I’ve seen this happen with trends many times before. It doesn’t matter if it’s music, fashion or the internet.
- A small subculture adopts a new way to distinguish themselves from everyone else. Rappers, Skaters, Goth kids and Bloggers all started off this way.
- Eventually the trend begins to gain some traction. Said trend begins to adopt ‘rules’ or ’standards’.
- At this point the ‘cool kids’ jump on board and pretty soon trend watchers take notice and a few news articles start popping up.
- This is where the original subculture gets angry and starts complaining.
- Creatives start including the new trend in TV commercials and in the background of the current hot teen soap opera.
- The trend has now officially Jumped the Shark.
- The trend becomes watered down so that the mass market can stomach it.
- After this point the ‘cool kids’ have declared the trend “So 5 minutes ago” because it’s now being sold at Target.
- And then Your mom uses it.
At the recent Federated Media conference I went to I became a bit of a celebrity (I don’t know how to put this but I’m kind of a big deal). Ok actually it was just among the Federated Media employees and really it was just my business card. The title on my business card says “Web 2.0 Strategic Lead.”
Why is this a big deal? Because John Battelle, the CEO of Federated Media is one of the founding fathers of Web 2.0 movement and it’s proliferation.
To quote Jared, “When Web 2.0 shows up on an HP business card it has officially jumped the shark.”
Great, does this mean I killed Web 2.0?
Fortunately John felt that the term Web 2.0 jumped the shark a long time ago. Maybe that’s why he’s been using the term Conversational Marketing lately. Maybe I should change my card to Conversational Marketing Strategic Lead? Na, too long.
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I don’t think you or any one person has killed Web 2.0 and made it Jump the Shark. If anything it is watered down and over saturated. Too many people have jumped on the bandwagon and it is slowing down and not producing much real value these days.
I predict a tipping point will come soon much like what happened in the e-learning industry some years back. Everybody produced a learning management system (LMS) or learning content management system (LCMS). Many of these startup companies ended up being acquired by the bigger companies. There are now just a handful of big-boys on the block. I believe we’ll begin seeing a lot of these Web 2.0 companies merging or be bought up by Microsoft, Google or emerging companies before too long. In fact, I think it’s already starting…
Justin, of course I don’t think I had anything to do with the over hype of Web 2.0. I do believe that it has gone mainstream and that the hype will only worsen before an actual discussion about it’s real benefit can occur (more on that later).