twopointouch

Tim O’Reilly says “Web 2.0 is not about these bubble companies, it’s about the new approaches we are trying.” Try has he might to focus on leveraging and intersecting databases, the world prefers lists of sites with funny names. Perhaps we ought to call this the digg world to avoid confusion.

Wired news publishes a quickie article about the winners and losers in what it calls the Web 2.0 world. Author Michael Calore introduces the list, which is actually a subset of another list:

There are plenty of good ideas in the Web 2.0 world, and an even greater number of bad ones. In the interest of brevity, I’ve chosen five sites from each category. The web services industry certainly has more than five winners and five losers, so we’ve only highlighted the exemplars.

Winners:

flickr
odeo
writely
deli.icio.us
netvibes

Losers:

myspace
squidoo
browzar
fo.rtuito.us
friendster

Haven’t got any problems with the winners, though we don’t know enough about their balance sheets to seriously rate them. But MySpace is a loser, is it? Reason given: it’s ugly. ZeFrank has, as usual, something clever to say, “Ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.” I agree, but even if you don’t buy that idea, their numbers aren’t bad either. They project $350mn revenues this year and $700mn next, moving into profit about now. If only we could all lose as badly as that.

Friendster? That would be the Friendster that just secured an extra $10mn in funding, would it? The one that also secured a potentially very lucrative patent on elements of most social networks? What losers…

And Squidoo is a failure, eh? I’d say that building a library for children in Cambodia, and giving thousands of dollars every month to other charities is a pretty solid success.

Ermm.. and how exactly is browzar a web 2.0 service? It’s a wrapper for Internet Explorer that may (or more likely may not) improve your online security. Not exactly ‘web as platform’ in my book.

I’ll give them fo.rtuit.us - the service introduces you to complete strangers on a random basis - and then you’re supposed to talk to them online for four weeks. A bit like speed-dating without the speed, or the drinking, and quite possibly the worst social network idea ever.