No one has been hit harder by the Web 2.0 revolution than the e’s. Once the most successful letter of the English language, e’s have been suffering from major drops in employment rates over the past two years. And many experts say it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Wishlistr is the most recent in a long line of Web 2.0 companies that have decided to say “no” to e. It’s a trend that started around the time of Flickr and has become almost a standard among the new web apps worldwide. Apps like Flagr and Talkr even attribute the majority of their success to their openly anti-e attitude.

“E is bad business,” claimed the CEO of one of the newest W2.0 wonders. “When we were starting out, we knew we would save considerable overhead by excluding e’s, but we had no idea how much it would help the image of our company overall.” It seems that these days, inclusion of e in your business plan is basically branding yourself “Web 1.0.”

Wishlistr’s r had this to say about his relationship with e and his newfound success:

Before W2.0, I felt like I was completely dependent on e. I mean, you hardly ever saw an r without an e. I think most of us r’s thought that the “er” sound couldn’t be made without e, but the web app revolution was a big eye openr and a major confidence-boostr for us. R’s like Flickr’s r proved that we can make it on our own. [Flick]r was the r who inspired me to join Wishlistr, and things couldn’t be better for me right now. And with the holiday season coming up, I’m looking forward to a level of exposure that I never could have achieved with e. Of course, I do feel a little bad about the whole thing. I miss e, but I guess that’s just the way the world goes round.

So, why all the anti-e-ism? Most say that it is a backlash against the e’s meteoric rise to success during the late 90’s. Once email and ecommerce became household names, e practically became a buzzword in itself. Every company of the first internet boom wanted to cash in on the e-craze. A whole language of words prefixed with e was created. The e-bubble became bigger and more fragile than the .com bubble off of which it fed. The e-bubble has now popped, and e’s are facing some hard, hard times.

Anti-e-ism is still rising on the web and spreading to consumer electronics like Motorola’s Razr and Slivr. Analysts seem uncertain as to whether the e’s will make a recovery before the end of the decade. Most agree that 2007 doesn’t look good for the vowel.