A couple of days ago at the Sour Herring dinner at Lund one of my companions at the table said that he did not believe in Web 2.0. Interaction, he said, was overrated. Most of us around the table took the remark as humor and we were satisfied with this.
But the remark has been gnawing at the back of my mind. Do I believe in Web 2.0?
At first this may seem like a strange question, coming from me. I blog and participate in other blogs. I have set up and run wiki’s and used these technologies in the classroom, in research and with friends. Still the question is rather valid.
No blogs and wiki’s don’t require that you believe in them. If they are useful they will be used. I enjoy them and use them as a central part of my work (and play). But what about the more typical social networking sites?
Just to name a few I am a member at Technorati, Linkedin and Facebook. I have even upgraded my free account on flickr to pro (which means I am paying money for it). Besides flickr the usefulness of the others is unclear to me. Technorati is not much of a social networking site it is more of an aggregator for blogs – so let’s move on.
Linkedin seems to be a more formal social networking site based upon professional contacts. It is not really designed to encourage wide scale use. Facebook on the other hand it something quite different.
Facebook is a huge social networking site where people are actively encouraged to collect friends and interact with them by comparing films, music and books. The site encourages users to play games with each other such as the presently popular war of the vampires.
With all these applications I can really see that users can spend literally hours online finding and interacting with their online friends but after some testing I still am struck by the sensation or feeling: What is the point of facebook? It is surprising to see how many people are using it – in particular its appeal the the large group of non-techie or non-Web 2.0 crowd. But I still don’t really get it. What is the allure of this site? What need or desire does the site fulfill?
Or is it simply that the social interaction between friends, even in an online virtual forum, is the whole point. Oh well, I would like to analyze this further but unfortunately I need to update my profile 🙂