I know I’ve been posting a lot on 2.0 applications lately. The reason for that is because I’ve been doing a lot of research on this matter for my work. I need to find handy and usefull applications I can integrate in an intranet website, to build a forum that can be accessed by all employees and where all the company data can be ‘alive’ and ‘interactive’. I’m talking pictures, RSS feeds, tagclouds, webmail, intranet pages, server pages, forum features, polls, idea pools, workgroups… all in one.
While I was checking out Ning, the interactive playground, I noticed how boring it had become. Ning is not a playground for 2.0 applications, it’s a prison where one surfer just copies the module from another and so on. Of the 5000 apps they say they have to offer, hundreds and hundreds just do exactly the same. It’s a circle. Nothing new is added, except by a few scripters who try their best, but then those apps become victim of the ‘me wantee’ society that lives there. Something I realized when I was walking around on the servers is that I can’t get my hands on source code to take the app out of that brainless adaptation environment to take it to the intranet and implement it there. Sure, Ning offers a blahblah.ning.com domain to host your brandnew copied app, and you can modify some tiny little details to ‘customize’ the thing you want, but users still have to go to the Ning site to ‘experience’. And that’s just too bad. I expected more from this. Then again, if the process is called ‘Clone this app’… that should’ve said enough.
While I’m a bit fed up now with useless 2.0 apps, I’ve realized that I’m not the only one. The 8by1 post I recently published had a comment in it by a blog called ‘Go Flock Yourself’. I had a great laugh, because this blog points out exactly what I refused to see in my enthusiasm. Here’s what they wrote about 8by1:
This is Web2.0’s take on those shitty, ineffectual electronic petitions. Browsing through the tag cloud on their front page, we see such poignant, world-visionary wishes as “Legalize Marijuana,†“End Smoking Bans,†“Cure Cancer,†the gem of goodwill “make all arabs leave the land of Isreal,†and a couple that are truly indicative of the mindset of the Web2.0 partisan: “hjhj†and “apple of by life.â€
How Touching.
Relax, though, guys — at least this heap of fruity-smelling shit isn’t a beta. It’s in fucking alpha. Now let’s all join hands and lend our collective energy to solving the problems of world hunger and scratches on our iPod nanos.
And you know what? They’re absolutely right. Applications can be cool, I don’t deny that. But people always tend to use them for the same crap they’ve always used them for.
Take Social Bookmarking for example. There are people who open up accounts on each of those services to cross-post their bookmarks all over the place, thus hyping the importancy of what they bookmark.
You’ve got Digg, where links are dugg, and rated. People can comment on links, then bookmark the digg’ed link to a del.icio.us account. If it isn’t del.icio.us, it could be de.lirio.us. And if they don’t Digg it, they might Pligg it. If del.icio.us doesn’t do it, you can join jots, which does exactly the same but differently, of course. If the written text link isn’t enough and you want a fancy picture, you can try blogmarks, where a thumb of a screenshot is added to the bookmark. Or even better, try Wists, a free service that lets you visually bookmark any page on the web, then automatically create a small image, text summary and add a set of keywords without having to save and upload anything. They call it ‘Social Shopping’ to give the thing a name. But what’s in a name? Whether you Furl it, Spurl it or call it Connotea… it all does the same. And if you don’t want to share your links with others, you can always use looklater. Looklater also allows you to bookmark images, instead of ‘just’ links and pages. Then I haven’t even began to talk about BlinkList or Magnolia.
Isn’t it about time the cloning came to an end? Would somebody please kill the ‘yeah cool, me too’ thoughts that overcrowd the web 2.0? Thank you.
