The revolution is a bubble.

The prevailing wisdom right now clearly states that Web 2.0 is a bubble. A “frothy“, “fuzzy” bubble. And all this time I thought it was a revolution… So where does revolution meet the idea of a bubble?

As I see it, Web 2.0 probably has an inflated sense of itself. The number of applications and mashups appearing recently indicate massive growth indicative of a bubble. As always, only a few of them will survive. We’ve seen this before. As Scoble points out, though:

First, retail investors are not involved. Translation: your mom and dad can’t buy stock in any of these Web 2.0 companies so they won’t be hurt this time around like they were last time. Web 2.0 companies aren’t going IPO. They aren’t getting big.

Second, the amount of money involved is still small. Yeah, the company I work for got $5.5 million. Digg. A couple of million. And so on. But you aren’t seeing the total pouring in of capital without any oversight like last time around.

People have gotten wiser. There’s not going to be a massive loss to the public when the bubble does burst, and the web will end up a better place than it was before the bubble. The revolution is in usability and the web experience, and that remains inside of or outside the bubble.

Competition between social networking sites, start pages, online office applications, etc. can only be good in the end. If we all don’t die of feature fatigue first, we’ll eventually whittle ourselves down to the most usable, stable and productive applications on the web. Or the ones with the most cash behind them, I suppose. But the massive changes in the web from what we call 1.0 to what is dubbed 2.0 are, in my opinion, a 180 degree turnaround. It’s gone from being a one-way information gathering source to being a two way, interactive resource for the user. We have to consider, seriously, that the vast majority of the millions (billion+) on the internet are not developers, are barely what I would consider to be browser-savvy, and have not a clue what web 2.0 means. But as I’ve stated before, the next generation is addicted to Myspace and Facebook, and the options are growing. The web is becoming more social and the younger generations are driving it. My parents don’t use Myspace, and I don’t expect they ever will. I don’t even like Myspace. But I love the blogosphere and RSS and AJAX based applications. And I love sites like Digg and Delicious because they give me something that Google can’t. True interaction with other netizens.

It should be noted here that Google still *is* the web. My parents do use Google, I use Google, companies still devote massive resources to mining Google keywords, and adsense drives a lot of online business. The number of people actually using social bookmarking and networking is quite small in comparison to the total users of the web. The web remains read-only for much of the net-world. The bubble will probably come and go before that changes. What will be left behind in the soapy residue will hopefully be a building ground for a more dynamic, more interactive information playground for the rest of the world wide web community.