Why this Season of Web 2.0 Discontent?

Has Web 2.0 lost it's sparkle? Finding multiple posts suggest an intriguing trend.

At Techcrunch, Robin Wauter uses a barometer of declining number of startups contacting his company and including the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message as an indicator suggesting the "Death of Web 2.0".

Beyond this Wauters looks to Google trends for insight into Web 2.0 interest:

".. the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started - with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0″ by the way - and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for 'Web 2.0' by 2011."

I've added a note to my 2011 calendar to test that prediction. Meantime, seriously, where does Web 2.0 stand? Where do we look for clues to declining Google search interest in Web 2.0? And what new is capturing attention?

A February 2009 McKinsey Quarterly article "Six ways to make Web 2.0 work" provides helpful insights?  It reports McKinsey's study of 50 Web 2.0 early adopters over the past two years and finds:

"Our work suggests the challenges that lie ahead. To date, as many survey respondents are dissatisfied with their use of Web 2.0 technologies as satisfied."

The article goes on to describe the impediments dissenters cite:

"..organizational structure, the inability of managers to understand the new levers of change, and a lack of understanding about how value is created using Web 2.0 tools. We have found that, unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or to reach expected heights of usage. Executives who are suspicious or uncomfortable with perceived changes or risks often call off these efforts. Others fail because managers simply don’t know how to encourage the type of participation that will produce meaningful results."

The rest of the article is recommended reading especially as it reiterates the case that Victoria Axelrod and I will be making Monday to our FOWA workshop participants. Successful technology development and adoption demand both focus on engaging stakeholders in the business improvement to be gained and a deep understanding of the human networks on whose success they depend.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Comments

[Olivier Amprimo]

Hi Jenny,

The fact that guys over at Techcrunch talk about the death of 2.0 probably is probably a good news for the RoW. One way to understand it is that it moves away from the buzz zone so that finally we can work decently on social computing.
Now the McKinsey survey reports a very classical situation where things fail because they are not implemented by the right persons and consequently the right way. What happens in most organisations is that 2.0 is implemented top down and the tools are considered as commodities. The implementation of 2.0 is done the 1.0 way. People implement blogs and wikis or whatever 2.0 exactly like they implemented emails and office packs. They simply don't get that the know how is not in the soft, but in the situated implementation.
In fact what happens is that we have lazy and/or uneducated managers* who keep on the old Taylorist approach while it should be the Taylorian one going on. Taylorism is the misunderstanding of Taylor's work: a recipe instead of a method. Taylor's methodology is to understand how people work and how can it be implemented. It is in fact a very grassroots and informed approach. As long as we have these guys in command, any attempt to make things better and efficient is meant to fail.

* going out from the best B-School definitely is not the warranty for quality people. It is just a marker. (so on recruitment too, there is some work to do)