Thanks

Check out the Web 3.0 Conference & Forum website for more information. I will be a speaker there and I'll be interested in the collective mood of the participants.

Just saying – supporting data portability is an important first step. Giving your users access to their data in a usable format after you close up shop – I guess we haven't gone there yet.

http://www.webomatica.com/wordpress/2008/01/09/...

It would cost them more resources to do that, though, and for a company going under, I'm sure money is pretty scarce (paying to code this, paying for additional servers to handle the load). But it would gain them trust that they could really use when they unveil their next project and hope people will use it.

Logins and passwords should be encrypted inside a database so that nobody can recover them in plaintext. And if this data was sold, well…there goes the credibility. Not only would I refuse to use any of their services ever again, but I'd tell everyone who would listen about what they have done to their loyal users.

And I have to agree with @haldol…I found this post through SocialMedian, am commenting through Disqus, on a Wordpress blog, and this comment will then show up on all the various social aggregators I use. So you have used Web 2.0 to announce the death of Web 2.0…and without Web 2.0 technology no one would have known, cared, or been able to comment.

Of course, I think you are smart enough to know all of this. Which raises the question of “why write a chicken-little post like this”. Linkbait, much? :p

But here's the chain of events that is leaving me really perplexed. I come. Read your article. I get it. There's a lot of folks out there that feel the same way. I get that too. Doesn't mean it's what I think – but it's a damn good thing that's the case, life would be seriously boring if everyone thought the same thing.

But the thing is this. I caught this link on the Startup Successes friendfeed. Whoever started it sent me an invite to it, that showed up this morning, in my gmail. I scroll down and I'm reading your comments, and over to the side I see a twitter post. Hmmmm. Then I link to your tech articles to see what you've written, and I picked the Twitter Is a Crappy Restaurant type-titled article. And you sign off on it saying you haven't used it in 2 weeks on the 30th, but your last Twitter post was on the 22nd. It may have come via friendfeed, but that's just a tool – it's not the platform. You were still using the platform… and then your posts die for a couple of months, and then they spring back into action – without account of why.

So I guess my confusion is this. I end up seeing your post on friendfeed (2.0) via an email i got to my gmail account (cloud computing) and when I get here – I read about how Web 2.0 is dead, but you're using a wordpress platform (2.0) and I'm leaving you comments (2.0) and as I write I'm feeling suffocated by your friendfeed plugin (2.0) on the right which is displaying your tweets (2.0) and your google reader (2.0) and your feedburner (2.0) stuff. I'm so confused.

Don't get me wrong. If you don't want to write about 2.0 it's your frikkin right to do whatEVER you want. But seriously – how many contradictions can you fit into one site, not even – let me take that back – how many contradictions can you fit into a couple of blog posts?

If you're “so over web 2.0″ then why don't you unplug? If it's so worthless and bubble inducing – cool, get rid of it. Just, you know, practice what you preach. But while we're on the subject – the market is pinching all of us – silicon valley just happens to be as vulnerable as the alley, their late arrival to that understanding I tend to believe has to do more with them being from California than it does to them working in 2.0 tech fields. Final disclaimer: I really can't stand California.

Sincerely,

A loyal member of the NYC Tech Mafia.