Michael Arrington Declares Web 2.0 Dead

After a bloody week in the stock market that has seen the evaporation of trillions of dollars of wealth around the world, it became increasingly difficult for those trapped in the circle jerks of Web 2.0 to ignore Reality 1.0.

While what happens next in Reality 1.0 is anyone’s guess (capitulation, finally?), today marked a special day: Michael Arrington’s capitulation.

That’s right, Friday, October 10, 2008 will live in infamy. It’s the day Arrington marked an “An Ignoble But Much Needed End To Web 2.0.”

Apparently it was an awful video of some of Bubble 2.0’s children partying in Cyprus (embedded below for posterity) that did Arrington in. He wrote:

We’ll look back in later years and think of this most recent boom as the Web 2.0 period, when we were wowed by the magic of user generated content, copyright violations on a massive scale, and neat little widgety things that used Javascript and Flash to turn web pages into pretty close equivalents to the old desktop apps. Of course there were other evolutions as well. Advertising technology has advanced steadily, particularly in tailoring ads to an individuals needs, and tracking them properly. This is the period that social networking as we think of it today was born, and we’ll never be rid of it in our lifetimes.

So why the use of the word ignoble in the title? Well, all this went down at an unfortunate time for a score of Silicon Valley posterboys and girls as they partied 1999 style “the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in October of 2008 for a week of reflections on life, love, and the Internet.” They leave behind an absurd video that would have gone unnoticed a month ago. But this week, with the walls tumbling down, they look like a bunch of jackasses who have no idea what’s going on back at home. And this video will always be associated with the end of Web 2.0.

Goodbye, Web 2.0. I hope I never have to type those words again. Now can we please get back to work? There’s still a ton left to do before we get to Matrix-style virtual reality, the Singularity, and mobile phones with batteries that last a whole day.

Amen, brother.

I don’t know what do to with myself. It seems like my work here is done.

Cyprus Lip Dub - Don’t Stop Believing from Brittany Bohnet on Vimeo.