Echo Chamber Report: Web 2.0 is Done, Son

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, November 30, 2007 @ 12:07 pm

When the marketing folks say a trend or bubble has lost its bloom, it must be true. But the examples they give are telling:

Talk of a second dotcom bubble has been fuelled by a flurry of web 2.0 acquisitions in the past two years, with media owners jostling for supremacy in the digital space. Most recently, Microsoft announced its $240m (£117m) acquisition of a 1.6% stake in Facebook in a deal that values the social networking site at $15bn (£7.3bn).

In October last year, Google snapped up YouTube for $1.65bn, while Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp splashed out $580m on MySpace in July 2005. “Some of these valuations bear little or no resemblance to reality,” says Andy Hobsbawm, European chairman of Agency.com.

Hmmm, Facebook, MySpace (in 2005! Feel the churn!), YouTube? With the exception of YouTube, these are all Social Networking sites. Web 2.0 is more than social networking, and a bubble is more than three corporate behemoths staking out territory at overblow valuations.

For those of you toiling in the fields of Web 2.0, RIA applications, don't even break stride. This is nonsense.

Technorati Tags: web20, hype

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