Quote from Wired Magazine “Web 1.0 was about commerce, Web 2.0 is about people”
What does this mean for your business? At the ‘endless possbilities’ end of the scale Tim O’Reilly has a good diagram outlining what you can do with the possibilities Ajax, frequent releases, standard interfaces and interaction with your community (all features of Web 2.0) can give you.
On the other end of the scale, what are companies actually doing with the new possibilities? Since we tend to be about 6 months behind the curve here in Dublin, a couple of examples from the Bay area in the US are:
- Rollyo.com – choose which sites you want to search (built on top of Yahoo)
- Zimba – a web based collaboration suite in the same spaces as Microsoft Outlook and Exchange
- Upcoming.org – a user driven event site
What all of these have in common is that they have both a community (free version to get people on board) and Enterprise (additional features worth paying for) editions. The Community edition acts as marketing and a driver for the Enterprise edition through what economists call ‘Network effects’ – the more people that use a tool , the more useful it is.
Paul Browne 