by It is safe now to say that “Web 2.0” is dead. The evidence is irrefutable and it exposes the twin fallacies the concept of Web 2.0 has depended upon: 1) that people can build their worlds around – indeed, will want to build their worlds around – social networking; and 2) that social networking offers a viable, massively scalable business model.
So begins Peter Scwartz’s Huffington Post article, “Facebook’s Face Plant: The Poverty of Social Networks and the Death of Web 2.0.”
This article echoes some of the things I’ve been saying for ages about educators who invest a great deal of their time, energy and allow their identity to be merged with products whose entire business model is based on borrowing money until Google bought them.
I’ve also been warning about cloud computing and how I don’t trust the “cloud” with anything of value.
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
Well… sorta. Facebook starting to turn south is like watching a once hot disco or skatepark shut its doors. It isn’t the end of dancing or skateboarding per se. It is a faddish market, but it won’t go away completely. Facebook is a what, third, fourth, fifth generation social network? Depends on how you want to define it.
Also, I’m quite confident that in the long run we’ll look back at “Web 1.0” as “what we thought the web was before we understood it” and “Web 2.0” not as social networking but “the web as it is.”
I absolutely agree about the cloud. Don’t get me wrong, I love the convenience of the cloud, but the fact is that it means that you don’t control your data any more.
I’ve seen the problems that Vicki Davis is having with the impending shutdown of Google Lively, and my first thought was that’s a valuable lesson for her students about the dangers of keeping your information in a closed cloud program.