Steve Rubel has a good post on information overload and the web 2.0 bubble. He claims that humans have an attention capacity - it’s impossible to pay attention to all the info that’s thrown at us day after day; therefore, some of the thousands Web 2.0 startups and services will inevitably have to fail.

While I do agree that it’s becoming pretty much impossible to follow everything that happens on the Web 2.0 front, and I too have felt this personally, being unable to process the dozens of new startups that appear every day, I don’t think this is cause for concern.

In many ways, I see Web 2.0 as a second IT renaissance. Remember the time when computers were really young? Writing a good desktop application that solves some problems could get you far; unlike today, when it seems that everything has already been done to death.

Now, the same thing is happening - on the web. Thousands of ideas are being realized on the web because developers see new potential there; it’s a fresh new playground, and sometimes merely making a web version of a desktop application can be enough for (moderate) success.

So, why do we, the Web 2.0 followers, feel like it’s too much? Well, because we’ve been following it all. From online photo editors to Twitter tools to RSS mixers to online operating systems.

In many ways, following all this is like following all desktop software. Imagine a blog with the caption: a blog about software. Sounds a bit vague, right? A bit too broad in scope? Well, that’s what many of us who write about web startups are trying to do: report on every new service and application that uses web as a platform. There’s simply too many of them, and you can either hire more people and try to do a big comprehensive site that follows everything; find a niche, or focus on stuff that you find really valuable.

It might be a little inconvenient for us bloggers, but it’s our problem. Web 2.0 is doing fine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Web, Web 2.0, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.