The failure of “Web 2.0″

I think this post by Greg Linden (pointing to two other posts, one by Jason Calcanis and the other by Xeni Jardin) highlights the fundamental problem with “Web 2.0″, which is that any system that gains traction will be swamped in spam.

We had this issue at Feedster going back to the beginning. It is very easy to poison the ‘pings’ and ‘feedmesh’ streams, and the Feedster ‘pings’ API was getting mostly spam. I did a quick web search and turned up two tools which allow a user to create an RSS feed and submit it to all the major search engines with a simple click. We also much more complex schemes to get spam into the search engine, as well as search bots ripping content wholesale, as well as bots trying to DOS our system.