Web 2.0 Technologies: Social Networking and Enterprise Applications

Introduction to Web 2.0 Technologies

The Internet has revolutionized the means by which communication, collaboration, transactions, and ultimately the interrelationships between individuals and organizations occur on a global scale. In addition to the speed and alacrity of change that revolutionary approaches to communicating, collaborating, and transacting 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 purely technological, enterprise-wide Information Technologies (IT), social, and architectural approaches to evaluating Web 2.0. The transition from Web 1.0 — often described as a "push" oriented publishing model focused on the production of static websites that did not invite user participation — is significantly different from the more collaborative, participatory principles of Web 2.0 technologies and applications (Kirsner, 2007).

In the development of more collaborative applications, there is also a 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 IT standpoint, the social networking applications built on this platform exemplify the capabilities of the Internet's development, collaboration, and publishing technologies. This area of using Internet-based collaborative technologies and platforms to enable greater efficiency in how companies operate has been termed Enterprise 2.0 (McAfee, 2006). This aspect of Web 2.0 shows unique potential for 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), whereby the majority of people in an organization have access to social networking applications, thereby increasing the velocity of information sharing and 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, and MySpace. One of the most fascinating areas of research today in Web 2.0 concerns how companies are defining acceptable use policies for these applications throughout their organizations. These applications — Facebook and Twitter especially — are also being used in marketing campaigns and strategies.

The overlap of Web 2.0 technologies for both professional use in the form of marketing strategies and the inherent personal interest of employees is creating a potential liability in 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 them, there is ample evidence of how effective these applications are proving 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 which 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 in the context of how the second generation of services available online — specifically designed to ensure 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 that enable service and support to be delivered much more efficiently than before. Studies of the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction in Chinese Web 2.0-based companies show significant evidence that collaborative technologies lead 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 responsible for ensuring the security of entire company networks — who are by nature risk-averse to new technological developments that have not proven to align with business strategies (Kirsner, 2007). Skeptical of the new technologies that together comprise Web 2.0, and with specific skepticism directed at social networking, 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

Blogs — Online diary or journal entry on the Internet, primarily supporting text, photo (photoblog), video (vlog), and audio (podcast) formats. Google, AOL, and Yahoo offer free blogging platforms.

Mashup — A web service that gathers related content from more than one source. IBM's mashup applications, for example, enable project managers to match team resources with a map to identify their geographical locations.

Peer-to-Peer — A networking technique for effectively sharing music, audio, and text files. Napster and Gnutella are popular peer-to-peer networks.

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) — A 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. An RSS feed may contain 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 websites enabling people to share content such as text, audio, pictures, and videos. Popular social media sites include YouTube (video) and Flickr (photos).

Social Networking — Websites that permit users to create online networks and communicate with friends and colleagues. Social networking sites include MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Friends Reunited; business networking sites include LinkedIn and Ryze.

Tagging — Allows users to bookmark or rate online content to share recommendations with other users. Typically used by publishers of media sites seeking 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 — Enable users to create and edit the content of a website, leveraging the expertise of online users. Consumer wikis enable users to comment on content in addition to editing it. Wikipedia, a community wiki encyclopedia, includes approximately 1.3 million English-language articles.

Sources: (Bernoff & Li, 2008; Hauser, Tappeiner, & Walde, 2007, p. 75; Christ, Berges, & Trevino, 2007, pp. 13–14)

Taken together, these applications form the collaboration platform on which social networking applications and their variations — including mashups and blogs — rely in order to accomplish high levels of collaboration. The proliferation and growth of Web 2.0 applications are defined more by communication patterns than by adherence to taxonomies and architectures. Taken together, the applications in Table 1 are evidence of the dynamics that 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).

Figure 1: Web 2.0 Explained

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