Web 2.0! Exciting!

For a while now, I’ve been wondering why the term “Web 2.0″ has become popular, and because of whom. It certainly seems content-free from a technical standpoint. Most of the people I know working on the technology consider the term– along with “AJAX”– to be anywhere from meaningless to beneath contempt.

Then someone sent me a real-estate related article about the “resurging” office-space market in SoMa in San Francisco, for “Web 2.0″ businesses.

And I suddenly realised that “Web 2.0″ means “Internet Bubble 2.0, the Sequel”, and the “audience” for the term is those who, keeping in mind the phrase “you can’t cheat an honest man”, are both predators and prey in the 2.0 swindle.

It’s Sand Hill Road. It’s VC’s and investment banks.

As in: “Remember that great Web bubble in the 90’s? Yeah, we made out like bandits! Then the suckers who were dumb enough to stay in too long lost their asses. Well, ho ho ho, guess what? It’s coming back! It’s a sequel! Get in now! It’s Web 2.0. Buy, buy buy!”

1.0 was Pets.com and that ilk. 2.0 is Fleeble, Zlorkpu, Bramski, and Glorkle, or whatever the names of these dumb-ass companies is nowadays.

I suppose that the hangers-on of the industry– like the trade press, real estate agents and developers, executive recruiters, etc.– are also similarly interested in a “New! Improved!” version of the late 1990’s, and similarly excited by “Web 2.0″.

It’s been 6 years now since I left that circus. I will never go back. My “President’s Day” thought this year was that there should be a picture of P.T. Barnum on the U.S. Dollar instead of George Washington.