Web 2.0: At the tipping point

I love it! With the help of IBM, the enterprise might wake up to Web 2.0.  It blows me away that it has taken so long for ideas that have been common in open source development community - collaboration, participation, and meritocity to find there way into businesses. The tools that facilitate all of this are what drives web 2.0. They have been available for the last few years. Much of the stuff Mr. Gruha, an IBM scientist, mentions is available today.

Collaboration, participation, and sharing on-line all happen with social software.

"Web 2.0: At the tipping point" News Story by Stacy Cowley, IDG - March 24, 2006

"As the World Wide Web evolves into a more collaborative platform, the technologies and business models involved in that transition are being swept up into the "Web 2.0" rubric, a term vague enough to encompass almost anything one cares to push under its banner, but catchy in summing up the widespread sense that the Internet is at a tipping point.

The idea that the Web is transitioning to a new era, however, is grounded in real examples. Beneath the hype is a growing number of sites that are offering collaborative services, underpinned by new business models.

IT publisher Tim O'Reilly, who coined the term for the debut Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in October 2004, was hard-pressed to define the term more concretely for the second conference. He resorted to offering a list of companies exemplifying the idea that the Web is evolving from a collection of sites controlled by individual publishers into an interactive platform.

Dennis Gruhl, an IBM scientiest, sees next-generation consumer technology leaping ahead of enterprise tools in innovation. "A lot of Web 1.0 was driven by people in professions that had access to information through sources like Nexis or Westlaw. We got spoiled with the ability to find information at work easily," he said. "Then it slipped. Enterprise tools drifted while consumer tools raced on. There are better tools for hobbyists than enterprises. [At IBM], we want to figure out, how can we create enterprise equivalents to things like blogging? How can we do search better?"

IBM is working on problems like developing systems that can shift through the Web and identify the latest street lingo for drugs -- a data set that would help emergency-room physicians talking with patients in crisis. Another WebFountain demo project searches blogs and college Web sites for music discussions, measuring online chatter to forecast next week's Billboard Top 40 hits.

Meanwhile, as new businesses and research projects get off the ground, the Web 2.0 hype grows. "It's one of those things that took off so fast, it loses its initial meaning," said Yahoo's Horowitz. "It's like the dot-com of this generation. Back then, if you stuck on the label, if you were Pets.com, your valuation went up. Now, if you're Photos Web 2.0, your valuation goes up. Yahoo has some of best talent and minds in the world to help us find the signal in the noise, but it's getting noisy."