O’Reilly Realized Web 2.0 Should Be Useful But Will It Be?

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York Tim O’Reilly, the person who coined the term “web 2.0″ (and the organizer of the conference itself) made a very interesting statement during his keynote. He decided to finally tell out loud what many of us have been thinking for a while and had our concerns about: he said that internet should finally become useful and focused on producing real value.

As an example O’Reilly used Facebook application SuperPoke to demonstrate that there must be something wrong with the entire web 2.0 when one of the most widely used Facebook applications (it has over 5 million active monthly users which kind of shows the scale here) is intended for users to throw sheep at each other and do tons of other equally meaningless things. And it is quite obvious that this should not be what the best minds in the internet industry work on. But unfortunately a huge number of such useless applications are developed everywhere with only occasional announcement of a service attempting to change the world.

So O’Reilly expressed a view that those bright minds of web developers should change their focus and do something useful instead of giving people yet another place to throw sheep and demonstrate to everyone willing to listen how good we are in throwing sheep (I’m talking about lifestreaming here and the number of places already in existence where we can perfect our lifestreaming skills).

But unfortunately I see a serious problem here: entrepreneurs and developers will build applications looking to get more people in and earn money off those people watching ads or paying for yet another way to listen to their favorite music with an additional level of comfort. And while business users are usually willing to pay for useful applications able to boost their productivity (and this is why when we look at the list of companies sponsoring conferences like Web 2.0 Expo, we will normally see enterprise-oriented companies there), end users will continue to enjoy entertainment tools same as they do now - and this demand will continue to be met with adequate supply of entertainment tools that will generate revenue for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

After all, web 2.0 has clearly become a big business now and the vast majority of businesses are about money, not about changing the world out of your free will to do something really good for the mankind. We do have non-profits in the real life and we also have a number of web projects trying to change the world (think Kiva or Free Rice) but they are non-profits as well - and you can not expect everyone to work not for profit.

So even if Tim O’Reilly acknowledges the need for a change and everyone agrees that we should change the focus and do something valuable with the resources we have, the majority of projects launched will still need to generate revenue, not some abstract real-life value - and if throwing sheep generates revenue better than feeding hungry people, we will still see equally stupid applications developed, no matter how sad that is.