Posted by kglee | Filed under Software Fixes
June 06, 2006
Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning
What every CEO needs to know about the array of new tools that foster online collaboration — and could revolutionize business
Silicon Valley loves its buzzwords, and there’s none more popular today than Web 2.0. Unless you’re a diehard techie, though, good luck figuring out what it means. Web 2.0 technologies bear strange names like wikis, blogs, RSS, AJAX, and mashups. And the startups hawking them — Renkoo, Gahbunga, Ning, Squidoo — sound like Star Wars characters George Lucas left on the cutting-room floor.
But behind the peculiarities, Web 2.0 portends a real sea change on the Internet. If there’s one thing they have in common, it’s what they’re not. Web 2.0 sites are not online places to visit so much as services to get something done — usually with other people. From Yahoo!’s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr and the group-edited online reference source Wikipedia to the teen hangout MySpace, and even search giant Google (GOOG), they all virtually demand active participation and social interaction (see BW Online, 9/26/05, “It’s A Whole New Web”). If these Web 2.0 folks weren’t so geeky, they might call it the Live Web. more…