Snake Oil 2.0

So evil Yahoo bought delicio.us, a collaborative tagging website. The usual suspects have been writing lots of crap about “Web 2.0” over the last few years, about how it was going to turn us into a hive mind and free our souls, or something similar. Sites like this that used lots of tagging were, apparently, the Answer to some great Question, online harbingers of some kind of cybernetic Rapture.

Notwithstanding the booster drivel, it both amuses and saddens me that “Web 2.0” is indeed turning out to be just another exit strategy and key hype spew for tool makers, as was predicted by naysayers all along.

Yahoo is where good ideas go to die in its evil, uncaring corporate bosom of anti-user hostility. EGroups. Geocities. Broadcast. The list goes on and on.

When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements – the invention of some new valve or sprocket – while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism
(Julian Barnes – Flaubert’s Parrot)

The young and the naive at least have an excuse for credulous optimism. Those old enough to know better usually *do* know better, but have a vested interest in the whole bubble boosterism.