
It's Gonna Blow! The Critical Mass of Web 2.0 - transburgh
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-critical-mass-of-web-20
======
mechanical_fish
Metaphors should come with safety warning labels so that drunkards don't wield
them incorrectly.

Yes, this poor woman is drunk. She's just discovered the existence of slush --

<http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html>

\-- and now she's convinced that the entire universe is made of tightly packed
quantum units of idiocy. It's an understandable reaction. I believe that
professional editors (see link, above) actually use the technical term "slush
drunk". I hope she sobers up soon.

Fortunately, a pile of poorly conceived websites will not "blow", no matter
how large that pile is. There is no "critical mass". It just doesn't matter
(except to the people who are bold enough to volunteer to review them
individually) that the world contains 2,000, or 20,000, or 200,000 stupid
websites. At worst, we all just ignore them. At best, they employ webhosts,
and sysadmins, and programmers -- it's like complaining that the oceans are
too dirty because there are too many bacteria and plankton everywhere.

But one of the things the web does well is ensure that it's really easy to sit
at your desk and make a list of 10,000 crappy businesses. It used to be fairly
difficult to make a big list of crappy businesses -- they don't last long, by
definition, and most of them don't have a high profile, by definition. Now you
can find twenty of them before breakfast. Submissions like this one
practically write themselves.

~~~
ROFISH
The biggest difference is cost. While "Web 1.0" actually went bust because of
funding, it costs practically nothing to build something and run it on a dinky
little server. As long as nobody is throwing millions of dollars towards
crappy businesses, they just won't scale and not matter.

------
carpal
What she's saying is that a bad idea with bad execution will end badly. That
isn't exactly revolutionary. If people panic and the Web 2.0 bubble "pops"
because bad businesses die, then some people seriously need their head
examined.

The end point is that businesses, whether Web 1.0, Web 2.0, or what have you,
need both a good idea and to have it be executed well. Trying to believe that
the business is immune to those laws just because it is executed over the
Internet is asinine. The people who found these companies and the people who
invest in them will get burned.

And they should. And it will be _good_ for the industry.

------
mynameishere
_Of course, I am not talking about Flickr...What I've been faced with in the
last forty-eight hours are their painful copies_

...Flickr, of course, being a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. I
can't speak for the other sites she mentions, but they are probably all highly
derivative.

------
Tichy
90% of everything is crap. Except crap, 100% of crap is crap. (tmcm)

~~~
softwarejim
awesome!

