Dozens of Web 2.0 companies' logos
Andre Torrez Ludwig Gatzke has collected the logos of dozens and dozens of "Web 2.0" companies and laid out them out in a grid in a gigantic image-file he's posted to Flickr. It's pretty amazing — like seeing the thousand swooshes of the companies …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Web 2.0 label spent late 2005 turning from a conference name into a working category: TechCrunch closed the year with its list of Web 2.0 companies it couldn't live without and web2.wsj2.com ran best-of-2005 software rankings, both treating 'Web 2.0' as a countable set of products. Ludwig Gatzke's grid is the visual version of those lists — dozens of logos in one Flickr image, proof the cohort is now large enough to need a census.
That the collage lives on Flickr is itself part of the story: the photo site had just overtaken Webshots in traffic per Alexa (November 2005) and rolled out a printing service on user demand, making it both a host for the meme and one of the logos inside it.
First-order effects
- Gatzke's grid gives bloggers and listmakers like TechCrunch a single reference image for a category they were previously enumerating piecemeal, and hands Flickr another high-traffic page as the meme's host.
Second-order effects
- Startups competing for spots on year-end lists now compete visually too — a shared logo aesthetic makes the whole cohort instantly legible, so differentiation shifts toward brand styling as much as features.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 'Web 2.0' hardens from a descriptor into a marketable category that investors and press can buy into wholesale — and one crowded enough to invite backlash over buzzword inflation.
The trend: Web services are consolidating into a self-identified branded cohort whose shared design language does as much categorizing work as any feature set.