A couple days ago, Business 2.0 released their second annual list (see the first one here) of 50 people who matter most right now in the world of business and technology. A couple of things I noticed:

1. Mark Zuckerberg is actually on the list after being named as one of the top 10 people who don’t matter last year. Perhaps it was all the ridicule he received after declining a supposed $750 million dollar buyout offer last year. This year however, he is back on the list. From the article:

In September, Facebook opened its doors to anyone with an e-mail address, and in May it announced plans to add free classified ads. It also gave outside developers access to Facebook’s underlying code. In a matter of days, one application, iLike, had attracted nearly half a million users.

Perhaps things are looking up for him, and in terms of the business side of Facebook, all of these recent changes make a lot of sense (Read: sense = money). Personally though, I could do without all the applications and stuff cluttering up people’s user pages, but at least they haven’t made it so that a user’s favorite song starts blaring at you when you go to their page.

2. There’s a generous focus on businessmen who have started to make efforts to be more eco-friendly in their business (Examples: Richard Branson, of Virgin; Kevin Walsh of G.E. Financial Services; and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is apparently a higher-up in some government somewhere). Umm, all right, I guess…

3. “You” has been bumped down from #1 to #45. Apparently the collective “you” that was so highly touted last year as being “…continually creat[ing] and filter[ing] new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest…” has gotten lazy, according to the article released last week.

All those YouTube videos of cats dancing, playing the piano, and drunkenly running into walls? So derivative. Then there was all the fawning over Snakes on a Plane. What was up with that? And don’t even get us started on Sanjaya. Look, we still think You have lots of potential. But if You’re really going to change the media landscape, it’s time to step up Your game.

No surprises there. Especially because the portion of “You” that they are referring to seems to actually be a very loud, but small portion of the collective “You”, primarily made up of bored high school and college students with a webcam, time, and an intense focus on trivial things.

4. Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs is on here. For those of you who don’t know, Linden Labs is the company responsible for Second Life. I can’t figure out what’s so great about this guy, because for him to “matter” enough to be on this list, that would have to mean that Second Life matters, and it doesn’t. In fact, I’m just gonna come out and say it: this is stupid. Stupid!

Second Life is boring, clunky, and ugly, and doesn’t deserve the attention it’s getting. It’s not the wave of the future, internet or otherwise. First of all the graphics are terrible, and painful to look at. Second, it barely works. The program runs as though your system isn’t advanced enough to run it optimally — no matter what kind of system you have. It’s as though the developers worked on it until it sort of functioned and then Linden Labs got rid of them all and started working on managing the economy of their world instead. In my opinion, while the concept of a virtual world filled entirely with user-generated content may be personified in Second Life, and there is something to say about it being a “new thing” that Linden is pioneering, it still has a long way to go before there’s any real use for it. Honestly, spending real money so you can make your avatar’s pants go from brown to blue is totally bananas and just shouldn’t happen. That’s right, totally bananas.

From the article:

Second Life is no longer just a game; it may also be the precursor of a more visual, three-dimensional Internet. Instead of looking at a flat e-commerce webpage, imagine dropping by a 3-D virtual store. Sound far-fetched? In Second Life, it’s already routine.

Whatever dude! WhatEVER! This kind of terrible thinking totally reminds me of the early days of the internet, when companies would design graphical site interfaces that looked like brick corridors with signs like “Chat Room” and “Home”. At the time it made it easier to navigate the site, but only because people were just getting used to navigating the internet at all. Do we really want to go back to that?

That’s about it for now.