What's wrong with web 2.0?

There are a few very interesting posts on web 2.0 that I'd like to point your attention to.  First, there is Seth Porges' well-written reminder about how lazy we all are in The Futurist: Will Human Laziness Burst The Web 2.0 Bubble? 

He starts by defining the problem:

If the defining trait of the first Web cycle was the stupid animated GIF, the current “It” sites all have one thing in common: They are, to varying degrees, reliant on user-generated content. Without your neighbor/classmate/sister/girlfriend’s tireless devotion to keeping her profile up-to-date, MySpace would merely be a place for FOX to promote its properties. Without a horde of news junkies yearning to see their username in digital print, Digg would be an ugly page of yellow and white (and their new profile feature would be a joke).

He then goes through a thoughtful observation about how people migrate from one social networking site to the next -- first Friendster, then MySpace, and now Facebook.  He concludes:

And that is why the Web 2.0 era will come to end sooner rather than later. Because if there is one immutable law of humankind, it is that we are really, really lazy [...] The point is, it is hard work keeping up with these things. And there will be a point down the line when, even if it’s not done in a collective shrug, the Web world will just say “screw it”, and update their pages more and more seldom, until Facebook resembles Friendster.

Then the brilliant Alexander van Elsas stepped in with a great post called  The flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them.  He agrees with Seth's laziness theory up to a point, but then he disagrees (and this is where user experience comes into play):

But, I don’t think that is the only reason why web 2.0 is flawed. A much more important reason why most web 2.0 platforms will not be sustainable in the end is that they were essentially not build to provide true value to its users, but instead they were build to create and leverage the value of a large network! The larger the network, the more value it creates to the platform owner in terms of advertisement revenues and of course the possible take over by one of the larger companies which have too much money to spend anyway. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t really help the user. Users are putting much more energy and creativity into the networks than they get out of it. Be honest, have you really gotten as much value from other (often unknown) “friends” on Facebook, Myspace etc than the amount of effort you have put into this?

I agree with his opinion that we're currently not getting as much value out of social networking sites as we should, but I disagree with his viewpoint on why that is the case.  As I've written before here and here, the social capital embedded in networks are extremely beneficial to users - if they have the right connections (read my earlier post for an explanation of structural holes non-redundant contacts).

In my opinion, the network is what it's all about for the user -- the network is the need.  That is where they will draw their information benefits and control benefits from.  The flaw is not that social networking sites focus too much on the network, it's that the user experience does not allow them to tap the full potential of their networks.  As I've written before:  access and use of the resources in a network are dependant on an actor being aware of their presence.  If an actor is not aware of ties or relationships between him and other actors, he cannot use the resources available to him. Social capital then seems not to exist, and will only come into existence for that actor once he becomes aware of it.  The user experience needs to help with this discovery for social networking sites to become truly valuable and fulfill the user needs that Alexander talks about.

As for the solution to this dilemma, I am in full agreement with Rolf Skyberg on the creation of an open social network (read his brilliant post on the topic here).  But only if we get the user experience right, and that is going to be the tricky part, of course.  It needs to be an experience and an interface that allows people to identify the most important actors in the network, and tap into the benefits of those networks easily and without boundaries.  And it needs to do that without relying on too much user input because, come on, we're lazy!