“What’s the point of Web 2.0?”

That was the question that I found myself answering on the way back from Atlanta, Georgia this weekend.

What was my response? I gave the only answer that made any sense at all to me at the time, “You know, there isn’t really one.”

There isn’t a point? How could that be!

Before you get too worked up, let’s take a look at why.

Why We Make Products

The “point” of any product is either to entertain or aid — for the vast majority of people, Web 2.0 products do neither. Don’t believe me? Let me illustrate with just one example.

Imagine if you spent your entire life protecting your private information from prying eyes. Hiding away the odds and ends about ourselves is a common past time for the pre-email generation. Back in antiquity, your check book was something to be squirreled away, and your little black book was to be hidden in a desk drawer.

Now imagine if someone introduced you to Google Calender or Mint. Other than a quick laugh as you try to fathom what type of insane person would broadcast their most important personal information across the Internet, what use could you draw from these products?

The answer is none. The problem isn’t necessarily that these products aren’t safe, it’s that they work against behavior that has been hardwired into our psyche. One of the first rules of product design is that where possible, don’t try to fight sociology. Moreover, if you are going to wage a war against human psychology, do it elegantly. Most Web 2.0 product design assumes that the world at large behaves in a way that it simply does not.

While this is a fantastic way to build a product that is designed to stop scaling as soon as it saturates the early adopter market, it is a terrible way to design an application that has to cross over into the mainstream. Here are a few more Web 2.0 maxims that fall flat on their face when seen without Valley Goggles on.

• Privacy is dead.
• People want to move their applications onto the web.
• Virtual communication is somehow more effective than “face time.”
• Social Graph, Crowdsourcing, Social Media are meaningful concepts.

There is probably a books worth other false maxims out there, but at the end of the day the only solution for a product designer is to take a step back from the Web 2.0 reality distortion field and to start looking for real problems to solve again.

Web 2.0 Roundup

• Why did Wikipedia work? It helped real people find real information.
• Why did Email work? It helped real people communicate.
• To a lesser degree, why did Facebook/MySpace work? Communication again.

Do you see the pattern here? Successful Web 2.0 products take simple, real problems that would benefit from the web and they build solutions around them. It’s not technology, it’s not features, it’s not brand power — it’s real problems and easy to use solutions. That’s the answer. Until we start understanding this, the point of Web 2.0 will continue to be a whole lot of nothing.

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