It wasn't long ago that to be a credible participant in social media one only had to have a decent blog and keep it updated fairly regularly.  The rise of social media was an astonishing and novel enough development that most people still don't blog today, despite the enormous influence that blogging and other forms of social media continue to have.  One reason is that blogging takes time and takes some skill, both in writing and using blogging tools effectively. Another is the rise of online social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Hi5, which add a personal dimension to online interaction that many find more rewarding and relevant for them.

But just like blogs made two-way conversations on the Web relatively cheap, easy, and quick for the masses compared to previous methods (such as personal Web sites), conversational models on the Web have continued to evolve.  Recently, microblogging and social aggregation platforms like Twitter and Friendfeed have emerged to offer alternative models that are compelling for a number of significant reasons.  For one, contributing to them doesn't take much time.  To achieve this, they either have radical limits on the amount of content that can be posted at a time (140 characters for Twitter), or they do the posting work for you and automatically centralize your social activity on other sites into a single feed, as in the case of Friendfeed.  They also tend to work very well on mobile devices -- an incredibly fast growing channel for experiencing anything on the Web these days -- as well scale conversation well, are extremely easy to use (even easier in general than blogs), and allow you to keep track of a large numbers of contacts socially.

And vitally, both Twitter and Friendfeed are open platforms, not just mere tools.  A key factor in their success is that they offer open APIs to allow others to add the features and capabilities that are missing for various specialty needs that would otherwise clutter the product for many users.  This creates a far richer overall feature set than any single product could offer on its own, while at the same time leveraging the innovation of the user community.  Blogs have been able to do something similar with badges, widgets, and plug-ins for some time but haven't seen the same directed results as we'll see below.

The sheer volume of 3rd party add-on activity for these platforms is impressive. Best-of-breed applications like Twhirl for Twitter (and now Friendfeed) and AlertThingy for Friendfeed extend these new social media experiences onto the desktop and provide real-time monitoring of your "Twitterverse" or friend's feeds.  To get a full sense of the depth and scope of the innovation of the Twitter community, which is certainly still a niche compared to the blogosphere, though an increasingly impressive one, you have only to look at some of its more compelling 3rd party applications:

Common Twitter Applications 

• Summize - A power search engine for scanning Twitter conversations for information
• Twitter Charts - Detailed analytics of your Twitter activities along many different metrics
• TwitterFeed - Link your blog activity to Twitter
• TwitterGram - Post MP3s into your Twitter conversations
• TweetBurner - Combined with twurl.org, this application shows click through analytics on your Twitter links as well as overall Twitterverse stats
• TweetWheel - Analysis your Twitter account's social graph to understand the connections between your followers
• TwittEarth - A 3d animated globe that shows activity in the Twitter public timeline in near real-time
• Twitt(url)y - A link aggregator that reports on link activity within the Twitterverse, a sort of Techmeme for Twitter
• TwitSay - Use your phone to post to Twitter via a voice message
• TwitterSnooze - Turn off a chatty user temporarily and bring them back automatically later
• Twistori - An interesting dashboard that displays the expression of key memes from the Twitter public timeline, creating a sort of global collective intelligence
• Twubble - Many new Twitter users have trouble finding users to follower, this tool helps finds new contacts you might care about

This only a small list of the most popular Twitter applications and they don't even include the product offerings that are stand-alone in their own right, but work much better in conjunction with Twitter and Friendfeed, such as Brightkite and Natuba.

Understanding How Conversations Are Changing

The challenge today is that while the size of individual contributions to online conversations is getting smaller, the frequency of conversations are increasing on these new social media platforms. Making this point, Sarah Perez over at Read/Write Web wrote this morning that there are too many choices, and too much content. Users of the latest social media tools are far more likely to post several times a day, more likely dozens of times, each one forming a new conversational beachhead.  This can be overwhelming, but it can also be enormously stimulating and rewarding, as a form of collaboration, cross-pollination, brainstorming, serendipity, news gathering, and countless other activities provide one with a continuous connection to the broader world.

To get a handle on how people are using these next generation social media platforms, I ran an online survey this week which I pushed out across my Twitter followers, Friendfeed contacts, and a random sampling of my personal contacts via e-mail (the latter without much regard if they used these tools.) The results largely reflect many of the points above, but there were some interesting write-in results as well.

