords coined[2] and the web was in a new cycle. From day one people were skeptic about it and a lot of articles were written about why this time it’s not going to leave hundreds of web developers jobless.

Maybe they were right. But it doesn’t mean there is no bubble and that it won’t burst. In the last few days and weeks I’ve seen too much ‘startups’ go into public beta or announcing what new and amazing problem they’re going to solve. Well I don’t really have any of those problems. And those I do are already being solved by a few Web1.0 and a few Web2.0 applications. Why would any of the new apps be any better? Because they use glows, fades, XHTML, CSS and AJAX?

This time around fewer jobs and less investor money will be lost. What will be lost though are the hopes and dreams of many developers that believed that del.icio.us, flickr and other success stories of the Web2.0 era were just really smart ideas. Naive we all were…

1. XMLHttpRequest is one of the trademarks of Web2.0 that was available at the time of the Web1.0 but was rediscovered later and is used by most project managers to sell stuff. back
2. AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and was coined by JJG @ Adaptive Path to sell the idea of ‘asynchronous’ updates of the page. back

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 11:13 and is filed under technology, thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.