Don’t get me wrong – I love and use some of the tools from the Web 2.0 era every day. del.icio.us enables me to file away stuff I might need in future and find helpful tech resources (with better results than Google). I have bursts of using Flickr, Last.fm, co.mments. After trying a tonne of different online feed readers with “cutting edge features”, I went back to Bloglines. I’ve found Basecamp invaluable for keeping organised. I sometimes point people over to PXN8 or Pixoh if they don’t have an image editing program on their computer.

But reading TechCrunch, Mashable and so on has lately become less exciting for me. The Web 2.0 list is massive – and there are many people bringing out similar sites and services.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s a better system out there than the one I’m using for a particular task (e.g. social bookmarking) and I’ll go looking and try out a new system. Either I don’t give it enough time to realise the benefits, or I don’t need all those extra benefits or I’m too entrenched in the simplicity of the tool I currently use.

Being bombarded with new sites and services constantly (if you’re a subscriber to quite a few Web 2.0 sites) might actually be less beneficial. Sometimes there’s nothing like word of mouth from people who’ve become converts to the system, rather than people just reviewing them. The true test of the value of one of these sites is it becomes part of your life, your habits. We can all be wowed by features the first time we meet them, but are they actually beneficial?

The same goes for all the blog plugins – yes they may wow us but are they actually beneficial to the site’s visitors, or do they clutter things up and make things more complicated than necessary? We often wonder about features we would like added to our favourite sites. Have you ever wondered about features (not ads, heh) you’d like removed from those sites – things you find get in the way, things you never use.

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