Web 2.0

I’m a pretty poor technology evangelist because I don’t get amazingly excited over Web 2.0 startup gadgets that so many in my industry find cool. I’m not sure why; I have all of the other required traits of a guru in this space, but somewhere along the line I didn’t obtain the “be awed by new uses of technology” gene.

I think it has something to do with the practical side of my brain kicking in and wondering what good it really does me. The intellectual side does admire the obvious clever thinking and hard work that went into it… but a collection of tagged photos for people I’ve never met but would like to but only in a professional sense? I don’t know… it just doesn’t sing to me.

Perhaps it all started when, as a young child, I would watch Saturday Morning cartoons. I remember clearly a Play-Dough commercial where children could buy a plastic mold set and make McDonalds food out of Play-Dough. I remember thinking, “What good is that? You can’t eat the Play-Dough”. This part was true, although other children in the neighborhood seemed to eat the Play-Dough anyway. At the time I realized it was perhaps a bad idea to be selling a tool to make an inedible product look like food.

Much of the Web 2.0 widget tools remind me of the McDonalds Play-Dough tool. Pretty, and they do serve a purpose, but perhaps not a purpose that anyone really needs or perhaps should even be offered. The big difference is that most adults (one hopes) realized that the Play-Dough was just a toy and shouldn’t be treated as anything more than that.

In terms of the widgets, I don’t think the shoe has dropped for most people who chase after them like the proverbial day-glo orange and purple Play-Dough hamburgers they can’t ever eat.