The clearleft-boys on the Web 2.0-buzz @ SXSW

To make it clear right at the beginning: I am not in Austin, Texas (heck, not even close) where SXSW is taking place. But I found Andy Budd blogging from there. He made available the slides from the presentation he and his co-worker Jeremy Keith gave at the conference. Interesting, but most of all: hilarious…and I was not even there.

You can grab your copy of the presentation slides from Andy’s blog entry. They are really worth downloading the 10MB. For me, there are a couple of interesting - and funny - things in there:

• What is Web 2.0: “A startup that generates more RSS than revenue” by Endgadget
• The four pillars of Web 2.0
• The fonts of Web 2.0
• Most hilarious applications: Gawker Stalker, overplot

While I was flipping through the slides, I was thinking: “They are so right. The pattern behind the whole buzz is almost ridiculously obvious.” But where does this all go?

Almost every week a new application is popping up and everybody needs to be on it, else you will be left behind. Take twitter, for example.“Twitter: What are you doing?” (I don’t care, i don’t wanna know). It’s nice, it’s funny, but I don’t get it. Why do I need to keep everybody, everytime updated about what I am doing NOW. Twitter is getting more popular every day, without me, that’s for sure, but I refrain from following every hype that’s out there and trying out every new application that someone is referring me to. I am gettin’ tired of this.

Sidenote: I don’t even have a del.icio.us-account, cause I keep another blog (separate from this and hidden from the public) where I store all my useful infos (and links). It would add just another Username/Password-pair to my list (which is currently amounting to 124).

One of our marketing lecturers (or was it someone else, I can’t remember) once said: “There are no dumb business ideas. Cause eventually, there are people out there, as dumb as the idea, who will buy it.” So I guess this is also true for at least some of the new Web 2.0-applications. The Tamagotchi comes to my mind, when I look at some of them.

Don’t follow the hype.