Web 2.0 is nothing new.  Sites like Facebook and Flickr would not be half the sites they are today if not for the willingness of the masses to bring some semblance of order to the chaos.  Today we think of Web 2.0 and nobody bats an eyelash.

In some way, shape or twisted form, both Facebook and Flickr – and a host of  other Web 2.0 sites – are nothing but empty shells without the mass of user content that fills them.  Granted, Flickr’s initial mission was to bring order to the masses of images already on the web.  But there’s no denying that today, both services are intimately tied to user-generated content.

And it’s not enough to just amass content.  Google owes its bloated success to the very fact that it started off with a single focus in mind – bring order to the chaos.  Google itself has no content – that’s not entirely true, but when you think of its search engine and even its AdSense program, we’re talking about algorithms that sit atop the unfathomable amount of information out there on the Interwebs.  Whatever content Google has that it can call its own pales in comparison to the content on which it has built its business – content that’s not its own.

And that’s okay, because Google is good at what it does.  I like Google.  I don’t like Facebook.

Now, is it even right to put Google and Facebook in the same sentence?  One is a bonafied Web 2.0 company, the other isn’t.  And yet I believe that the answer is a resounding “YES!”, since Facebook is quite intent on becoming the most important thing to hit the Interwebs since… well, since Google.  Where Google crawls the Web and all of the loosely-connected content therein, Facebook is attempting to replace the content of the Web with the content within its own walled-garden.  Content created by the users, for the users.

Here’s the problem with Facebook.

People are not good at managing huge quantities of data.  We make spelling mistakes, we say “toMAYto” and “toMAHto” and mean the same thing, we say “bear” and “beer” and mean two different things.  One person sees a butterfly in an ink blot, another sees a unicorn.  Some of us are colorblind.  Some guys think Nicole Kidman is a knockout, others think her plastic is showing (I’ll take my N.K.  pre-“Peacemaker”, thank you very much).  20  people will watch Ali Velshi play with an iPad and record it, then post 20 different versions online of vastly differing quality and post individual links to each of their Youtube uploads.

In all of this, the single question is – who is correct?  Or, what’s the one right answer?

Who do we trust?  When Google attempts to bring order to chaos, it’s very simple – you either trust Google’s algorithm (and believe that Michelle Obama is a monkey – uh oh!) or you don’t.  It’s in Google’s best interest to keep their algorithm relevant and accurate.

Not so with Facebook.  Besides the ridiculous amount of information overload that comes with watching people try to one-up each other with the frequency of their status updates and wall posts, you also have the potential to see the same information repeated ad infinitum by a multitude of people (hello retweets!)  Logging into Facebook is like taking a trip down the rabbit hole, and getting out is harder than knocking the socks off of any Agent that the Wachowski brothers could ever dream up.

And then there’s the question of tagging.  Oh goodness, tagging.  Is that flower red, orange, or auburn?  Nuff said.

Before Web 2.0, we had IRC.  We had newsgroups.  My goodness, we even had Bulletin Board Systems.  Then we got Geocities, then MySpace, then Facebook.  I’m sure I’m missing some stuff, but that’s secondary.  Of prime importance is that the only thing that’s really changed is how much free reign we’ve given people to paint the world in their own colours and shove it on your monitor.  Then we’ve asked a million other people to comment on it, tag it, link to it – then we called it “the future” and attempted to monetize it.

I’m not sure which adage is more suitable: “Too many chefs in the kitchen”, or “An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters…”

Understand that I’m not against user-generated content.  Rather, I’m against free-form, user-directed collaboration.  I mean, if you have some data that you want classified into one of five categories, by all means let the users have at it – as long as all of the information gets classified, there are no duplicates within the data, the categories are strictly defined, and the majority wins.  Anything less is a failed experiment.

Facebook, take heed.