In recent times, I have been watching the kind of companies being floating in the Web 2.0 space. While this cannot be a complete representation of current Web 2.0 scene, a lot of them  do not seem very impressive:

1. WooMe.com - This website is all about online speed dating. Like the normal in-person speed dating, users can group and speed-date. Later, they can exchange contact information online and take it further - the website charges you only when you are exchanging contact information. Now, I cannot see a reason for this being an absolute success. Users on social networks and chat messengers are already weary of meeting wierd and unpredictable people online - cant imagine people taking this up. Interestingly, this company was selected to feature on the 2007 TechCrunch40.

2. Faroo.com - A German company providing peer to peer search. Hereby, users would be the search engine crawlers as web pages they visit will be indexed on their systems. Other users performing search would retrieve resutls based on these indexes. Ranking of the pages will be performed by something they call "PeerRank". Hereby, user’s behavior when visiting that page will be observed and rank value for that indexing will be determined based on this. While this distributed search offers a great advantage of no hardware cost - no crawlers, it appears to be leaving just too much to users, especially when the only reason users are going to subscribe to Faroo is for this P2P search.  It intends to share revenue with users to get them in - but we’ve seen shared advertisement short-cut to success fail too many times in past. Again - this one was featured on TechCrunch40 2007.

No qualms with TechCrunch40 2007. And I completely realize that it a fertile environment - 1 out of 1000 innovative ideas succeed - and for that one successful innovation, it is important to have the rest 1000 innovations - but the fact that these  are the kind of products exhibited on TechCrunch40 gives a representation of where we are heading. From what I know, a lot of products do not even get chance to be featured on TechCrunch blog - so many more would have been rejected from being featured on this demo - just to get an idea what those rejected ones would be upto!

I’ve been a big beleiver that a lot of Web 2.0 stuff has been important and valuable advancement - rich interfaces (AJAX), tagging, collaborative environments, social networks, better advertisement models, exposed interfaces for cross-application integration and so on. But, often a bad use of these Wonders of Web disappoints in a big way.