2010 marks the beginning of the end of Web 2.0. Just a decade since the starting gun was fired on the .com collapse.

With the last collapse went billions of dollars of investor money and high profile company flame outs like Boo.com, Excite @home followed by M&A freak shows such as AOL/Time Warner.

Now there is a new meltdown on the scene. Quieter, less in the public eye, but no less relevant. The Web 2.0 collapse. It started with a public announcement earlier this year that AOL was ditching Bebo – a mere $850 Million write off. Had Bebo been a public company we might even have hailed it as the beginning of the end of Web 2.0.

Then, in March, Ning announced that it could no longer offer free software to millions of small groups and social networking entrepreneurs. They could only afford to focus on providing chargeable software for their more corporate, er paying customers. This shake out alone will probably see over a million social networks close.

And on – the original Web 2.0 pioneers like MySpace and Digg are struggling to find their footing in the post Twitter period. They may end up being the Netscape’s of the Web 2.0 era.

But this time round the losers will be the VC’s that have spent the last 2 years quietly writing down a plethora of Web 2.0 investments that they sprayed cash at in the heyday of 2006/7. Most collapses will stay off big media front pages – becoming mere graveyard bylines at the odd tech blog.

The Web 2.0 freemium model will get challenged and geeks will shift their attention to chargeable mobile apps. The days of endless, free, community oriented and Web based consumer and small business software will be numbered but a clutch of valuable Web 2.0 companies will make the transition and our lives will be richer for it. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Groupon will be the juggernauts of this decade – making even Google look like the guys of the past.

Trends like mobile app stores, geolocation, Crowdsourcing, video everywhere and raw pure Cloud computing will define the next phase.

And when TechCrunch finally gets sold to some big ‘ol media company we’ll know that Web 3.0 has begun in earnest and Web 2.0, like the .com era was just something that got us from Web 1 to Web 3.