Silicon Valley loves its buzzwords and one of the current crop is ‘Web 2.0’. It’s not new, but behind the inevitable hype lies a real change in the way the web is used – one that will change the way we do business as surely as the PC did a generation ago. Large corporations are also beginning to absorb Web 2.0 principles into the way they organise their business.

THE ‘INFORMATION-SOURCE WEB’ VERSUS THE ‘PARTICIPATION WEB’
 
Most of the web, as we know it today, consists of ‘information silos’ – sites that you visit to retrieve information, to buy, to carry out a transaction. Even when these sites are billed as ‘interactive’ this rarely means much more than the facility to register an opinion, leave feedback or to ask a question.
 
In recent years, advances in the power of computers and, crucially, the networks connecting them, has led to the growth of a new type of website – one that relies on its users providing content, rather than solely giving them information.
 
eBay, for example, is an up-to-date version of the market-place, where anyone with goods to sell can set out their stall. But the power underlying eBay – the power of computers and networks – makes it a truly collaborative service, ensuring, for example, that dodgy traders are quickly unmasked and honest traders rewarded, whilst buyers and sellers alike are protected financially. In other words, the site relies on real-world interaction between people, just as a market in a small town does, and grows in effectiveness in proportion to the number of people using it.
 
eBay is definitely a ‘Web 2.0’ site. So too is Yahoo!’s Flickr photo-sharing service with over 2 billion images and increasingly powerful searching and public indexing tools. And collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia has over 9 million articles in 253 languages. Teen hang-out MySpace and its slightly more grown-up cousin, Facebook are also Web 2.0. Even Google – which analyses which sites the web user population values, as a way of ranking search results – is part of this new wave. So is the blogging phenomenon. The common theme is collaboration: users provide information as well as using it.

BEDROOM TODAY – BOARDROOM TOMORROW
 
Historically, advances in computing technology usually move from corporates to consumers. But in a reversal of that usual development path, Web 2.0 began life with enthusiastic adoption by clued-in youngsters. It is now gradually finding its way into the practices of businesses not noted for irresponsible flights of fancy. So, what are they seeing in Web 2.0? Here’s just three key areas.

Wikis are turbocharging collaboration in many companies, by facilitating and encouraging pooling of information about customers, processes, products. Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and media company Disney – as well as BT Wholesale – are among the corporations encouraging wikis.

Blogging – politicians are doing it of course, but so are corporate leaders like Jonathan Schwartz of Sun and Bob Lutz of General Motors: engaging in direct public conversations with customers and stakeholders. Transparency is also a key concept in a post-Enron world, where large organisations have never been more closely watched.

Social networking – more and more companies are using sites like LinkedIn to find the right staff – even, in some noteworthy instances, to find the right CEOs. And employees also now use Visible Path as a tool for mapping and maintaining their professional networks.

 
ONE GIANT COMPUTER
 
Some companies remain sceptical, of course, and there is no use denying that ‘web 2.0’ is also a marketing buzzword. But Kevin Nickels Strategy Director of BT Design thinks that the underlying concept is here to stay – the idea of the web as a platform for participation, not just in terms of content, but also in terms of services.
 
Kevin quotes the example of a large UK bank that took the decision to implement an internal Facebook site because they understood its potential as a useful business tool. The site created an internal social network that connected people faster and more accurately than traditional structured methods like skills databases. "The game was hot competition among the bank’s younger employees for reputation as a well connected Facebook user. Using a social network means that you’re only ever a couple of degrees of separation from the right source and simply mirrors the powerful informal processes that occur naturally inside any company. Facebook is simply more efficient."

BT is using this participation model increasingly inside its own business, using the capabilities of its 21CN (21st Century IP network transformation programme) to encourage co-operation amongst its own people and to experiment with new forms of engagement with its customers. BT Wholesale is beginning to use the power of next generation networks to leverage collaboration with Communications Providers and their customers. "In the next step of this evolution," says Kevin, "we’ll see the gradual abandoning of the large, expensive slow-to-market software model in favour of lighter, more flexible web-based applications that businesses can put together and start using within days. In this model, software distribution also becomes ‘viral’ and customers in effect become resellers."

The ‘mashup’ – a web application combining data from more than one source into a single integrated tool – is an example. Craigslist  is a centralised network of local online communities offering ads, forums and all sorts of local services, now serving 9 billion pages a month, and makes extensive use of mashups to provide new and distinct web services. For proof that this is a coming technology, look no further than Microsoft, about to launch ‘Popfly’, a mashup creation product.


READ BETWEEN THE LINES

The speed and reliability of modern networks means that ‘the network is the computer’ (see The network has gone soft in the last edition of Between the Lines). BT Wholesale’s 21CN is the essential underpinning for this new model for computing, one in which ‘content is king’ and the limitations of legacy hard-wired networks simply disappear. Web21c – our on-demand computing infrastructure running on 21CN – together with software development kits (SDKs) are among the first fruits of this new approach. 21CN is empowering customers as never before.