It is the latest label that online software service
suppliers are keen to deck themselves out in, but what exactly is
Web 2.0 and what can it do for business? asks Neil
Ward-Dutton
Depending on how much time you spend reading material
originating in the US, you may not have heard of "Web 2.0". Even if
you have, I will lay odds you are not entirely clear about either
the meaning or the implications of the term.
The good news is that there are some useful concepts and
technologies bound up in the Web 2.0 idea which you should explore;
the bad news is that a lot of confusion, hype and marketing
trickery is going on.
The term was popularised by publisher Tim O'Reilly in an
inaugural Web 2.0 conference in October 2004. The idea that drove
the conference was that the bursting of the dotcom bubble was not
only an ending, but also a beginning.
O'Reilly and others (many in senior positions at technology
suppliers and venture capitalist firms that had benefited from the
dotcom boom) contended that despite the collapse of so many
companies, the web had gone on changing, and that quietly but
steadily a new breed of companies, services and technologies were
transforming the online world.
The breadth of the Web 2.0 term means it is best thought of as a
label to describe what has been happening in the development web in
a specific period of time - from 2001 until the present.
Web 2.0 is a handy piece of shorthand that allows many ideas,
technologies and businesses to be hitched to its bandwagon to
secure venture funding, column inches or money from unwary
customers' wallets.
As a result, there is now a hugely diverse range of companies
declaring that they are Web 2.0 houses or sell Web 2.0 products.
This is not conducive to gaining a clear understanding of what is
going on.
So what is really going on? Well, the web is becoming less a set
of discrete online resources which people engage with in a
transactional manner, and more a sprawling marketplace where people
stay - to talk, to listen, to explore, to learn, to play and to
shop - for long periods of time.
I call this "web as place" and think of it as the third wave of
development of the web (the first wave was web as library, the
second was web as sales channel).
Although bulletin boards and news groups have provided distinct
places for people to meet and exchange ideas online for many years,
Amazon, eBay and others changed all that by creating storefronts
that were wrapped in community services.
They have also fostered large-scale, international communities
of shoppers, enthusiasts and business partners with shared
interests.
The community-creating innovations made by these companies have
now become part of the scenery, and more and more organisations are
finding ways to weave community building into what they do.
Wikis, blogs and "social bookmarking" tools (see del.icio.us,
Connotea and Furl for examples of the latter) are now being used in
some enlightened large organisations to fuel internal information
sharing, and augment, replace or kickstart ailing intranet and
knowledge management projects.
The peer-production models associated with these technologies
can empower employees, given the right training and encouragement,
to capture and share knowledge and coordinate tasks in an
environment that is productive, yet hosted and managed centrally,
in a way that many "top-down" architected intranet projects, with
their formalised taxonomies and hierarchies, cannot.
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein is a widely discussed user of
these technologies.
Community-building is not just about internal productivity
efforts. It is also proving to be an interesting strategy to boost
sales, marketing and support efforts. Amazon, eBay and the like may
have built their whole businesses around fostering online
communities, but the wider world of commerce companies as diverse
as BMW and Procter & Gamble have started to enrich their online
presences to help learn more about what their customers want, make
their customers feel more included, and deliver more tailored
products and services.
At the same time some of the technologies that are a feature of
web as place are also making online software services easier to
use.
Rich user interfaces, built using Adobe's Flash and Flex and
various implementations of dynamic HTML and Ajax, are making
services more user-friendly along the lines of interactive desktop
applications, and employing open programming interfaces to make
them comparatively easy to integrate with other applications and
services.
The result is a resurgence of hosted application services
catching the eyes of organisations small and large. Salesforce.com
is only the tip of the iceberg. Companies such as Zoho, 37Signals,
and Google (via its recent acquisition of Writely) are now offering
easy-to-use and rapidly growing office productivity applications as
hosted services over the web.
I have covered multiple ways for organisations to take advantage
of the Web 2.0 - and in this small space I have not had space to
discuss "mashups", which are also important. Web 2.0 may be a
magnet for hype and trickery, but there is more to it than
that.
Neil Ward-Dutton is co-founder of analyst and advisory firm
MWD
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