Investors and entrepreneurs seem to be getting sick of web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the internet as we know it today. More precisely, these are the internet technologies that let us connect with one another on social networks. People are beginning to realise that the amount of value that can be created by connecting people online, is not much. Especially keeping in mind that India alone has more than 25 of its own YouTubes, a dozen social networks and an online population of about 50 million or 5%. With the looming economic crisis as a backdrop, a 10-day old Harvard blog post said – “Today’s investors, boardrooms and entrepreneurs are looking for value in all the wrong places. Facebook’s game of musical chairs won’t solve big economic problems — and neither will making token investments in greentech.” Five days ago a New York-based venture capitalist wrote the following in his blog post, Am I bored with Web 2.0? —
“I am a bit jealous of friends who are working on finding and funding alternative energy or biomedical technologies that have the potential to address the serious problems facing the world. At times, it seems that helping the web become more social, intelligent, mobile, and playful is not as impactful.” Though the social media sector was considered hot a year ago, today’s scenario is very different. The Indian realisation of this can be seen in entrepreneur blog posts, like Are you guilty of not solving the world’s problems? In this post, a young Indian entrepreneur writes, “Aren’t there enough web mashups already? Do you really need to create yet another social network? Web entrepreneurs today are so hallucinated by their own culture that they have forgotten that there is a whole range of important problems to be solved for which the internet is not necessarily the panacea.” It seems investors will have to wait for web 3.0 now.