Web 2.0 Overload Comin' At Ya!

By
Think about it: There are HUNDREDS of these "Web 2.0" sites that have sprung up in the last year or eighteen months. Most of them are simply re-works of existing concepts: Video sharing, Social Bookmarking, Feed Reading, and so on. They are all competing for the same set of eyeballs, more or less.

Think about the "Web 2.0" sites that you really, really use consistently. I know which ones i use:

Google Reader
Digg
Del.icio.us
Google personalized home page
Flickr (infrequently, though i do have some photos there)
YouTube (I just visit)
Live.com (mostly just visit)

-- That's about it, the "Short list". Sure, i look at the new ones. But almost without exception, I visit once or twice, determine if I am really interested, and you never see me there again.

When I look at this list, there are really only 3 that I ever use consistently:

Digg, mostly for entertainment, because it's populated in the main by 20 and 30 -something Liberal geeks, and I am a bit older and more conservative, so I enjoy smacking them with my non-Liberal "make you think" comments.

Del.icio.us, because it delivers. It delivers bookmarking, tagging, and searching. It's simple, it's fast, and it works. If I've bookmarked something, it's easy to see how many others have done so, and more importantly, it's easy to find similar content based on either a search, or the tags I've assigned. If you look at the bottom of this post, I've got a "Social Link This Page" link that has dozens of these sites on it. The only ones I ever use from the list are Digg and Delicious.

Google Personalized Home Page. Speaks for itself.

What's my point? It's that unless you have a really compelling concept and the abilty to execute it with style, you don't earn my eyeballs. Period!

In fact, right now --- of all the so-called "Web 2.0" offerings in the marketplace, I'd have to say that Google's Personalized Home page is my favorite. Why? Simple- it helps me keep what I need to see and am interested in right in front of my face. It does so easily, I can change it, and it has tabs so I can have plenty of my "Stuff" - whether it's headlines, feeds, Digg, my Gmail inbox, NASA space shot of the day - whatever I want - right on my home page.

And you know what? People's home pages are where their eyeballs are at, pal. If you have a formula that earns you the right to be somebody's home page, you are King Webtard! Anything less, and you are simply swimming with all the other Web 2.0 fish in the pond and chances are slim you'll ever see the eyeballs in any substantial way.

Think about it. Most of this other stuff, no matter how sexy it may seem right now, will be completely gone within one to two years. Del.icio.us will most likely still be here. Google Home page will certainly be. Flickr, YouTube, probably. The others? Heh. Bach's been dead 365 years and he's still popular. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue album came out 45 years ago; it still sells 5000 new copies every week. Web 2.0 sites? -- don't hold your breath.

I leave you with this question to ponder: If all this is Web 2.0, what will Web 3.0 be like, and when will we see it?
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more