Web 2.0 concepts and applications

¶ … Web 2.0 Technologies & Applications

Assessing Web 2.0 Technologies and Applications

The Internet has revolutionized the means by which communication, collaboration, transactions and ultimately, interrelationships between and among individuals and between organizations occur on a global scale. In addition to the speed and alacrity of change the revolutionary approaches to communicating, collaboration, and transactions have fostered via Web 2.0 technologies, the long-held belief that communization of the Internet would be possible has found critical mass in social networking technologies (Bernoff, Li, 2008). In the context of this paper the collection of technologies referred to as Web 2.0 form the foundation of social networking, two terms initially defined by O'Reilly (2005).

There are the purely technological, the enterprise-wide Information Technologies (it), social, and architectural approaches to evaluating Web 2.0. The transition from Web 1.0, which has often been described as a "push" oriented publishing model that focused on the production of static websites and did not invite user participation is significantly different than the more collaborative, participate principles of Web 2.0 technologies and applications (Kirsner, 2007).

In the development of more collaborative applications there is also the need for creating Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems that can support role-based queries, portals and Internet sites (Galea, 2007). Content in all forms is emerging as one of the key determinants of how Web 2.0 technologies can accelerate the adoption of social networking applications over time (Bonabeau, 2009).

When Web 2.0 is evaluated from an Information Technologies (it) standpoint, the social networking applications build on this platform of technologies exemplifies the capabilities of the Internet's development, collaboration and publishing technologies. This area of using Internet-based collaborative technologies and platforms to enable more efficiency in terms of how companies operate has been terms Enterprise 2.0 (McAfee, 2006). This aspects of Web 2.0 shows unique potential for the streamlining complex business processes in companies and organizations globally. Research in the area of Enterprise 2.0 is focusing on how economies of scale can be created in addition to the Network Effect (Tellis, Yin, Niraj, 2009) where the majority of people in an organization have access to social networking applications, thereby increasing the velocity of information sharing and therefore making the organization more efficient over time. This Network Effect has also been studied in the context of Web 2.0-based social networking applications including Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace. One of the most fascinating areas of research today in Web 2.0 is in how companies are defining acceptable use policies, and even creating acceptable use policies for these Web 2.0 applications throughout their organizations. These applications, Facebook and Twitter especially, are being used in marketing campaigns and strategies as well.

The overlap of Web 2.0 technologies for both professional use in the form of marketing strategies on the one hand and the inherent interest personally on the part of employees is creating a potential liability of this entire new area of Internet applications (Christ, Berges, Trevino, 2007). Despite the negativity that surrounds the use of Web 2.0 technologies and the social networking applications that support then, there is ample evidence of how effective these applications are being proven to be in attracting, selling to and serving customers.

The collaborative benefits of social networking from a business strategy perspective have initially shown results in creating informal connections and collaborative frameworks through with companies can connect with and understand their customers' unmet needs (Eccleston, Griseri, 2008). The pitfalls and potential that social networking offers organizations need to be balanced with the growth trajectory of this area of Internet applications.

Assessing the Impact of Web 2.0's Technological Innovation

In order to put the impact of Web 2.0 into perspective from a societal standpoint, it must first be seen from the context of how the second generation of services that are available online, specifically designed for ensuring a high degree of collaboration, information sharing, and support for knowledge-based and financially-based transactions are re-ordering relationships and making it possible to achieve levels of trust and therefore deliver service and support much more efficiently than before. Studies of the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction in a Chinese Web 2.0-based companies show significant evidence of collaborative technologies leading to greater levels of customer satisfaction over time (Hsu, Hsu, 2008).

The distinction many researchers make is that the first generation of the Web is by nature passive, often relying on a publish-and-subscribe model (Kirsner, 2007). Despite the highly interactive nature of Web 2.0 there are critics, mostly from the ranks of senior managers who are responsible for ensuring the security of entire networks within companies who by nature are risk averse to new technological developments that have not proven to be effective in aligning with business strategies (Kirsner 2007). Skeptical of the new technologies that together comprise Web 2.0 in general with specific skepticism directed at social networking specifically, these Chief Information Officers (CIOs) have been slow to adopt these new collaborative platforms. Table 1 provides an overview of Web 2.0 applications, illustrating the role of social networking in the second generation of services available over the Internet.

