Scredit Crunch

Steve Rubel posts about what he believes is another bubble about to burst. That after the initial enthusiasm and desire to change the world, everyone is now out for a quick buck.

I’m a latecomer to the Web 2.0 scene, if not necessarily the idea. I do, however, admit that my feeling has often been ambivalent when reading about what is going on. There’s a huge amount of product overlap and of copycatism. Sticking ‘social’ in front of your description does not automatically lead to success or even interest. You need to be the absolute best at what you are doing and offer something really valuable and new to the audience, and forget about the hype.

I have to admit something: I have never thought of Scred as a Web 2.0 application, but rather as a tool to do useful stuff. Scred is indeed an old idea which I happen to think nobody has yet nailed. Before recently I did not blog, as such, although I did read the odd one now and then (I don’t count contributing to the forums of interest groups as blogging). I have contributed to Wikipedia and the original WikiWiki site for a number of years, but I don’t actively use Twitter or Jaiku. I’m a member in only two social networks: Facebook and LinkedIn (the latter for quite some time). Three if you include the Finnish IRC-Galleria.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t great tools and ideas out there. We’ll certainly be using more of them for Scred in the future. It just means I’m not necessarily jumping with joy at the announcement of another tool to manage umpteen blogs and search. That’s just something I do not find myself doing.

Will I be considered lame by the 2.0 scene for admitting this? Possibly. There are, however, loads of really smart and cool people out there, so I don’t intend to view myself as their enemy. Hopefully being a slight outsider can bring something new to the scene as well.