Web 2.0 hype is all fluff and hot air?
Web 2.0 sites like Flickr are massively over-hyped out of all proportion to real usage patterns, according to a survey conducted by HitWise this week.
Although Flickr seems to be on the lips of every high-impact blogger, the survey of photo-sharing sites concluded 
that Flickr ranks only sixth (5.95%) by market share (hits), a long way behind sites like Photobucket (43%) and Yahoo! Photos (18.3%):
Why is this so? Much comment revolves around a perceived social hierarchy among bloggers. The Register, who claims that mainstream media aggravates the situation by only listening to blogging royalty, prints the following opinion:
Photobucket is all over Myspace and LiveJournal, and it gets the hits, but the San Francisco myopia only sees their web 2.0 darlings.
HitWise analyst Leann Prescott suggests that the results reflect the cultural habits of the hoi polloi at LiveJournal and MySpace:
Photobucket, Slide, and Imageshack are all image hosting sites, and MySpace is their primary source of traffic. In fact, MySpace was responsible for 76% of Slide’s traffic in May 2006, 56% of Photobucket’s traffic, and 50% of Imageshack’s traffic. The growth of Photobucket and Slide go hand in hand the growth of consumer generated content and social networking sites…
Demonstrating exactly the elitism (or intelligence, depending on your point of view) under examination, Marshall Kilpatrick at TechCrunch agrees that the aristocrats and bloggerati may be out of touch, but says it’s all in a good cause:
High-authority bloggers appear to write about Flickr about 3 times as often as they (we) write about Photobucket. The blogosphere as a whole uses the word Photobucket 3 or more times as often as we use the word Flickr. (TechCrunch has used the word Flickr 11 times more often than the word Photobucket.) Does that mean high-authority bloggers are out of touch with the bulk of users? It may; it may also mean that being interesting doesn’t equate with mass adoption.
It seems an odd debate to me. First, “hype” is obviously about what’s coming not about what is. If everyone was using Web 2.0 services like flickr, the hype would be about Web 3.0.
Secondly, hits are a very crude measure of importance. They only tell me what people are visiting. They tell me nothing qualitative, nothing about how interesting, useful, stimulating, innovative (or not) the destination is, only how popular it is.
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Tags: blogging, flickr, hitwise, internet culture, not apple mail, survey, web 2.0
June 25th, 2006 at 2:52 am
I’m not sure it’s fair to generalize about all of Web 2.0 being hype, but I agree with the thrust of the survey. I don’t know anyone who uses Flickr who isn’t either *really* net-savvy (i.e. the type of person who would have a blog of his/her own).
June 25th, 2006 at 2:58 am
Ooops, my last comment got cut off partway. I just meant to say that I don’t know anyone who uses Flickr who isn’t either really net savvy or a very serious amateur photographer. Most of my friends just email photos to me. On a certain level, I think the average person tends to not see the point of posting personal photos online for the world to see. You have to be an extrovert, a blogger, or someone with really great photos to get something out of it.
The Flickr user interface could also use a little work. It’s clean, but not intuitive, at least to me.
June 25th, 2006 at 3:16 am
I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to compare Flickr with sites like ImageShack and Photobucket. They are completely different types of sites and services. Where is the community aspect of Photobucket (or Imageshack or PIcturetrail or Shutterfly)? From what I’ve ever seen of these services, they’re used primarily as photo storage only.
Flickr is more a destination for me, and less about photo storage. If I had a bunch of silly party photos or celebrity paparrazi photos, I would keep them at photobucket. If I think of myself as a amateur photographer or wanted to find a community of other photogs, I’d go to Flickr.
They are completely different beasts.
June 25th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
What’s web 2.0?
David
June 25th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Wikipedia tells all
, including the following warning:
June 26th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Oh geeze, now Super Dave’s “question” seems even more rhetorically cynical to me in light of that Wikipedia warning. ;-)
June 26th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
My first experiences with Flickr (starting in Sep. 2004) were relatively intuitive and obvious. Nowadays my basic needs are usually served just by interacting with it through the FlickrExport plugin in iPhoto. When I do futz around with my account through the web interface it doesn’t take long to get comfortable with any changes or re-familiarized with things I’ve seen or done before. Occasionally there’s quirky UI behavior but since I’m a light user it doesn’t bother me. Of course more demanding users will have their share of justifiable criticisms and suggested improvements.
June 26th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Thanks Tim. It is really vague, eh?
David
June 26th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Well, it’s fuzzy like a lifestyle or state of mind rather than sharp like a function call, certainly.