TABLE 1:

WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS

Applications

Descriptions

Blogs

Online diary or journal entry on the Internet, which primarily supports text, photo (photoblog), video (vlog), and audio (podcast) formats

Google, AOL, and Yahoo offer free blogging platforms

Mashup

Web service that gathers related content from more than one source

IBM's mashup applications enable project managers to match team resources with a map to identify the geographical locations of the resources

Peer-to-Peer Networking technique for effectively sharing music, audio, and text files

Napster and Gnutella are popular peer-to-peer networks

Real Simple Syndication (RSS)

Feed-based technology that, with the aid of an RSS reader, enables users to subscribe to newly released content such as text, Web pages, sound files, photos, and video

RSS feed may contain the full content, for example a podcast, or simply a link to the content

Social Media

Encompasses all online tools (blogs, podcasts, Wikis, social networks, vlogs) and Web sites enabling people to share content, such as text, audio, picture s, and videos

Popular social media sites include YouTube (video) and Flickr (photos)

Social Networking

Web sites that permit users to create online networks and communicate with friends and colleagues

Social networking sites include MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Friends Reunited, and business networking sites include LinkedIn and Ryze

Tagging

Allows users to bookmark or rate online content to share their recommendations with other online users

Typically used by publishers of media sites attempting to benefit from users' recommendations

Popularized by sites such as Digg and del.icio.us, which enable users to publish, categorize, and share their bookmarks

Wikis

Enables users to create and edit the content of a Web site, leveraging the expertise of online users

Consumer Wikis enable users to comment on content, in addition to editing content

Wikipedia, a community Wiki encyclopedia, includes approximately 1.3 million English-language articles

Sources: (Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li. 2008, et.al.) (Hauser, Tappeiner, Walde, 2007, p. 75); (Christ, Berges, Trevino, 2007, pp 13-14)

Taken together these applications form the collaboration platform that social networking applications and their variations including mash-ups and blogs rely on in order to accomplish high levels of collaboration. The proliferation of the series of Web 2.0 applications and their growth are defined more by communication patterns than adherence to taxonomies and architectures. Taken together the applications in Table 1 are evidence of the dynamics industry thought leaders Tim O'Reilly, founder and publisher of O'Reilly Books, and John Battelle, author and former design engineer lead at Google summarized in their definition of the market and user dynamics driving the next generation of web services called Web 2.0

Figure 1 is the map O'Reilly and Battelle created showing how both market and user dynamics are defining social networking (O'Reilly, 2005. et.al.)

Figure 1: Web 2.0 Explained

Benefits and Limitations of Web 2.0 Technologies

The two most prevalent social networking applications based on Web 2.0 technologies are blogs and Wikis. Both blogs and Wikis are considered consumer-generated media or content (Cronin, 2009) and as a result, have lengthy histories that parallel the growth of the rapid maturation of the Internet. Blog is short for web log, which is by definition a running commentary and analysis from a person writing the blog itself, often referred to as a blogger. The first blogs appeared in 1994, represented by text inserted into a web page. The highly narrative nature of blogs defied the restrictions of website technologies at the time and lead to the development of diary-like technologies in 1998, with the launch of Open Diary, LiveJournal in March, 1999 and Blogger.com in August, 1999. The period between 2001 to 2003 saw the legitimization of blogs as a source of news coverage and analysis, as the Iraq War became the sole focus of many blogs. Iraqi teenagers, American and allied soldiers, and working professionals including dentists and lawyers who lived in Baghdad all contributed regularly to blogs which provided an insight into the war not possible for watching CNN. Technology-related blogging flourished during this period as many computer, software and development experts began their own blogs. Most well-known was Robert Scoble of Microsoft.

With the 2004 U.S. Presidential elections, blogs' growth accelerated dramatically as nearly every news network, candidate in both U.S. Senate and House of Representative races, and political pundit has their own blog competing for the publics' attention. The era of 2004 to today in fact has created a blogging industry that is pervasive in its availability of publishing platforms (USC Annenberg School of Journalism) and also in its readers for organizing and aggregating content of interest (Boeri, 2007).

Since 2004, technologies have emerged for completing text mining of blogs to find linguistic patterns in the mass of posts and also build linguistic models that represent public opinion. The use of latent semantic indexing as a technology has become prevalent as a result.

Wikis are also a form of consumer-generated media and were initially developed in 1994 with the first Wiki being introduced in 1995.

The term Wiki was chosen as it means quick in Hawaiian when one of the initial developers of this technology was visiting when he heard the term. Wikis are actually semi-structured content management systems that make it possible for organizations to quickly share content across departments in real-time. Wikis also are created to organize content hierarchically as conversation threads are defined and therefore make for content management system that records events and knowledge as they are created (Cronin, 2009). Wikis are predominantly used behind company's firewalls as the information published in them is highly sensitive. The best known publicly known Wiki is Wikipedia.Org and online dictionary anyone who opts in to the site can contribute content to. Wikipedia.org is currently published in ten languages. Another highly visited site is craigslist.org which operates on the same Wiki-based approach to posting more commercially oriented content including selling, buying, trading and job placements. Both blogs and Wikis are predicated more on the fundamentals of HTML and HTTP protocols, with the latest generations of both technologies relying increasingly on AJAX-oriented technologies for the best possible performance of their user interfaces of these technologies.

