Does anyone still remember when Web 2.0 was all the rage? It is one of those things, isn't it? For a while, there was all this hype about it, and then before you know it, it's here, and we barely acknowledge that it is here. To be honest, no one really knew what Web 2.0 was in the first place. I pretended I did, it made for some fun times. At least you got to hang around with other excited people, some of them true futurists who believed Web 2.0 was the next coming of the Matrix, and some just there to be seen and to feel like they were included in the future.

The future is, after all, an important thing to be involved in, because really, you don't want to be caught at the tail end of it.

Web 2.0 was promising, but to be honest, now all that remains are Facebook and Twitter. Evolution is a cruel process. There were and are all these great designs for social networking, hundreds of them, but so few will make it into the consciousness of the mass population. Which is what you really need with any social-networking application. These days, it's all about critical mass. That is what the free market and democracy are all about. You can only make it in the world as a business if you have enough people out there willing to listen to you, notice you, and basically, buy your stuff.

On Google and Amazon, you have items and articles ranked by anonymous reviewers, but on social-networking sites, which is basically the pinnacle of the whole Web 2.0 affair, it is people who get ranked. That is a much more difficult task because, essentially, you are trying to quantify an entire person. From the experiences they had as children, to what they do on weekends, to who their friends are, and how many of them they would actually consider as friends.

Some sites do it relatively successfully, like the dating site okCupid which has a rather fun way to trawl data from people, and which other networking sites are now trying to capitalize on. I am talking about quizzes. People simply love to do things that tell them about themselves, even though what you are doing is essentially asking a question to an answer you already know.

Certainly, the problem of meeting people you'd like to meet is a difficult one. You have to be in the right place, at the right time, with similar motives, whether it is for work or play. The ideal situation would be to meet people you would like to know all the time, whenever you feel like socializing. This can be anywhere, from a party to commuting on a train. Transitioning from digital space into Cartesian space in the real world is one thing that our sophisticated networking technology, as sophisticated as it is, has not achieved successfully, yet. Even with the iPhone, BlackBerry and Google HTC.

Meeting people online, through some ranking system, as accurate as it may be, is not quite the same as meeting someone in the flesh and having a conversation with them. Meeting people online is good, and you can get to know very useful individuals that way. Nonetheless, there exists this disconnect which many people find disconcerting. Certainly, there is something less natural about the entire affair. Human beings were evolved to socialize in the flesh and in person, and this is something that has been neglected with the development of that entire Web 2.0 which was supposed to humanize the Web, and has yet to get there.

Digital technology needs to start truly supplementing our existence, as most of us do not live in a binary world. We are in many ways integrated with our technology, but this technology needs to be developed with an understanding that we are not simply consumers of their services, but that they are supplementary to our lifestyles, and perhaps even, our existence.