Web 2.0 - Good and Bad for consumer

The concept of Web 2.0 is to add the socializing aspect in the web. For example, if media/news company has a website which traditionally allow internet user to read the news on the web, they can add section at the bottom where reader can make comments to express their opinions. Similarly, for products, like in Amazon.com and other websites, buyer post their experience on products, and since internet become popular there is a rating agency that rate seller and buyer can rate sellers too, typically you can find in Google, Ebay, Amazon etc. Any many many places like Facebook, Digg, Yelp etc you will see this kind of socializing attached to the traditional web.

As a consumer/reader/surfer, people rely heavily on it, as the original intention was clear and to help people. There are various things happens as this web2.0 are getting mature in the market.

First, Advertisement, the website with useful content and the website like google where surfer get benefits in their work, study etc for using those content. They tend to add the advertisement, and the fine tune it so those advertisement is gear toward your behavior on the internet. Thanks to the company like omniture. This is still not bad. But then they tend to pay people to update the content and make their site popular, so they will have more visitor and more advertisement revenue. So now, the content you are looking for is biased.

Secondly, many companies go beyond that, by paying to write a review. Raise the hands, who has got emails and message that says Like us on Facebook and you will get this coupon, or follow us in tweeter to get this... and so on. So if some company or product has many likes it does not mean they really like it, but companies use this information in their marketing campaign to drive more revenue. In the similar notes, they paid some people to write a review on their products, especially when they are new in the market. They want us to think that they have a nice product to drive the revenue.

Finally, Promotions, Deals and Auctions there are getting extremely abused by the above tactics. For example, if you see the new site and provide some product with extremely low price, which make them popular in the internet market. They tend to provide good customer service initially. But then you will trap in their ponzi scheme. This things are happening in the eBay for the many many years. They tend to have some of their friend/family/payer buy the product from ebay and write those false review and trap consumer. Ebay do give warranties etc but who cares, consumer does not know even the product they received was authenticate. Now a days, there are many many websites that sell the stuff very cheap and there are some companies who gave rating on those website, but who you are going to believe? Many website that sell electronics they sell the camera etc that has no USA warranty, they are authenticate but you got the product that are sold in some other country.

As a result, it is extremely difficult for a consumer to connect the dots and figure those out. So there you go bad part of web2.0.