Pros and Cons of these Blogs and Wikis

There are many benefits of relying on blogs and Wikis for communicating both inside and outside an organization. The pros and cons of blogs are presented, followed by the pros and cons of Wikis (Cronin, 2009).

Blogs

Pros

Encourages knowledge sharing and collaboration both with customers when used outside the company, and with employees and contributors when used inside the company.

Fosters greater internal team building

Can be upgraded more frequently and easier than newsletters at a greatly reduced cost

Relies on thin-client technology to make it possible to create entries at any time, from any location

Possible to syndicate content in a blog using syndication and blog readers to make it more valuable over time

Companies can use blogs to engage with customers on new product development ideas, solicit feedback on new products, and improve product designs

Cons

Many companies struggle with governance issues relating to the use of blogs as there have been incidents where company secrets and also company criticisms involving confidential information are aired in public.

Once a blog has been created it takes significant time commitments to keep it up and running. The creation and maintenance of a blog take an inordinate amount of time to keep fresh with valid and usable content.

Blogs can quickly degenerate into complaint sessions with customers if not monitored closely and managed well.

Blogging has become so popular that Microsoft has over 1,200 employees blogging today and requires governance and the same time a concentrated effort to make sure blogging efforts remain balanced yet do not compromise the organizations many trade secrets and technological advantages.

Wikis

Pros

Low cost content management system that is easily implemented through open source components.

Thin client that can be deployed on any laptop.

Chronological order of comments allows for replicating how knowledge is created.

Consistent with AJAX-based programming and J2EE programming standards (Cronin, 2009).

Can be configured to operate behind a firewall.

Cons

While the content is chronological in structure it is not easily tagged or analyzed as traditional and more robust structured content management systems do.

Lack of support for advanced syndication technologies.

Numerous reports of "spoofing" and spurious comments on public Wikis claiming accomplishments not earned and lack of validity to Wiki posts overall has this form of collaboration on public sites under scrutiny and at times lacking credibility.

The use of blogs and Wikis needs to be considered in the context of a broader Web 2.0-based communications and collaboration strategy. Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of services available on the Interne to enable enhanced online collaboration and information sharing.

Table 1 provides an overview of all Web 2.0 technologies. It is the recommendation of this report to look at blogs not only as a collaboration platform inside an organization, but more importantly, the building of collaborative relationships with customers outside the company as well. Standards and governance would also need to be defined as would be use guidelines, yet the use of blogs as a means of communicating both inside and outside companies needs to be seriously considered. Wikis on the other hand need to be considered purely internally-focused collaborative applications for organizing and cataloging knowledge as it is created. Wikis, given the spurious and often low credibility of postings on public sites, needs to only be used in those scenarios where the posters can be verified and their contributions validated

Integrating User-Generated Content into Web 2.0 Applications

Inherent in the user dynamics of the map completed by O'Reilly and Battelle are the theoretical foundations of social networking (O'Reilly, 2005).

Specifically the architecture of participation, remixable data sources and data transformations (also known as mash-ups in Web 2.0 vernacular), and the harnessing of collective intelligence are the user-defined taxonomies are factors that have collectively served as the catalyst for the growth of social networking.

Social networking is bringing an entirely new level of participation and interactive feedback to nearly every task completed online. With the growth in social networking participation through the variety of websites and applications, the impacts to society are starting to be seen, mostly from gaps in the existing collaborative platform that supports these applications (Hatala, Lutta, 2009). First, there is the issue of authenticity and validating the true identity of someone within a social networking context. Facebook and MySpace both do not today have a highly reliable identity authentication process in place; hence the concern of many parents regarding their children participating on these sites and the risk of interacting with strangers who may or may not be who they present themselves as online. Second, social networking is bringing an entirely new level of immediate transparency to the online communication process, inviting thousands if not millions of people to communicate with one another (Jones, 2008). Blogs and Wikis were the precursor to this aspect of social networking's impact on society today. These three factors of blogs, Wikis and the emerging set of social networking applications are forcing transparency to the forefront of what is considered credible online behavior; to be oblique or not forthcoming about ones' true intentions online is to not be trusted at the least and ostracized at the worst. Third, the complex issue of how relationships are created, sustained, and how trust is eventually created is also one of the main issues that is impacting the adoption of social networking globally. Fourth, there are the concerns within organizations that their proprietary and confidential information will be either intentionally or accidentally shared through social networking sites. There are also the concerns over what is said about an organization by its employees on blogs, Wikis and through sessions on social networking sites. Google, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft and many other technology-related companies have been quick to define standards for their employees to follow for blogging specifically and social networking in general. These guidelines look to both protect valuable intellectual property and proprietary data, yet also give employees the flexibility of promoting the company and their contributions. The potential for conflicts of interest and the ethical dichotomy of having employees participate in social networking and media, known to be the new framework of global free speech, yet monitoring them either loosely through policies or rigorously by filtering, is one of the emerging paradoxes society is going to have to deal with well into the future as well (Hauser, Tappeiner, Walde, 2007).

