I’m convinced the Web 2.0 bubble will impact soon. Granted, some will survive, some will struggle - but some will just blow up. Time to sell for these. There are several reasons why I believe this will happen “soon”:

  • Too many clones. How many facebook/linkedin/xing/studivz/… clones can you name? We could make a “Memory” (aka: Concentration, Pairs) type of game from them…
  • Too little benefit - did you actually have some benefit from these services except being able to show off how many people you know?
  • Many of the web2.0ish stuff is just pretty graphics with no real use. How many of the tag clouds you see are actually useful? On the contrary, how many of these new sites have accessibility issues?
  • Privacy issues - you’ve probably seen the bad press MySpace has recently been getting because of stalking and even paedophiles.
  • Content issues - I’ve heard of child pornography been uploaded to e.g. MyVideo (a YouTube clone popular in Germany, since it’s doing huge advertising and is on TV), and them taking multiple days to remove it. I wouldn’t be suprised if that happens with YouTube as well, but they probably are faster in reviewing and deleting such contents.
  • Licensing issues - there was a lawsuit started agains RapidShare, and they probably are bigger than the P2P filesharing networks by now. They’re proud of having 80 GBit bandwidth, and I assume 95% of their traffic is actually violating copyright. They try to get out by claiming of having no control over their users content, but that is bullshit. They make a living of having people download this stuff from them.
    Also when I recently browsed MyVideo a bit, it seemed to have like 95% of videos that either come from some TV or have been on the net somewhere else for years; most definitely violate someones copyright. But so far, noone has been caring enough, apparently.
  • Security issues - Javascript and webbrowsers aren’t well-suited for writing reliable and secure programs. Face it. We’re already seeing the first attacks on the Google API, expect much more of these attacks to surface. I wouldn’t be surprised if spammers already make heavy use of such APIs to harvest email addresses.

Many people have been keeping an hungry eye on YouTube, Rapidshare and others. It’s just a matter of time until some of these predators goes for the kill.

My predictions for the post-web2.0-bubble time:

  • User content will be restricted to plain text unless you register and verify your ID, so if you upload copyrighted material, the owners can go right for the user that uploaded.
  • Privacy will be a key feature of services, maybe some privacy service providers will surface, that allow you to have a verified ID without exposing it directly to the web service, or having to verify again and again for different services. However phishing will be even more of a threat then.
  • More restrictions for unregistered users means lower eyeballs, which in turn means less advertising money and thus less services that can be offered completely for free; however many services do not work as crippleware.
  • APIs on the web will largely go away again. A specification for making them safe for scripting will be underway, but only supported in Firefox 3+
  • True client applications will come back. Vista with C# and Mono on Linux allow for such applications to be written much easier, and they will not suffer from the browser security restrictions. Why would you write a web-based word processor fighting with HTML limitations, the JavaScript language and browser security when you can do it much easier in C#?