CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

Web 2.0 is already dead

Ok — going out on a limb time.
My still stand­ing most dra­matic com­ment on tech­nol­ogy is still in the works, and that is the one back in 1999 when I said that Microsoft would be dec­i­mated in 10 years.
Trends show­ing that are the con­stant delay of Vista, the impend­ing over-run of Macs and the decen­tral­iza­tion of equip­ment.
Now for my next dra­matic com­ment:
Web 2.0 is already dead
Here’s why.
First, the social phe­nom­e­non is one that is dri­ven towards con­nec­tion and person-to-person. What’s light­ing up Web 2.0 is not a mea­sure of how great the Web is for get­ting peo­ple together, but how des­per­ate peo­ple are to feel con­nected in an oth­er­wise silent, lonely, and text heavy medium.
Web 2.0 isn’t a com­men­tary on how great the Inter­net is going to be for bring­ing peo­ple together, it’s a com­men­tary for how lousy it HAS been to date in get­ting peo­ple together.
Con­grat­u­la­tions, peo­ple, you’ve dis­cov­ered that human beings are social ani­mals. A per­son alone is a bad thing, yes, just look at the drama of the movie “Cast­away”, it was the lone­li­ness that gave it ten­sion — we are born seek­ing con­nec­tion with each other. Duh.
So, for years, we’ve been using tech­nol­ogy that essen­tially dis­con­nects us, keeps us hid­den behind emails and text mes­sages. We’ve been so des­per­ate for con­nec­tion that we, as a soci­ety, invented smi­ley faces
So Web 2.0 isn’t the new rev­o­lu­tion, it’s just a relief from the orig­i­nal iso­lat­ing process.
A long time ago, I pointed out that all tech­nol­ogy is mov­ing towards one sit­u­a­tion — con­stant, freeform, face-to-face inter­per­sonal con­tact any­where at any time. That’s what we want. We want to be able to pick up the doohickey, push a but­ton and not only “chat at” a friend, or send a pic­ture, but actu­ally be with him her, see his/her body lan­guage, inter­act, touch, feel, smell, and be with that other per­son.
So what’s gonna hap­pen? A few decent tech­nolo­gies will bub­ble to the sur­face, no major killers … just a few web­sites that do some stuff — more along the lines of an Ebay than a new IM or email appli­ca­tion… and then it will drift off and be crushed by what’s really com­ing.
What’s really com­ing, you ask?
Video.
When the tech­nol­ogy to put video up with­out delay or hic­cup is in place, with qual­i­ties rival­ing cable TV, you can kiss the web good­bye.
When you can pick the doohickey up and see the baby’s first steps, chat in real time with your friend in Europe and/or store an expe­ri­ence eas­ily for later view­ing (and lis­ten­ing) … the web will fall into the same hole that ate BBSs and Gopher.
Web 2.0. That’s cute. You peo­ple really need to get a job.