Contrary to these limitations that the gaps in the collaborative platform that social networking is based on are the many advantages and advances in collaboration within and between organizations and companies of all types. While the initial direction of social networking vendors and sites was to seek balkanization of the global social networking user base by segmenting using their own technologies and processes for communicating, there's an increasing pressure to make all forms of social networking communicate with one another. As has been referenced, Google's API to unify all social networking sites and applications is a case in point, as are the emerging group of start-up companies that seek to create a more unified collaborative architecture where all social networking applications and processes can be integrated together. On a small scale this is already happening mostly within the four walls of companies, protected by firewalls to ensure proprietary and highly confidential data is not leaked or hacked from the outside. The use of Wikis, a form of social networking where the needs of users for content define the taxonomy of the data, including its depth vs. dearth by subject area and the tertiary subject areas, are widely in use throughout many corporations where knowledge management is critical to their competitive advantage (Hauser, Tappeiner, Walde, 2007). The use of Wikis as knowledge and content management systems has become more pervasive as enterprise software vendors have worked to create product strategies that allow for the content in these social networking applications to be repurposed throughout the organization as well (Hedgebeth, 2007). The development of enterprise content management systems and the integration of social networking applications as repositories of knowledge that can be queried depending on the business strategies needs has been defined by Harvard University Professor Andrew McAfee as Enterprise 2.0, and reflects the commercialization of social networking (McAfee, 2006). The future of social networking is evident from the attempts within organizations to create enterprise-wide knowledge and content management systems on the one hand, and the evolution of responses to unmet needs of social networking users globally for greater validation of identity, security, and collaborative integration across divergent social networking platforms.

Predicting the Impact of Web 2.0 Technologies in Organizations

There are the benefits of having large numbers of people developing a sense of community regarding their participating in social networking forums and groups, yet the broader and more strategic concerns of any organization, from schools and universities to companies of any size, is the ability to stay aligned with the needs of its customers and those it serves. The use of social networking strategies for staying focused on the priorities of customers is shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Customer Response Analysis Using Web 2.0 Technologies

Adoption Scenarios

Effect

Probability

Outcomes

Slow Adoption

Rapid Adoption

Understanding unmet needs of constituents through the use of Wikis and blogs

Creating special interest communities online using social networking

Served constituents' level of satisfaction with philanthropic efforts by the non-profit organization

Wikis created based on volunteers' observations for how to improve processes

Based on analysis Sources: (Christ, Berges, Trevino, 2007, et.al) (Hauser, Tappeiner, Walde, 2007, p. 75)

Web 2.0 is already impacting Information Systems (IS) development by concentrating on those process areas that have the most direct implications on being able to quickly gain insights into customers' and employees' unmet knowledge and process-based needs (Hedgebeth, 2007).

Capitalizing on the use of Web 2.0-based social networking applications as a means of listening to employees and customers more effectively is also serving as the catalyst for the growth of collaborative technologies use in both for-profit and non-profit organizations as well. The advantages and disadvantages need to be weighed however of Web 2.0 technologies relative to any organizations' current it strategy and standards, in addition to their ability to sustain IS support for these tools over the long-term (Hathi (a), 2008). The advantages of social networking from an organizational strategy standpoint include the following (McAfee, 2006).

First, Web 2.0 and social networking applications and the communication processes they support encourage and promote knowledge sharing and collaboration both with customers when used outside the company, and with employees and contributors when used inside the company (Huang, Behara, 2007). Second, Web 2.0 technologies and the social networking processes and applications foster greater internal team building. Capitalizing on this aspect of Web 2.0, companies are creating Wikis and knowledge networks (Rowell, 2008). Third, as social networking applications are entirely Web-based, they can be quickly upgraded and modified as defined by the needs of both constituents or customers and employees. This aspect of usability is considered to be one of the dominant factors in the development of more collaborative, interactive applications based on Web 2.0 technologies (McAfee, 2007).

