Sunday’s New York Times had an article about Twitter, the “micro-blogging” site where people post fascinating information such as “I like pickle relish on my hot dogs” and “Mandible is such a great word.” In my opinion, it’s the very reason why blogs took so long to be taken seriously, and I can’t believe now that there are thousands of interesting, informative blogs, that we have suddenly reverted to this task-list type blogging.

The author of the article didn’t seem to get Twitter, and neither do I. It seemed to be yet another web 2.0 application that arrived with a bang and served little to no purpose. One of my favorite technology sites is rev2.org, and yet I’m still amazed at the fact that they find a new web 2.0 application to link to every single day. Sure, there are some interesting ones every once in a while, but most seem to just trying to find ways to discover the next MySpace.

My worry is that so many of these web applications aren’t basement projects put together by a few guys in their free time, but made by actual “legitimate” companies. Web advertising seems to be taking off like crazy again as well. And all of this is happening with seemingly little to no regard to the financial disaster that hit the industry just a few years ago.

This article on Coding Horror does a great job of bringing this issue to light and serves as a friendly reminder of the similarities to what is happening now with the situation we were in a half decade ago.

The problem seems fairly straightforward: Nearly all of these sites are based on user interaction, and there are only a limited number of users to go around. There is a reason why there is only one Wikipedia; the same rule applies to nearly every other social oriented web application.