PC World - The world loves Wikipedia, flocks to Flickr and listens to Last.fm. And why not? Web 2.0 sites like these harness collective knowledge, promote interaction and communication and improve the more you use them.
Alas, not every Web 2.0 site is a winner. Many are vague, pointless or just plain silly. As Web critic Nicholas Carr notes, "If I were called in to rename Web 2.0, I think I'd call it Gilligan's Web," after the goofy '60s sitcom.
How do you identify a dumb Web 2.0 site? First, the site's mission statement must be impenetrable. ("Spotback is a personalized rating system that recommends relevant content based on personal rating history using collaborative filtering and aggregated knowledge technologies." Huh?) Second, the site must solve a problem that has been solved a million times already or didn't need solving in the first place. Third, its name must love the letter "r" but eschew vowels (Drivl, Grazr, Hngry) or be a refugee from "Jabberwocky" (CurdBee, Egghub, Humyo, Jiffle).
Here are 14 of the silliest and most redundant, tasteless or mystifying Web 2.0 sites. Warning: Visiting these sites may impair higher brain functions.
If you were a venture capitalist, and some supposed Web visionaries came to you with a home page dominated by an animated picture of a talking alpaca, wouldn't that in itself be enough to make you say "No thanks"? Apparently not in the case of Blabberize, which lets users add audio and animate the mouths in pictures, like this take on Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Now that's comedy!
Let's say Dan owes you $20 for pizza. You ask Dan for the money. "Robert," says Dan testily, "I paid for your botox last month, remember? Chill." D'oh! How embarrassing. If you were using BillMonk — "a free service that makes it easy to track expenses between friends, and to settle them up instantly online" — you wouldn't be in this fix. According to its creators, BillMonk is particularly popular with roommates, college students and other folks who can't communicate via vocal cords or sticky notes.
The "Short Attention Span Theater" isn't gone — it just moved to the Web. Blippr, for example, lets you review movies, books, games and so on in 160 characters or fewer. This setup results in such trenchant appraisals as "Some ginger dude eats macdonalds every day until he gets fat and chunders" (Super Size Me) and "this is a fine specimen of bookage" (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
"Ate McDonald's every day until I got fat and chundered." Don't keep such morsels to yourself. Thanks to FoodFeed, you can share your eating habits with the world! Legarvin in Fort Lauderdale had a cheese stick 41 minutes ago. Maurawani in Vienna just wolfed down some "scholle müllerin, karotten und kartoffelpül." Mein Gott!
I once wrote about the most boring Web site in the world — a single page that listed the latitude and longitude of every stop sign in my county. I may have found a topper: Yay Hooray, which seems to be an online watering hole where people network about, um, nothing. Think of it as a Seinfeld episode without the laughs. Killer discussion threads include "What are you listening to RIGHT THIS SECOND??" and, of course, "i am my own doctor." The membership sign-up box says it all: "Wanna join up? Tell us why!"
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