Fourth, technologically Web 2.0 applications are not resource-intensive and therefore do not require intensive support from it. Rather, the burden of governing the use of social networking rests with it ands in many organizations, senior management. Social networking websites rely on thin-client technology to make it possible to create entries at any time, from any location through a web browser as a result. Fifth, it is possible to syndicate content from a social networking application including blogs using syndication and blog readers, making the data more immediately available and useable over time (Bonabeau, 2009). Sixth, social networking's advantage strategically is in staying in touch with customers and their unmet needs and new product development ideas, solicit feedback on new products, and improve product designs.

All of these factors taken together are the catalysts in many organizations for the development of entirely new approaches to integrating content into a more process-centric framework (Hempel, 2009).

Despite these many advantages of Web 2.0 there are also the issues of governance of social networking applications including the belief on the part of many organizations that they must monitor the use of these applications as there is the potential significant productivity will be lost as a result of employees spending time on the networks instead of doing their work (Hathi, 2008).

Included in this area of concerns are those specifically defining the governance of employee's use of blogs. There have already been incidents where company secrets and also company criticisms involving confidential information are aired in public, the most notable being the Google employee who criticized the company's direction and focus and was dismissed as a result. The second disadvantage of initiating Web 2.0 applications within any organization, or participating in those that are outside the organization yet relevant to its customers and employees is the time requirement to keep these forms of knowledge sharing current. To embark on a Web 2.0-based social network strategy as part of a broader enterprise content management initiative is to make a major commitment as an organization into keeping the social networking software current, assigning authors and contributors, and also working to ensure the contents of the applications are consistent with governance policies.

Web 2.0's unglamorous side is all the hard work of initiating, growing, and maintaining not only the application but also the content. Inherent in these challenges are the change management issues of getting employees, many of which have very valuable information from years of experience, to share it through social networking. Often social networking applications are seen as a threat and resistance to change happens quickly. Employees resent having management ask them to share their most valued insights and knowledge, and therefore do not participate. Early failed implementations of social networking programs within organizations has led to very low levels of adoption, well below 50% of the total base of potential users. Organizations located in nations that have a demographic shift occurring due to retiring baby boomers have also looked to social networking applications as a means to capture knowledge from retiring workers, often with limited success as these workers feel the company is looking to gain their insights and let them go all the sooner for it. Overcoming this resistance to change is inherent in the IS planning strategies of Web 2.0- based networking applications to begin with.

The ability to foster collaboration is critical for social networking to be successful as an application or process in any organization. Organizations that quickly rush out and embrace Web 2.0 technologies including social networking applications and then turn into discussion exchanges online are susceptible to the entire network becoming more concerned with discussing what is wrong with the organization overall, how they would re-organize it, and in short, use social networking applications as a platform for complaining about all aspects of the organization. This underscores the need for having Web 2.0 strategies including social networking integrated into the broader content management system so that employees can see the value of it through the processes they use to complete their jobs. The social networking application components, when kept within organizations' four walls as part of a broader enterprise content management strategy, must be managed as a strategy first and a repository or taxonomy of data second.

The strategic objective of Web 2.0 must first be to create a more collaborative series of workflows for managing internal knowledge (Kambil, 2008). In the case of Web 2.0 and social networking external to any organization, there are a myriad of implications to contend with, including first and foremost, capturing the voice of the customer and understanding in detail their unmet needs. From a company-wide perspective, all forms of social networking and consumer-generated media need to be paid attention to from a corporate reputation management standpoint, and second, to look for ways to better serve the general public with information about the company. The goal of these strategies needs to go far beyond the re-purposing of press releases and promotional content. There in fact needs to be an active, honest and transparent stance any organization takes in responding to concerns from the public in general or customers specifically that arise in any of the social networking sites. Finally, there is the opportunity to learn more about customer segments of interest, and within those segments, specific audiences, through the studying of Web 2.0 and social networking trends. It is evident that Web 2.0 has accelerated and accentuated the traditional role of marketing, customer service and communications in organizations.

All of these internal and external factors relate to organizational objectives at a strategic level, yet also impact the definition of next generation Web 3.0 projects as well (Kambil, 2008).

Starting with the first phase of appreciating the unstructured problematical situation of Web 2.0's nurturing of social networking's non-linear growth, any organizations' planning needs to take into account of primary and tertiary development paths of a social network can impact system security, scalability, reliability, and extensibility of systems from an integration standpoint. There is also the need to define the specific strategies for taking into account the priorities and concerns of key users of the systems and external customers as well, including a definition of how their unmet needs fit into the broader strategic plan for an entire organization.