Perspective # 24 – Web 2.0 Innovations

Web 2.0 Innovations: For enterprises great innovation opportunities await for exploiting the new ‘rich’ Internet, which is branded as Web 2.0 and 3.0. Remember and compare those good old static yahoo pages (web 1.0) and yahoo today (web 2.0) which is much more engaging. Web 2.0 is many things to many people. For many of us it is social networks like Myspace or Facebook or Twitter the microblogging service .. for some it is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit or Second Life the 3-D virtual world entirely owned by its residents or Flickr online photo management tool or…. The list goes on! Nevertheless the business impact is profound – watch this youtube video in which the gurus like Bill Gates discuss The Impact of Web 2.0 at the Davos Annual Meeting 2007.

Organizations across the globe are trying to leverage the ‘new Internet’ to better serve their customers and improve productivity. Yes - it is not just the Facebook kids or Secondlife avatars but even nano scientists are using Web 2.0 . nanoHUB, the science gateway for nano-science and nanotechnology housed at Purdue University is an example. The Web site is a required bookmark for people who get excited about stuff like algorithms, carbon nanotubes, nanoelectronics and quantum dots. Michael McLennan, a senior researcher says “ the secret sauce of nanoHUB is a software application that is between the supercomputers at national research facilities that power the site and the Web interface. This "middleware," named Maxwell's Daemon, also finds available computing resources on national science grids and sends job requests to those computers faster than the blink of an eye.”

Innovations also await those who leverage mashups. A mashup (which may get replaced by semantic web later) is a web-based application that combines two or more different applications into a single view. For example do you want to know who speaks better –McCain, Clinton or Obama? Check this Speech Mashup. You don’t need to be a nerd to create mashups – just see how simple and easy it is to create this vacation request application mashup.

And behold. We are seeing just the beginning – ‘Rich Internet Applications’ a.k.a Web 2.0 plus ‘Cloud Computing’ plus ‘Software as a Service’ plus ‘Telepresence’ the high-definition video conferencing system will transform our business landscape. No – This is not a bubble like we had in the past as today there are strong business drivers like co-creation and prosumers who produce and consume – also Web 2.0 is not built on vanilla HTML ..now we have solid tools and technologies like Flash, Flex, AJAX, Folksonomies, Microformats, REST, XML, JSO, XHTML, RSS, Atom, Wikis, WebTop, Ruby on Rails etc.

This year Arcelor Mittal is going to host their annual shareholder meeting in the second life virtual world. The website says, “To access the ArcelorMittal virtual meeting centre, please ensure that Second Life is installed on your computer and that you have an avatar.” ☺ note this is a brick n mortar steel company..Julien Onillon, the head of investor relations gets excited and tells Wall Street Journal, “At a real shareholders event, people come for drinking and not for the event. We want people who are really interested to attend the event. Though anybody can attend the meet, security will be tight. Though there won't be any bouncers if a guy starts to get naked and says bad things to Mr. Mittal, he will be kicked out” and then the profound punch line “We’re going to be touching a population that has never been touched” They also plan to legitimize the virtual Linden Dollars with which you can buy real Arcelor shares! Geddit? The writing on the wall is clear – endless innovation possibilities!!