Here's how the Twitter survey results broke down:

Results Of This Week's Twitter/Friend Usage Survey

1. Do use Twitter or Friendfeed on a regular basis? (Multiple Answers Allowed): 96.1% Twitter, 25.2% Friendfeed, 3.9% Neither
2. What things do you like about Twitter, Friendfeed, or your write-in choice from question #1: (Multiple answers allowed):
   • My friends and/or colleagues use it. 65%
   • A good selection of 3rd party apps are available. 26.2%
   • I've built up a set of followers which I've come to know and with which I socialize. 42.7%
   • It's easy to use. 71.8%
   • It works well with my mobile devices when I'm on the go. 43.7%
   • Contributing doesn't require much time. 69.9%
   • Easy to socially interact with a large number of people. 59.2%
   • I can publicize my activities from other Web sites. 37.9%
   • Useful way to acquire news and information. 71.8%
   • It's better than e-mail for quick communication with contacts. 35.9%
   • Actually, I don't think Twitter or Friendfeed are that great. 4.9%
3. What do you like LEAST about Twitter, Friendfeed, or your write-in answer for #1: (Write-In. Representative Samples.)
   •  "Twitter lacks a feature to filter or an easy way to group."
   • "Twitter is yet another thing to keep up with, I much prefer the all-inclusive nature of Facebook."
   • "downtime"
   • "I get a lot of noise, that is, useless information from people I'm following."
   • "Poor support for conversations. no threads, don't see other half if not following all involved."
   • "I've found it's hard to get some of my friends to adopt it."
4. Do now, or are you planning to, use Twitter or Friendfeed for business purposes?
   • Yes. 66%
   • No. 12%
   • Considering it. 22%

One of the biggest surprises of this survey (there were 103 respondents total) was the amount of those who are thinking about using Twitter for business purposes.  Whether that's just expanding their personal brand or actually leveraging it for business collaboration, marketing, and other uses is hard to tell and will be the subject of a further survey.

Interestingly, in terms of being used as Enterprise 2.0 platforms by businesses, both Twitter and Friendfeed fly in the face of the underlying pull-based models that make social media more effective that traditional collaboration tools and it'll be interesting to see how well they will function in the workplace, something that seems a way off for most organizations right now.  And it may be that in the end that social networking for business platforms like Google's new Friend Connect may be the best answer. One thing is for sure, we'll find out soon as the living laboratory of the Web validates the best approaches.

Most other responses were within expected norms though it was interesting to see that, at least explicitly, users don't value 3rd party apps that much.  They are also using these social media tools as a replacement for traditional e-mail. But it was ease-of-use and the gathering of news and information which were listed as the aspects that respondents appreciated the most in these emerging platforms.  Which highlights that crowdsourcing of news via Twitter in particular continues to be a fascinating topic as a Paul Bradshaw wrote recently as he explored the news coming out of China about the recent earthquake disaster. 

All of this highlight that the unintended uses and emergent outcomes that we continue to see with with these platforms is demonstrating that they have the power to achieve compelling results of a wide variety, from news and learning to staying in touch and achieving business goals.  But the biggest challenge will continue to be the challenge of scaling our attention and time, something that's always in finite quantity. The product creator that can successfully aggregate conversation without losing the social value will be the winner as these endless conversations spin around us, informing, educating and enriching us.

You can track me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe and on Friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/dhinchcliffe.

Where do you see conversation online headed?  Will it be microplatforms like Twitter or SNS like Google Friend Connect? Or something else entirely? Note: Use wiki markup below to embed links. 

I've been spending a good amount of time the last several weeks getting ready for the workshop session I'll be giving at Web 2.0 Expo next week in San Francisco on building next-generation Web 2.0 applications.  What does "next generation" mean compared to what we were doing a couple of years ago with Web 2.0? A good number of things as it turns out. 

We're currently seeing that newer Web applications are much more federated than in the past, meaning they're made of distributed parts instead of being just one app on a Web server at one domain and are increasingly leveraging external Web services and APIs.  We're also seeing Web app functionality being bundled up into user distributable components such as widgets, gadgets, badges, and SNS embedded apps.  Next generation Web apps are also much more social than in the past with features such as friends lists, activity streams, and aggregation from other social sites as well as using that information to really learn about your customer like Facebook does [Paul Buchheit.]  And new Web apps are leveraging powerful new development platforms like Ruby on Rails, grid environments like 3tera , or cloud computing platforms like Amazon's EC2 and Google App Engine (my comparison of the latter two is here on ZDNet.) And these are just three of the larger aspects of the many new things taking place in on the 'edge' of the Web today.

That's a lot of things to learn for those who want to build Web applications that offer competitive features and will cost effectively scale as apps get larger, while often using technology that's still fairly experimental.  And that's one of the big reasons we suggested this workshop to help get a snapshot of the current state of the industry to get up to speed on the latest.  So we're going to spend Tuesday afternoon at Expo going over the details of everything that's happening in the Web app development space to the fullest extent possible. 

And while I reserve the right to change things right up the very last moment, here's what I plan on covering next week in San Francisco:

We'll start by providing a detailed examination of the best methods for turning a Web application into an open platform to drive growth through the use of open Web APIs with REST, JSON, ATOM. The key success factors for the underpinning business models of open Web platforms including brief case studies will be presented. Designing for consumption in mashups and 3rd party Web apps will also be covered.  I'm planning to build a Ruby on Rails REST API during the session based on the positive experiences we had a few weeks ago with Rails 2.0.

The very latest rich user experience platforms will be explored including Ajax, Adobe’s AIR, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and Sun’s JavaFx with an eye towards how to take advantage of their individual strengths to create new, highly compelling user experiences not previously possible, including for the next generation of mobile devices.

