The web has hit another dot-com bubble. This time, everyone is giving it the fancy name of “Web 2.0” and placing the focus of it on the user. Power to the people, in a manner of speaking. It was alright when I first heard about it a year ago. Then, an enormous amount of sites started to pop up. Most of the sites had the same feature. A lot of them tried to replicate what other people were doing or what had already been done.

A year later, I am completely tired and sick of it all. The more and more I hear about Web 2.0, the more and more I am getting apathetic about where the Web is going right now. My disdain for it just grows larger. It’s fine to have all sorts of sites, but too many is way too much to handle. Information overload has not been good for me in the past. The sheer quantity has pushed my tolerance to critical mass, and now I have given up on it.

It is much easier to not care at all than it is to try and manage everything. Managing that microcosm of sites is becoming more and more increasingly difficult. My attention span has dwindled to the point where I won’t even bother clicking things anymore. I barely read through all my feeds these days. I’ve become extremely picky about what I do decide to click and read. It has to be meaningful in some way or have some lasting impact.

With Web 2.0, anyone can create anything. Unfortunately, this adds up to a lot of crap I don’t want to filter. I thought Digg was an amazing site at first. But then as more and more users joined, the percentage of things worth looking at became much, much smaller. I had decided to drop their feed and switch back to Slashdot (because they have a filtering process and don’t incessantly post insignificant topics). Web 2.0 sites have given everyone more ways to connect with each other, but it hasn’t worked for me at all.

I don’t interact with enough people online. It wouldn’t be worth it registering billions of accounts and then later finding them all to be useless. I’m not discounting the power of collectiveness. For some people, it works. Those kinds of people usually tend to be celebrity geeks of some kind. For me, I’ve found what I’ve needed, and I’ll just stick with that. I’m also not discounting the sites out there. There are sites that I love (e.g. Flickr) that work well for me. I just think there is an oversaturation of the market right now. It is a market I would like to join, but I want to be sure that I join the right one. Everyone can jump on the bandwagon, but it’s not a wise decision without having the foresight to see where you’re going.