What if you throw a Web 2.0 party and nobody comes?
The Giving Tree is an artifact of an era that later generations will contemplate with pity and horror. An era when many parents turned their children over to subminimum-wage workers by day, and told them stories like The Giving Tree during “quality time” at night. An era when hordes of American Boys and Girls pursued infantile fantasies and desires until they could eat, drink, and make merry no more. An era when many of us behaved like Tree-tolerant, indulgent, but not loving enough to call good and evil by name
- Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University.
No, this isn’t self-reflection, that won’t be in vogue until Pearl Jam and Primitive Radio Gods come back in style (Trust me, 90s nostalgia is already beginning to appear, I expect flannels at any moment). Rather, my own growing interest in ontologies has lead me to several examples of nearly dead and dying Web 2.0 ghost towns. I don’t mean everyone’s random blog about nonsense, I mean the big projects, where thoughtful people sat down at a Burlingame Starbucks and convinced some very wealthy people with poor fashion sense to give them some money.
Social networking requires, not surprisingly, community buy-in. These projects need to be popular for them to function. Otherwise it’s just another great or semi-decent (or, to be fair, just plain bad) idea like the thousands that litter Sourceforge. I’m sure there are several ones of you all sitting on the edge of your seats wondering, “What happened to the awesome artwork”, but for the one CTO in the back, who’s sweating through his pamona shirt, screaming “What do I do now that it’s clear my glorious social networking site no longer has any audience, and hence no relavence?!?!” I have answers. Let’s take a quick survey of the best ways to respond to your growing irrelevance.
1. You could just quit
Suck.com did.
I don’t really know if it constitutes as Web 2.0. Okay, I really do know that it doesn’t, but the best (And by best I mean most acerbic and park animal rehab-inducing) writing on the Internet closed up shop eight years ago, and all the monkeys editing all the MediaWiki pages on all the InterWebs will never match the wit of one Polly Esther.
2. The Lucky Penny Approach
You don’t need to quit, that would require leaving a message, a forwarding number, or at least an explanation. Instead, just leave your site, project or plans for world domination up and running, like you always have (Besides, it’s not like you’re paying so much for servers anymore–I’m pretty sure Friendster is running off a shared hosting account in Paraguay…) and maybe some day, someone will find your lost site, recognize its value, wipe it off, shine it up and carry through your initial vision. That last part is purely theoretical, of course, but if we assume that we really are just one of an infinite number of simulated realities, there’s a very good chance it will happen once in the entire history of the universe.
3. Redefine Community to Mean “You and Four Other Loonies”
Sure, Wikipedia operates with tens of thousands of registered users, but surely you could achieve the same thing with a handful of users who all have the energy, wit and wisdom of ten thousand people apiece. Or maybe that proves you’re just nuts.
4. Redefine Success as “Failure”
As a disclaimer, I said Citizendium was going to fail years ago, when it was but a twinkle in Larry Sanger’s eye. And it has failed. Think about all the times you’ve been on Citizendium and noticed the shoddiness of most of the articles, or the times you’ve entered into editorial disputes because you think your PhD came from a more rigorous insitution following a more quantitative vision of socio-historical study. What’s that, you mean you’ve never been on Citizendium? And you mean you aren’t one of the seven and a half contributors? Shocking! What are the chances? And yet, Dr. Sanger still thinks he’s really making something over there. Seriously, if you’ve had the kind of free press that Citizendium gets, despite its shockingly low popularity (Popularity has a deservedly bad rap, these days, but if you’re building an unpopular commons-based peer production project, that’s like building the next engine-less automobile) and you still haven’t accepted that you’re really just a vanity project, well, then you become case #4 in our, “How to assuage your unhappiness at the failure of your Web 2.0 project blog extravaganza!” Yes, I used ‘our’, it seemed to fit… And I’ve apparently changed the title of this blog post… How’s that for Web 2.0 functionality!
5. Tread Water Until Web 3.0
Constantly redesign yourself. Produce more mockups, more semantic web links, more theoretical immersion capability, you can fight, you can win! And, surely, your born-in-Web-2.0 project will not be quickly supplanted by newly synthesized Web 3.0 native projects. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check altavista for the release date of Encarta 2010.
Remember, only if we remember the failures of the past can we teach coping strategies to the failures of the future.
Brilliant post, Seven Lions. Over at MyWikiBiz.com, we’re basically going with # 3 on your list here. It’s just me, my sister, and few loonies. But, we’ve got semantic web extensions installed, so we’re sort of on the # 5 track, too.
Alexa says we’re getting in the ballpark of Citizendium’s traffic, but at least our site gets better page views per user, and a lower bounce rate. I try to be more fun than Larry Sanger. If I can succeed in doing that, then it’s worth it for me to keep MyWikiBiz open for business (it only costs about $18 a month to do so).
Again — good insight here.
The eternal pessimist would like to point out that YouTube is running an estimated $500 million annual loss.
http://www.slate.com/id/2216162/
And I’m not sure that 300 million terminally bored teenagers will actually pay money to see the latest comments on celebrity life some guy filmed on his cell phone. At least I really hope they won’t.
I think video has a place in communications, in many kinds of one-way communication that is not just white noise, but since more and more people seem to believe that video gadgets are cool, I see more and more links to annoying four-minute YouTube videos where a simple paragraph of text would have done nicely. Something I could have read in 10 seconds.
What Web 2.0 (3.0, 4.0; 5.0 expected to be declared by marketing bozos in late 2010) is about is reducing the signal-to-noise ratio because it’s, like, cool. Let them all go belly up, and then take a look at what we’ve really lost.