Web 2.0 and social overload

If Ajax was the most abused buzzword of 2005, then Web 2.0 has confidently staggered in to claim the title for 2006.

Suddenly everybody has a Web 2.0 company. You know the look: rounded corners, cheerful colors, enormous fonts, suspiciously shiny logos and a name apparently created by removing a few vowels from an ordinary English word.

And I admit it: I’m part of the problem. I upload photos to Flickr. I throw bookmarks into Del.icio.us. I check Digg to see what the hive mind has decided is important today. I watch ridiculous videos on YouTube. I discuss wine at Cork’d, browse photos at Zoomr, pretend to network professionally at Linkedin, investigate shopping at Crowdstorm, say hello at Socializr and scrobble my musical habits to Last.fm.

And those are just the ones I can remember. There are thousands of these things now, each enthusiastically inviting us to create yet another account, choose another username, upload another profile picture and tell another database what music we like, what we drink, what we buy and who our friends are.

Naturally, every successful idea immediately produces fifty nearly identical competitors. Del.icio.us alone has spawned enough clones to make you wonder whether anybody in Silicon Valley is still allowed to have an original thought.

Then there are the social bookmarking buttons. Tag this. Digg that. Save it here. Share it there. Every website now arrives decorated with a row of tiny colorful icons resembling the control panel of an aircraft designed by caffeinated monkeys. We are apparently expected to recognize all of them.

Icons of popular sites in the social web.

Meanwhile, the supposedly primitive old internet refuses to die. Forums, newsgroups, bulletin boards, communities and guest books are still out there, quietly doing what they’ve always done. They may lack gradients, rounded corners and venture capital, but somehow people continue talking to each other.

So perhaps the problem isn’t Web 2.0 itself. Perhaps it’s the sheer number of places demanding our attention. Right now the social web feels less like one connected network and more like wandering through a gigantic building where every room requires a different key.

The obvious solution is integration. Eventually some of these services will merge, identities will become portable and suddenly one login might unlock half the internet and your garage. Convenient? Absolutely. But there’s another side to that bargain.

Do we really want one single company knowing what we read, where we go, what we buy, what music we listen to, which photographs we take and who we know? One dark lord to sit on the toilet in Barad-dûr, gently caressing his precious ring to control us all. And what happens when all those innocent little databases start talking to each other? That may turn out to be the genuinely interesting part of Web 2.0.

The technology is easy. Figuring out how much of ourselves we’re willing to hand over in exchange for convenience, that could get messy.