Web 2.0 Companies That Probably Shouldn’t Exist

For every great Web 2.0 company, service, or application, there are probably 5 or 10 that shouldn't exist. I'd be willing to bet that they don't even have a business plan.

Here are my latest "wasting bandwidth" award winners:

Can't get enough of Google Street View? Streetviewr is a cutesy little app that allows you to submit funny and bizarre pictures found on Google Street View. Considering the fact that Street View itself has no inherent value, piggybacking on top of it is just redundant. I find nothing funny about Google slowly but surely turning into Big Brother, but 234 (at the time of writing this) digg users and Center Networks apparently disagree.

Again, 2.0 companies on top of 2.0 companies. InviteShare provides a handy little train of invites like a pyramid scheme. You get an invite from someone already in a private beta, then share your invites with more InviteShare users. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch thinks this is just fantastic, but all it's going to do is limit private betas even more so that people don't even GET invites at all. You'll have to beg and plead with the companies who are testing their products to give one to you for the purposes of research. I'm assuming that any possible business plan here says something like:

1. Create pyramid scheme for beta invites. Users come in droves.
2. Companies catch on and stop giving invites to all beta testers.
3. End service within six months.

Catchy, isn't it? I also think it may be misnamed. A better name would have been MetaBeta.

A friend sent Moody to me today, knowing my love of tagging things for better organization as well as my horribly eclectic iTunes library which ranges from the Asylum Street Spankers to the Miss Saigon Original Broadway Soundtrack to Yo-Yo Ma and just about everything in between. In theory? Moody sounds great. You can tag the songs in your iTunes library by your mood, so that you can create random playlists by your mood, mixing Nina Simone with some melancholy R.E.M. and the soundtrack from The Piano. The problem? Moody relies on a grid of colored boxes to assign the "mood." It's supposed to be a sliding scale of sad to happy and calm to intense, but I can't remember which scale goes where, and there isn't any helpful hover to remind me. Since I don't generally think in colors, it's completely useless (although pretty) and tedious to try to remember that you assigned the puce to "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" when you get to tagging "Everybody Hurts."