Web 2.0 is eating itself

There was a time when someone would come up with a novel idea for a website.
You'd find out about it, sign up, tell some of your friends about it and the watch its community grow more robust.
Maybe, after using it for a while, you'd find a deficiency, so you'd recommend a feature to the website's creators, and feel like you've helped them make something better.
Someone else would come along, find a richer service, and the story continues.

Then came 'Web 2.0'
Now, someone comes up with a good idea, but it's 'beta' and there's quite a bit of room for improving it.
Instead of suggesting improvements to the team, you decide 'I can do that better' and build your own site to compete with it.
So you launch your own 'beta', concentrating on how to be the next Google acquisition instead of how to build your community.
Maybe someone else comes along, and decides they can do even better than both fledgling services and launches a third 'beta'.
Now a new user, who perhaps barely understands the big idea, has three services to choose from. So instead of trying to figure out if X is better than Y or Z, they just decide to wait until someone establishes themselves as the leader and they'll sign up for that.
Or maybe all three services will never get a chance to develop the idea to maturity and will shut after a couple of years.

That's the danger with all this hype. Most of the sites that position themselves as the 'next best thing' -- would be more appropriate as a feature added to an existing site.