Web 2.0 Reaches Fever Pitch

This week I have had two acquaintances in South Australia evangelize about Web 2.0. The first was Mike Seyfang. He is interviewed in an article in "The Adelaide Review". from the world of Microsoft. The last time I was contact with Mike he was working for Microsoft in an Innovation Centre they had set up in partnership with the SA Government. The article focused on micro-blogging in twitter and facebook and did not really get to the heart of Web 2.0 which I feel is the collaboration and the easy combination of tools.

The second Web 2.0 evangelist was Kym Farnik from IBM. This is a man with huge credentials in serious IT and he was describing what big blue was doing in this space. Kym was presenting the Australian Computer Society, IT Architect SIG. He was focusing more on the tools to create product that can be used in mash-ups.

The message from both of these respected IT people was that Web 2.0 is ready to come in from the realm of the teenage hobbyists and the anarchic masses to provide some real business benefits. It is a hard message to sell. Instant messaging has been around for quite some time and does not seem to have penetrated the organizations I work for. A Wiki has found a place amongst a group of my IT people but it struggles to be recognized as an information store of any importance.

There is no doubting the utility of the Web 2.0. What is it about business that squeezes the life out of this technology? It could be the control that big business demands over its information assets. It could be the lack of freedom in relation to IT. It could be that web 2.0 succeeds in a world where people want to collaborate for the sake of collaborating. Collaboration in the business world has to be much more directed to some other outcome.

I think we'll see more applications of Web 2.0 in the business arena, especially as the power of Microsoft and IBM are behind its evangelizing. I look forward to this. Watch the mobile phone application space. This could be really big, however I do not think Web 2.0 itself will be seismic shift in the way most organizations do business. Expect a few neat add-ons to web applications to be developed with Web 2.0. I would also expect some workgroup collaborative tools that will have a fairly narrow focus rather than replacing the way we all work.

Reference
Beyond Blogging in "The Adelaide Review" , No 319, June 22-July5 2007, p8, http://www.adelaidereview.com.au/

Farnik, Kym, Making on-line communities and community collaboration real(Leveraging Web 2.0), http://sa.acs.org.au/it_arch/images/a/a7/ACS_Web_2.0.pdf