Mashalicious Flapprjacks

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web concepts: web 2.0, silly names and useless mashups

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So for a while it was interesting, then it was funny, then predictable, and now it is just annoying. Why do Web 2.0 start-ups still insist on all the crazy “innovation” (aka boring conformity in the guise of silliness) when it comes to their names? There are about 30 posts a day on Mashable.com with the newest excessively web-2.0-ey named upstarts (see Streakr, Jaduka, Galaxi, the list goes on and on). It’s become so ridiculous that there are numerous web sites and articles dedicated to the stupidity and formulaity of it all: web 2.0 name generator, worst web 2.0 names, web 2.0 bullshit generator, and my favorite, the web 2.0 logo generator:

A fully Twitter-integrated Google Maps mashup of the worlds stinkiest places

The web is so littered with junk like this that it is hard to find anything of use. Maybe someone can make a web 2.0 site to review, tag, and sort web 2.0 sites. Maybe it can integrate with Facebook and Flickr and publish out widgets to your iPhone. Oooh… and it can be a social networking site, a wiki, and user-generated video site all rolled into one!!!!!!

Sorry, I’m in a weird mood today, because I have recently accepted how wonderful the web 2.0 giant Flickr really is, yet how completely useless (although sometimes intriguing) and often poorly executed the billions of stupidly named mash-ups are. It is frustrating, because I really think there is so much more potential out there for Flickr, beyond a fun way to waste time.

Yeah, yeah… I know there actually are some useful Flickr apps in existence (although they are greatly outnumbered by stupid ones). But, here are a few I haven’t found yet, that I would like to see:

• Inspuraytor - There are those times in life where you just need a forcefully inspiring marketing photo to illustrate your PowerPoint presentations and what not. Where is the tool that allows you to feed in marketing mumbo jumbo or persona specs and get a perfectly nauseating picture?
• Suprmarkatoo - I’d love to see Flickr integrate with something like AllRecipes. I want to drag images of foods into a big web 2.0 swirly blender thing and have it match my ingredients to a recipe. I’d like to pump up the size of the foods I want to be more prominent “flavor profiles”.
• FlickrTripr - I want the ultimate maps mashup that associates points of interest with corresponding Flickr photos of those places. Furthermore, I want that to integrate with a trip planner, so that I can see places before I decide if I want to go there. I want to be able to view a photo collage of cities based on the points of interest I’m excited about. I want to push out a slideshow screensaver of my future journey in order to inspire me during the working hours. Yahoo! Travel is headed down that path, but there is some major editorial geo-tagging of photos that needs to happen to make my dream a reality.

Maybe there are some of these useful tools already out there, but they are so buried underneath the piles of web 2.0 garbage, that I haven’t been able to find them. Maybe someone can invent a StreetSweepr plugin for Firefox that is able to block out particularly annoying, useless, and/or redundant web 2.0 apps from your browsing experience.

technorati tags: flickr mashups, web 2.0 names