Web 2.0 is dead
A few weeks ago I participated as a speaker in a seminar at the University of San Jorge, together with Antonio, CEO of Cierzo Development, a startup in the region specialized in Web 2.0 technologies. We both had the opportunity to share our points of view on our tech fields with a group of CIO’s and other IT professionals, which was very interesting and rewarding.
I learned some new ideas from Antonio’s presentation and I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing with the rest of the world 
Antonio explained that there are more than 12,500 web sites with the words “Web 2.0 is dead” (12,501 by now) of people forecasting the burst of the Web 2.0 bubble. And it seems clear there is a bubble. Suffice it to compare Gartner’s technology adoption curve with Nasdaq’s index evolution during the dot.com bubble and the Google Trends results with the most popular Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook, Youtube, Lastfm (at their peak of inflated expectations) or Second Life (already at the trough of disillusionment). On the other hand, it is completely counterintuitive that Facebook, a social web site launched 4 years ago, is valued at a higher price than Ford, the car manufacturer.
And last week there came some news that seem to agree with Antonio’s predictions: Google admitted that monetizing social web sites is harder than expected, which, if confirmed with raw data, might hurt a lot the Web 2.0 industry and sink its revenue expectations:
“Social networks today, much like e-mail, are utility-like and often used as a communications platform. These types of channels have never monetized well with advertising.”
