BUBBLE: Alexa error triggers crisis of confidence
Web 2.0 may indeed be waning as a meme, as Crosslink Capital's Peter Rip suggests. Technology evangelists and journalists have probably vented all there is to say about dynamic web pages and online social behavior, the two key ingredients of this round of internet projects.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-arc in a skepticism cycle that has been building for eighteen months: Read/Write Web clocked naysaying at a peak in October 2005 when Web 2.0 doubting itself became the story, Wired saw the first cracks in Web 2.0 days later, and Publishing 2.0 argued in January 2006 that any Bubble 2.0 was a bubble in media coverage rather than in markets. What is new here is a concrete trigger — a confirmed error in Alexa's traffic data — arriving just as Valleywag relays Crosslink Capital's Peter Rip suggesting, as reported and unconfirmed, that evangelists have exhausted what there is to say about dynamic pages and online social behavior.
The story traveled: Jeff Clavier's Software Only picked it up the same week under a look back at three years of Web 2.0 investing, which frames the Alexa glitch less as a technical incident than as a moment of accounting for the whole investment thesis.
First-order effects
- Alexa's confirmed ranking error directly undermines the site owners and publishers who cite its numbers as public proof of traction, calling into question the one yardstick many young Web 2.0 properties lean on.
Second-order effects
- With Valleywag tying the glitch to meme fatigue and amplifying Peter Rip's reported view that the Web 2.0 narrative is spent, start-ups face growing pressure to swap rank-based credibility for demonstrable revenue when courting investors.
Third-order effects
- If the arc from 2005's cracks through this error holds, single-source traffic proxies lose their gatekeeping role and funding conversations shift toward measured business results — the destination Publishing 2.0 already pointed at when it located the bubble in media rather than markets.
The trend: Web 2.0 is moving from its evangelism phase into a skepticism phase in which meme-driven valuation stories give way to demands for verifiable performance data.