Over the last several months the web 2.0 community has been awash with news about new programs that will make your social experience so much better. Socialthing!, Ping.fm, FriendFeed, Twhirl, Alert Thingy, Spaz, TwitKit (which I actually kind of like, even if it’s missing direct messaging capabilities) and on and on and on have been the talk of the web 2.0 diaspora for quite a while.
Questioning Aggregation
So is it wrong to ask the question, is the web 2.0 development community becoming too focused on aggregation as opposed to innovation? Is this a sign of stagnation in the social media space? Granted, there have been some innovations, but most of them have been little more than functionality improvements to existing sites. FlickR video is an upgrade for sure, but it’s not a new service. MySpace’s API is little more than an attempt at keeping up with Facebook’s current offerings. It seems like everyday someone comes up with a new tool for Twitter (twitter clouds, quotably, outtwit, etc…,) yet, these are not innovative, they simply allow you to easily retrieve existing information.
To be fair, I am not a developer. I have no desire to be a developer, and perhaps that means that I should keep my mouth shut and just accept what I’m given; well, that’s not going to happen. Please don’t think that this is a direct criticism of any developer out there, it is not. I am a tool junkie just like anyone else in this space. I try out these new tools as soon as I can get my hands on them (or an invite to the beta) and I love what many of them do.
Perhaps it’s not the development that has become stagnant, perhaps it is more directly linked to what we as users want from our web 2.0 experience. Many of us in this community are obsessed with information (I know that I am) and many of the tools that have been given to us help us to amass huge amounts of it. But at what point do we simply turn into information hoarders? At what point is there just too much information to house, absorb, react to? Hell, sometimes it’s impossible to keep track of a single conversation on Twitter, let alone trying to keep track of the information being dropped into the feed every 3 minutes, and don’t even get me started on RSS feeds.
I guess what I’m asking is this: Are web 2.0 users at the leading edge of it’s obsession with information collection? If so, are we the reason that development in the web 2.0 arena has diverted from creating new tools for opening up our worldview to creating tools that allow us to track our own activity? As a web 2.0 junkie, this trend is definitely unsettling. I wonder if the steps forward we have taken in embracing and participating in an ever widening social sphere is slowly turning inward toward narcissism and solipsistic tendencies?
I don’t think that web 2.0 creates narcissistic tendencies, I think it is merely the newest outlet for them (my own included). What concerns me is whether or not they will take over this exciting new form of media. The Web 2.0 sphere is no stranger to dogmatic tendencies, yet, at its core it is essentially anti-dogmatic. The goal of new media is to create information at a volume never before considered, allowing infinite vantage points for every possible situation. However, people tend to gravitate towards those who share their own worldview, regardless of its accuracy. Web 2.0 has not yet become an arena of black and white, but is it becoming one?
I suppose it all comes down to whether or not we, as users, are willing to drink the kool-aid, especially when we’re the ones upending the bottle of arsenic.
Greg Hollingsworth is a marketer and blogger who also writes about politics on Devil’s In The Details.
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