Web 2.0 Means Business

In a sense, using the phrase “social networking” to describe the Web 2.0 phenomenon puts blinders on most of us; the automatic tendency is to look at pure P2P plays in evaluating whether anything qualifies as 2.0. Certainly, the early success stories have been in the P2P space – Blogger, Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and so on.

From Web 1.0 and business history, we can and should know better. The early poster child for Web 1.0 success was Hotmail; with the primary offering enabling users to communicate with other users, I’d consider that as a P2P model, even though purists may debate whether it qualifies as a pure peer-to-peer.

What were the next successes? Amazon, the early incarnation of Ebay, and others; B2C models in webspeak. We’re beginning to see some of these here on Web 2.0; Zoho, Foonance and others of the like.

And going forward, the B2B space; Ebay has successfully made a straddle between B2C & B2B, with significant business offerings and revenues. Alibaba, Elance and other pure B2B plays. Connectbeam and Krugle are just a couple of the Web 2.0 analogs I’ve seen so far; but there will be plenty more.

Each of these ramps up differently over time; today, with both B2B and B2C, we’re on the early stages of the ramp. I believe that many of the characteristics of Web 2.0 are ideally suited for B2C and B2B, and we’ll see a much stronger growth in these areas.

More importantly – we’ve seen how web technologies like email, chat and VOIP have impacted the way businesses work, changing the way they communicate. But huge amounts of business IT investment goes not into communication but into transaction; and that’s where Web 2.0 approaches will have the greatest impact.