Research on web 2.0

“If the Web 2.0 is in its infancy, then Enterprise 2.0 is a total newborn,” Andrew McAfee, associate professor of Harvard Business School, said at a conference attended by more than 400 Washington area business, technology and government executives last week in McLean, Va. “We’re using Enterprise 2.0 as short hand for blogs and wikis behind the firewall. But that’s entirely too limiting,” said McAfee. “We have not yet seen all the neat things that will go on inside enterprises.”

What Web 2.0 actually embodies, and its implications for enterprise systems managers, is still open to debate.

For Jobster founder and CEO Jason Gol
dberg, “Web 1.0 was all about getting things online. Web 2.0 is going the next step and making it work,” with sites, he said, that are “created by the people, for the people every day.” The Seattle-based firm works with a number of Fortune 500 companies, as well as the State Department, using relationship management software to tap into blogs and online communities as an alternative to job boards to recruit specialized talent.

Founded in 2004, Jobster is one of a growing number of new Internet businesses capitalizing on user-generated content, according to Michael Arrington, a former corporate attorney with famed Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini, and the founder of TechCrunch, which monitors new Internet products and companies.

Arrington outlined a variety of differences that distinguish Web 2.0 companies, including Digg, Facebook, Photobucket, Zillow, PickPal and YouTube, from earlier Internet pioneers. The newer breed of companies tend to rely on the Web as the operating system, rather than act as walled gardens; facilitate work from anywhere, not just from the office; rely on Java script, Ajax and Flash tools to load and move information on pages, rather than applications requiring constant refreshes; and require less start-up investment than the multi-million-dollar launches of the past.

In particular, Arrington noted the value that sites like PicksPal can create. The site allows users to participate in sports fantasy networks. But tracking software identified a small group of unusually successful players, which has spawned prediction tools that could have applications in other markets.

“Web 2.0 is really the acceleration of transformation,” he said. “It’s not that users got smarter or more social. It’s that technologists figured out what consumers wanted.”

Their new approaches offer three lessons to enterprise managers, he said. First, the systems that provide supply chain and other enterprise information need to work “hard to put people in touch with each other.” Second, “the technologists should get out of the way–to impose as little structure as possible.” And third, “the outcome doesn’t have to be chaos. It can be more like an ant colony.”

From http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/42116-1.html

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