It's Gonna Blow! The Critical Mass of Web 2.0

Yes, this poor woman is drunk. She's just discovered the existence of slush --

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html

-- and now she's convinced that the entire universe is made of tightly packed quantum units of idiocy. It's an understandable reaction. I believe that professional editors (see link, above) actually use the technical term "slush drunk". I hope she sobers up soon.

Fortunately, a pile of poorly conceived websites will not "blow", no matter how large that pile is. There is no "critical mass". It just doesn't matter (except to the people who are bold enough to volunteer to review them individually) that the world contains 2,000, or 20,000, or 200,000 stupid websites. At worst, we all just ignore them. At best, they employ webhosts, and sysadmins, and programmers -- it's like complaining that the oceans are too dirty because there are too many bacteria and plankton everywhere.

But one of the things the web does well is ensure that it's really easy to sit at your desk and make a list of 10,000 crappy businesses. It used to be fairly difficult to make a big list of crappy businesses -- they don't last long, by definition, and most of them don't have a high profile, by definition. Now you can find twenty of them before breakfast. Submissions like this one practically write themselves.

The end point is that businesses, whether Web 1.0, Web 2.0, or what have you, need both a good idea and to have it be executed well. Trying to believe that the business is immune to those laws just because it is executed over the Internet is asinine. The people who found these companies and the people who invest in them will get burned.

And they should. And it will be good for the industry.

...Flickr, of course, being a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. I can't speak for the other sites she mentions, but they are probably all highly derivative.