There are a lot of things that annoy me about Web 2.0 - the lack of sound business models, the buzz-driven approach to investment, the return of pastel colors, but I don’t think anything bothers me more than the cutesy culture that pervades this entire quadrant of the IT sector.

Yahoo and Google started the trend of using cutesy names for multi-billion dollar corporations, a trend which has become so commonplace that it would almost seem out of place for a Web 2.0 company to name itself using words found in Merriam-Webster’s English Dictionary. Google also introduced funny Easter Eggs, like the results when you search for “How Goes Google Work?“

As a result of Google’s success, many shiny new Web 2.0 company has sought to recreate itself in Google’s image, sassiness and cuteness included. While I think cuteness is fine for all of the general service-to-consumer interactions between Web 2.0 services and their users, I think this cuteness comes back to bite those services in the ass when it comes to getting businesses to adopt Web 2.0 services as part of their outbound marketing platform.

Let me share you a quick anecdote:

Over at Working Smarter, the blog I manage for work, we use a number of screencasts that we host with Vimeo, a YouTube competitor. We went with Vimeo because its Adobe Flash player had less compatibility issues than our in-house one and YouTube’s. Well, today we experienced a brief service outage and we were presented with the following error message:

SUCKER

Vimeo drank your milkshake!

This is what greeted all of our customers and potential customers when they came to visit the homepage of our corporate blog; isn’t that wonderful? Even if the majority of our customers have seen There Will Be Blood I don’t think most of them are going to understand right off the bat that this is an error message. It’s bad enough that our customers can’t see our screencasts, but having to show them this silly error message makes me regret giving this Web 2.0 company a chance to begin with. Why? It makes us look just as cartoonish and cutesy as Vimeo, an image which rests in stark contrast to the one that we’ve been trying to build.

So after being the butt of a few jokes by our CIO for my decision to use a third-party service to resolve some of our compatibility issues, I’ve decided that the cost of having this stupid error message rear its head to our customers isn’t worth the benefits of using Vimeo. We’re planning on scaling up our video usage considerably and we drive thousands upon thousands of eyes to our videos each week, which was essentially free exposure for Vimeo. Sucks for those guys.

A bit of downtime I could tolerate - that’s expected from any service, even YouTube, but the fact that we have to broadcast a bunch of cutesy garbage that clashes with our image to our customers whenever something breaks is unacceptable. The bigger lesson I am trying to draw here is that the cutesy stuff might be something that end-consumers appreciate, but a lot of businesses who try to integrate social media platforms into their outreach marketing efforts don’t.

Business Idea: Develop a YouTube, Vimeo counterpart that specializes in hosting corporate videos specifically, like training videos and so forth. Screencast.com is probably the best example of a “closed garden” in this regard.

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