Is it a bubble yet? There’s no way to be sure, but one telltale sign of irrational exuberance the last time around was the proliferation of companies based on ideas that simply made no sense.
The portents are beginning to loom once more. Look at the actual service that a new startup called Webaroo, featured in a little piece in the Times yesterday, provides.
Webaroo’s home screen screams: “Now you can search the Web when you’re NOT CONNECTED!”
Great. Just when we figure out that the value of the Web lies in the connections and conversations it facilitates; just when this “Live Web” gets booster-rockets in the form of AJAX-based Web applications; just when municipal WiFi and other newfangled forms of broad-based, cheap wireless connectivity are rolling out, so that we can be connected almost as much of the time as we want… Webaroo comes and gives us the Web on a hard drive — the disconnected Web — the dead Web!
Now, I’m sure there are situations and circumstances where the ability to store vast quantities of search-query results and cache gajillions of Web pages might come in handy. I’m not saying Webaroo is utterly useless. Just mostly. If you read closely on their site, it sounds like they started out focused on the vision of “The whole Web canned on your laptop!” — and that’s what the Times piece emphasized — but now they’re trying to reposition as a mobile-device content provider. I can’t see your PocketPC or Treo having enough memory to get you very far with this, though.
When I started covering technology in the early ’90s, CD-ROMs were all the rage. Almost immediately upon the arrival of the Web, it became clear that the new medium was more valuable — even though, at the start, CD-ROMs offered faster access to data and more elaborate interfaces. That’s because closed-ended, rich interactivity with a small static pile of data was infinitely less interesting than open-ended interactivity, however crude, with millions of other people.
So Webaroo will take the teeming ocean of today’s Web and bottle it for offline consumption. When a step backwards is branded as a leap forwards, and when people can be persuased to invest in such retrograde ventures, you know that dumb money has started to pile in behind the smart.
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