Is web 2.0 suffering with vowel problems?
I’m someone who can remember the internet when it wasn’t yet prefixed with a version number. It might sound so last millennium, but in a time when the Shaman sang ‘E’s are good, E’s are good’, and you dialled-up the internet you found the ubiquitous letter E proclaimed loudly and proudly.
Within this promised shiny future, with the dawn of E-mail, the infancy of E-commerce, the government’s new E-tsar and the Internet Explorer logo, it was impossible to escape the letter E.
Then seemingly overnight the web began suffering vowel problems and became increasingly in-consonant.
The big daddy of them all, the photo sharing site, flickr started a pandemic that has ravished cyberspace ever since and doesn’t look like stopping.
Go online today, keep an eye out for the missing E and you’ll soon see what I mean. Here’s a quick sample:
flingr, coastr (social networking for beer lovers), groovr, bloggr, fotoviewr, icebrrg (web forms made easy), rminder (never forget the important stuff again), codr (for snippets of web code), talkr, soonr, frappr (the most social maps on the web), beggr, zooomr, tickr (flickr mash up), notifyr, feedblendr (lets you blend a series of feeds into one), nabbr, flauntr, trackr (hunt down your mates with GPS), zappr, rsizr, graspr (the instructional video network), tumblr, sputtr (search multiple search engine), blogrovr (your trusty news hound), jaxtr, steekr, skrbl (your online whiteboard), scanr, dealburnr, wishlistr (let the world know what you desire).
So the lesson seems simple. If you want to re-brand to appeal to a net savvy generation just drop a vowel. How long before this creeps off-line and we see traditional professions embracing job 2.0? Is it only a matter of time before careers can be had as a teachr, farmr or prime ministr?
