Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous...
and to your profits. — Unlike some older technologies (notably …
Context & Ripple Effects
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column lands at the tail end of a two-year skepticism arc around Web 2.0: Wired flagged early cracks in the Web 2.0 story back in October 2005, Read/Write Web noted naysaying hitting a high that same month, and the ten issues facing Web 2.0 going into 2006 framed participation and economics as open problems rather than settled wins.
What is new by late 2007 is that the critique has turned concrete and commercial. Micro Persuasion's Web 2.0 economic conundrum questioned whether the model pays, and InfoWorld reported just a month before this column that a new breed of malware is evolving with Web 2.0. Nielsen's contribution is to fuse those threads into a single warning aimed at the P&L: the participatory web is not just unreliable, it can be dangerous to profits.
First-order effects
- Businesses deploying user-generated content, mashups, and community features face immediate exposure on two fronts named in the surrounding coverage: profit erosion from unproven economics and attack surface from malware that exploits Web 2.0 techniques.
- Vendors selling Web 2.0 platforms and widgets now confront a credibility problem with corporate buyers, since a widely read usability authority has put profit risk — not just hype fatigue — on the record.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise adopters are pushed toward demanding security assurances and measurable returns before opening their sites to third-party code and user contributions, shifting negotiating leverage toward vendors who can prove safety and ROI.
- The security angle gives IT departments fresh ammunition to slow or gate Web 2.0 rollouts, forcing product teams to treat moderation, sandboxing, and trust controls as launch requirements rather than afterthoughts.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the participatory web consolidates around a trust hierarchy: a small set of platforms that can afford security and moderation infrastructure captures corporate adoption, while long-tail widget makers are squeezed out of business deployments.
- The episode marks the point where Web 2.0 criticism matures from aesthetic and economic complaint into a governance question — who is accountable when third-party content and code run inside a company's customer-facing site.
The trend: Criticism of Web 2.0 is shifting from cultural backlash and shaky economics toward hard security and accountability demands, which will decide which participatory-web vendors survive enterprise adoption.