Steve Rubel’s post “The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid” last week was certainly something that took me a while to digest. I read about it in Robert Scobel’s tweets half an hour after it was published, but for some reason I couldn’t touch it until today, even though I had to think about it ever since…

He wrote “Let’s face it, we’re skunk drunk and it’s because of money. It’s almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together”… “The bubble really began in earnest on October 9, 2006 when Google bought YouTube. That’s when every person with an entrepreneurial itch woke up and smelled the hype and money. Prior to then, startups were more focused on the entrance, not the exit”… “I miss the days of 2004 when the class that includes Flickr, del.icio.us and others started. They really were about changing the web, not making a quick buck (they did so only because they added value)”, and he closes with “However, most of the rest of today’s net startups are only after the almighty dollar and while that’s capitalism, it saddens me because it has done little but breed hubris.”

This post caused immediate and very mixed reactions in the bloggerssphere…

Richard MacManus wrote in his post Poll: Are We Still Changing the Web? “the Web is still changing - despite the seeming lack of new innovative startups”, and he mentions innovative technology happening in the mobile web space and how social networks are showing signs of opening up.

Ok, so there is still innovation going on, but what is the driving force behind it?

John Heilemann wrote in his post Web Bubble 2.0 “Well, maybe it is a bubble. But out in Silicon Valley, they don’t think of that as a bad thing at all.”… “A year ago, the burgeoning social-networking outfit Facebook was nearly bought by Yahoo for $1 billion; today, the price tag is $15 billion”… “More than 1.3 billion consumers around the world now use the Internet, and the global growth curve is steep. Meanwhile, the main source of unbridled mania in the nineties, IPOs, are a nonfactor this time around. Instead, the boom is being driven by giants with riverine profit flows and vast reservoirs of cash”.

Howard Lindzon wrote in his post Social Networks… Why Not Undervalued? “To think that Facebook is the ultimate, or even biggest winner of this era of social networks is lazy thinking. There is too much leverage from so little to think that billions more investor capital won’t pour in to this space in the next 20 years”… “What niche will trigger the next big social networking craze and trend? That’s what you should be thinking about as an entrepreneur. The tools have never been more available and starting a company never been cheaper”

And then there was this article in the New York Times where PayPal founder Levchin says that he wouldn’t consider his latest start up Slide.com a success until it is worth “at least $1.54 billion”, and about his thoughts before he started Slide.com “I knew I wanted to be a CEO, I just didn’t know the CEO of what”… “I’d run any company; it’s completely irrelevant to me, It’s really about this drive to win”.

Good, I would like to add my 2 cents here, I think Steve Rubel is aware of the fact that the situation now is completely different from the dotcom crash, and he doesn’t claim there is no innovation going on at all anymore, but what he says is that the motives have changed, and this results in an increasing number of start ups who are only after the big bucks. Most commentators read who disagree with Steve simply refer back to there is still a lot of money to make with internet startups.

Meg Whiteman recently said that what we saw in the last ten years was only a warm up for what is coming in the next ten years, and I agree, but at the same time I think the once so beautiful idea of the world wide web has changed, it has turned into a money making machine, a successful one though…

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