Not all of the nominations have made me want to put down my coffee mug and smash my face against the keyboard: there have been some absolute gems in there as well. However, my patience has worn incredibly thin after two days of playing with hopelessly badly-designed websites and reading the drivel that currently passes for business plans. Something that should be enjoyable – investigating innovative online startups – has become an exercise in trying not to cringe so hard that I give myself a headache. Where does the money come from to sustain a business based upon badly copying a theme that has been done so many times before?
Of course, I am not talking about Flickr, Upcoming, Yelp, Last.fm, or Zoho. I’m not citing any of those smart, well-designed, useful services, or their smart, well-designed, useful competitors. What I’ve been faced with in the last forty-eight hours are their painful copies. The most painful are those that attempt to copy Ning, “allowing users to create their own social networks.” I have lost count of how many sites I’ve seen that want us to create our own social network on their hallowed servers. The only conclusion I can draw is that these companies can’t create anything worthwhile, but know enough web development (but only just) to create a platform so that other people can create content for them. While all sites that include user participation stand to profit off the contribution of others, I’ve been simply astounded at how many of these sites provide virtually nothing other than a way for the public to build up the companies’ link profiles and PageRanks.
How they do this is pretty simple. These sites have acquired funding using the hot air that keeps the web 2.0 bubble full and floating. You’ve seen the words they use; most of us were rolling our eyes at terms like “creating synergy” a long time ago. Now, every second sentence looks like a massive cliché. The latest phrase that makes me want to start drinking whiskey at work is “allows users.” Every second nomination has been telling me the incredible things it “allows users” to do. One of them allows users to submit menus! Christ, imagine that! Another is very excited about how it “allows users to define the important information they need, while on the go!” I’ve probably used the phrase in the past to describe the functions of a website. I’ll never use it again. To me, it now reeks of the tired and the overused.
I don’t understand how people can create and promote these sites with straight faces. Social news sites – both niche and generic – pile up on top of each other, each “story” sitting dormant with one vote. Social networks boast their “featured profiles,” most of which have no picture, no personal information, and whose owners will never visit the site again. Every tagging and bookmarking site is astounded by its own ingenuity, as it studiously does the same things as its peers. Scores of websites want to hear your travel stories, see your videos, and know which music you like to hear. Visiting some of these domains is like looking at the empty main street of a boring town.
We made jokes about rounded corners over a year ago, but it seems that people still believe that if their site looks like an iPod, it will be an unbridled success.
In addition to the fantastic finds and the abysmal failures, I have come across a few sites that have interested me. What is problematic is that most of the “interesting” sites caught my attention for the wrong reasons. FoxiFly, which promised to let me “see which of my friends are online, chat to them through my browser and see where they are browsing around the web at the moment,” managed to put the fear of teh internetz into me by making me think that it already knew who I was, let alone which websites my friends were looking at.
I assume that FoxiFly has a following of some sort and that people actually use the service, but the idea that my friends should know which sites I’m looking at doesn’t appeal to me. In regards to their other web-based applications, I already have instant messengers and a telephone. I’m quite sure that I could get in touch with almost everyone I know at any time of the day without this site. FoxiFly promises to let me check multiple email accounts from anywhere on the web… which is exactly the system I already have, using Gmail and Gtalk. As an aside, these sites that promise to let us do things “from anywhere on the web” apparently have not yet discovered that Firefox and Internet Explorer, plus most browsers, now support tabs, whereby we can have our email accounts open while we’re out there in the tubes. I already have very efficient versions of most of its other features as well, such as bookmarking, content aggregation, and social browsing.
The site, which is actually pretty great in terms of what I’ve been looking at, promises to let me spy on my friends’ Internet activity, add yet another instant messaging application to list instant messaging applications I’ve been amassing since 1999, check my emails in more than one window, and have my friends know when I’m snooping the Livejournal page of a girl I knew when I was 18 and no longer like. So basically, it combines redundancy with epic undesirability. This holds true across the board of so many web 2.0 sites: even if they’re well-developed, the vast majority of their functions are useless.
Given that I am reviewing sites for a set of awards, there was another thing that occurred to me today: when you’re submitting your site for an award, it’s not a good move to piss off the person who reviews submissions. Probably aiming to copy a young Facebook, U of Info bills itself as a “free informational website designed for college students.” The site asks you to enter your school in order to gain access. Still wielding a university email address, I begin typing the name of my college. Things go well for about ten characters.
Two examples of weird, broken, or pointless websites. Reduce the quality and multiple that by one-hundred and fifty and you’ll see why I’m having a tough time retaining my composure.
Acknowledging the irony of this next section, I have an announcement to make: The deadline for submitting sites to the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards is this Friday. As I say above, buried within the caffeine-fueled rage, I’ve come across a couple of really awesome websites during the last two days. I implore you all to add to the “best of” list, rather than create for me some more misery. Once I’m done with the nominations list, I’ll be seriously trawling the net for these good sites (as will Danny: I love assigning tasks to the intern). Do let us know which sites you guys think are deserving of recognition!
To end this fun, I present you with a quiz. Below are five descriptions of web 2.0 sites. Four of the options are slight modifications of real websites’ descriptions. The modifications simply cut out factors that would identify the site in question. I made up one of the descriptions five minutes ago in an attempt to create a nasty web 2.0 cliché. Please don’t cheat. That way, it’s more fun for everyone. See if you can pick which one is mine!
