Social Networking under web 2.0

This is the actual reproduction from the article from connectitnews.com. After reading through the article I felt that I can reproduce this as it deals with what web 2.0 and its relevance to Corporates .

So here is the reproduction

Social networking -- the new 'killer app'?
23 December, 2008

By Liam Lahey

Some say social networking came of age in 2008 and as it continues to mature over the course of 2009, it will live up to the hype as the next "killer app". But beyond social networking, what will Web 2.0 do for businesses in a forthcoming year that is economically unpredictable?
According to Tim O'Reilly (the man who coined the term), "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."
As stated on Wikipedia, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, described the term Web 2.0 as a piece of jargon. "Nobody really knows what it means," and "if Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."
Perhaps we'll have a stronger definition for Web 2.0 by the time there's talk of Web 4.0, as hindsight helps things to become vastly clearer.
"My own feeling is that all monikers are jargon," said Warren Shiau, senior associate, IT research, The Strategic Counsel. "What I perceive is that many people use Web 2.0 to signify people, rather than business entities, controlling the Web. But like Tim Berners-Lee says, Web 2.0 means lots of different things to lots of different people.
"Whatever you define Web 2.0 as I think is, in the end, irrelevant. There's a cycle to everything: start-ups get started, businesses grow and fail; things everybody says will be huge may end up being huge or turn-out not so huge. Remember how gigantic the ASP market was supposed to get?"
Beyond monikers, social networking has become a viable application with consumers and business users.

"Right now, social networking is valuable, and used, from a marketing and promotion standpoint. It can raise a company's profile, not to mention a brand or product profile," commented Michelle Warren, principal analyst, MW Consulting. "I've also seen it used for HR purposes -- to aid in the recruiting function. It is still largely viewed as being a cost-centre, however, as it is challenging to measure true benefits against it."

Executives would be well-served to understand its opportunities over the next year, and to see how they can benefit from it, she added.

"[Social networking] continues to ramp as a platform, however under current economic conditions which will restrict traditional and non-traditional forms of funding I expect there will be some market consolidation over the next two years," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst, The Enderle Group. "It isn't going away though and will continue to evolve into an ever strengthening platform but, I expect, with fewer major vendors in a few months."

It has also been said Web 2.0 is about hyper-connectivity, about the conversations that are happening on the Web that are shifting power away from companies and to the individual and the online communities to which they belong.

That is true of every wave of technology going back to the Bronze Age; the waves are just coming at an increasing rate.

"This is evolution at Internet speeds and those businesses that can be agile enough to evolve quickly enough will survive, many will actually anticipate these changes and flourish. You could argue that Google and Apple are poster children for this, while those that can't (Sun comes to mind) will languish and perhaps die," Enderle remarked. "This rate of change does put significant emphasis on survival of the fittest."

Warren said that is a definitely liability of Web 2.0 and an opportunity for the resellers.
"Sourcing, finding, and using data is difficult. Also, Web 2.0 expedites communications and therefore, the speed of business," she said. "Many argue that business is moving 'fast enough' these days -- Web 2.0 has the potential to speed it up. This has the ability to change the face of business in the next five years."

Meanwhile, Dan Latendre, CEO of Igloo Software -- a corporate social networking solutions provider -- said the technology still has a ways to go in terms of being adopted by organizations.
Igloo defines Web 2.0 as a set of new and innovative tools that take us beyond simple browsing, searching and publishing of static Websites.

"Along with this whole Web 2.0 and social networking play is something that's been forgotten and that's the software-as-a-service model," he said. "These are the choices organizations are going to have to make -- 'am I going on-premise or SaaS?'"
To that end, the coming year would be another important step for the corporate social networking adoption, he added.

"I don't think [social networking] came of age in 2008, I think we're still in an education phase," he said. "A lot of CIOs are still trying to figure out how to best implement a corporate social network in their organization.

"I strongly recommend to organizations to do it by business units . . . and not the top down enterprise approach. In the marketplace, you extend corporate social network outside your firewall to deepen those connections with your key partners and suppliers."

"Web 2.0 will generally allow successful businesses to become better connected with their customers, and it will probably have a great deal to do with who survives and prospers over the next 24 months," added Enderle. "Customer care and customer satisfaction form the foundation for customer retention and Web 2.0 services go to the core of customer care and customer satisfaction."

John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, recently said the next Internet experience would be driven by collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies and would be built around video and virtualization as the industry moves to the usage of collaboration tools.

"We believe the network will enable all forms of communication and IT," he said.
Everything Cisco is doing is building off of its belief that collaboration and Web 2.0 would become a more dominant and important part of business communications and doing business, Chambers added.
With files from Chris Talbot.

Unquote.

In my next blog write up I will share one article which talks about getting the best out of one the social networking sites LinkedIn

Happy reading.