Bust 2.0

There’s a growing feeling that I’ve had and shared with my peers in numerous conversations lately. It’s a desire to see another dot-com bust of sorts. A mini-bust if you will. I don’t mean this with any menace — rather, a desire to see the fat get trimmed, the cruft erased and for there to be more of a lean and mean Internet.

The fact is, my friends, there’s gluttony going around.

One of the points that stuck with me from the first dot-com bubble was the fact that at the time, the barrier of entry was low for those looking to be a player in this new economy. From basement designers to garage companies, everyone wanted in and got in. It was Darwinism in effect when the bubble burst — the fittest survived and came back stronger, leaner and meaner.

It’s bittersweet. It’s an amazing time for creativity and the independent developer, designer, worker. It’s also been opportunity gone awry for many looking to make money from ideas that are half-formed. Perhaps surprisingly, the money’s out there. It’s being waved about rather than thrown this time.

I’ve been inundated with too many social applications of late, too many web-based applications, too many applications in general to choose from and most of the time, there’s no clear winner at the top of the pile. I tend to shy away most of the time — letting others investigate and report before I do. I’m not much of a person who buys into hype on the first round — as with most things, half the time, it takes me forever to get into a band, a movie or a book that everyone’s talking about. And half of the time, I learn that they were right.

However, there’s a heck of a lot of crap out there on the web these days. Being continuously jacked in doesn’t help. A link here, a short blurb there, a long entry elsewhere and you’re on the path, trying to figure out what ________ (insert new webby thing here) is.

We live in a time when original thought, truly original thought is hard to come by anymore. Myself included. But what we can do is edit, thoroughly. And I have a feeling we need to keeping a lot more stuff on the cutting room floor.