It's ridiculous over inflation of Facebook's worth has gotten even the optimistic to say that the emperor has no clothes. Social networking and widgets are cool, but they aren't going to change the dynamics of commerce and advertising.
On this point, I totally agree with M.Gartner. From a financial perspective, the over inflation of some innovations, or in fact, not so innovations than better repackaging of existing inventions, is ridiculous. Facebook is, for the most part, a fancier version of the old closed BBS's environments. While Dot-com 1.0 was all about growing the largest client-base, even if totally unqualified; Dot-com 2.0 is about gaining as more attention as possible. And it appears the concept of "attention economy" is one of my favorite. Except here, the concept is screwed toward pure capitalism based on money and market, as M.Goldhaber flamed about in his post "The Wrong Book". Here's, in short, what Goldhaber says about the attention economy:It is an economy in the sense that it involves allocating of what is most scarce and precious in the present period, namely the attention that can come to each of us from other human beings.Could Web 2.0 be something else than rich media, social media, network as a platform, AJAX, consumer generated content and all those fancy ways of reaching the end goal: attention?
Gartner ends his post with:
Blame the ongoing war, the lead-tainted toys, the housing and mortgage collapse, and volatile days on Wall Street. Uncertainty across the board is about to investments Web 2.0 companies hard.Again true, just like Bubble 1.0 economics, stretched Bubble 2.0 economics will be a thing of the past. What will remain are the concepts and the tools to help businesses, and ultimately people, be more efficient.