This session will then look in detail at the latest in Web identity models with a focus on how to use openid and other popular Web single-sign on models to offer users the identity choices they’ll prefer in the near future. The cutting edge of social distribution channels will be explored through the latest field research in OpenSocial and Facebook application models and how best to package and distribute your Web application within popular and high volume social ecosystems and Web widgets. 

The second half of the workshop explores the architectures and cutting edge development models of Web 2.0 era applications circa 2008. The latest techniques for designing applications out of other pre-existing online platforms such as AWS, Google’s APIs, and many others will be given with specific examples for dramatically cutting the cost and time to market of modern Web applications. The latest in emergent architecture techniques, large-scale customer testing approaches, and rapid scalability methods (summary of these three here) will round out the workshop and finish with a informative survey of the latest productivity-oriented development platforms for creating highly effective Web applications including Ruby on Rails 2.0, Cake PHP, Groovy, Grails, and others.

And while I'll into more details about these in my session, here are some high level tips for building next generation Web 2.0 applications:

Tips for Building Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications 

• First, understand the basics of Web 2.0.  Here is a popular overview I wrote a little while back that has the essential design patterns of Web 2.0 as well as how they specifically plug into a viable business model.
• Assemble a development team that is willing to learn.  The market is moving at light speed at the moment and new models for designing, building, hosting, and distributing Web apps are emerging rapidly.  Because of this, it's fairly unlikely you'll be able to hire the folks that already have the skills you need, so the next best thing is hiring people who are passionate about and able to learn the latest new things quickly.
• Spend some time studying the competition.  It's definitely not polite to directly design replicate another company's Web app, but they'll do all sorts of things with their application that will give you new ideas and places to take your project that you never thought about. That doesn't mean you have to do exactly what they do, far from it.  But when you're playing on the Web, you're all playing in the same ecosystem and it's often surprising how you can affect each other.
• Really get to know your customers.  You might think they're consumers but they might really be small businesses or big enterprises.  All of the audience groups out there have specific needs and once you learn your demographic and who is actually using your applications, you can start offering them what they really need.  For example, here's what large enterprises are typically looking at doing with Web 2.0 applications.  It's a lot different from what consumers will generally do. Deeply understanding your customers (which you can watch live as they interact with your product) will make your product as successful as possible.  In fact, I call this the First Commandment of application development.
• Along the way, don't lose sight of the fundamentals of Web 2.0.  It's what makes your product especially potent and drives the core of the long-term value it generates. But it's easy to forget in the haze of Web design, feature-itis, testing, deployment, hosting, and scaling.  I'm not talking the surface gloss that most people are referring to with Web 2.0, I'm talking the serious stuff like Architectures of Participation, building a strong network effect, and capturing classes of data online.  Also read my Sixteen Ways essay as well as Product Development 2.0, they can help guide you enormously.
• Finally, use all the latest tools, technologies, apps, platforms and gain ground truth on what they can do.  There is no substitute for using things hands on and understanding what they are capable of.  Yes, this is time-consuming.  No, you can't skip it.  This is the special sauce that many entreprenuers fail at doing: Using Web 2.0-style apps in their personal and work life and getting their hands deep into the actual technologies.  Get to understand these things profoundly including how they work and their strengths and weaknesses.

I'll be at Web 2.0 Expo for most of the week and I'll be keeping everyone up to date on my Twitter feed , so please follow me if you want to keep up with the very latest.

What are you most interested in from a Web 2.0 application design perspective? Put your comments below and use wiki markup for links.

It's beginning to look like 2008 might be the year of the social aggregator as users begin to employ these emerging new tools to better manage and track their various online relationships, both personal and professional.  The introduction of these new Web applications, such as Friendfeed, Socialthing!, Spokeo, Second Brain, and Iminta, are making it easy for users to keep track of what their friends are doing online while simultaneously demonstrating that there are compelling alternatives to being social online without having to, say, actively maintain a Facebook account.  In fact, that's the very premise of this new type of social Web utility, which automatically tracks a user's public activity at sites around the Web including blogs, Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us and so on, and creates a single convenient feed for others to consume and track.

I've been evaluating a number of these applications over the last few weeks and so far Friendfeed seems to be one of the best offerings in this space and also supports one of the widest array of online services, with Socialthing a close second.  Friendfeed currently monitors and aggregates one's social activity on 28 different services at the time of this writing, putting the result into one clean activity stream with a matching Atom feed.  While the latency on some of the services Friendfeed tracks isn't always great -- del.icio.us bookmarks seem to take a good long while to show up for example -- the integration ranges from the workable to the robust, with surprisingly good support for Twitter's hashtags for example.  Services you also might not have previously considered aggregating socially are also offered by Friendfeed including your Gmail status message, Netflix rental queue, and your LinkedIn activity.

However, a quick examination of Alexa traffic charts (partial sample below) shows there are no clear leaders in this emerging space that will soon be crowded with competition, if it isn't already.  Peter Cashmore at Mashable tracked at least 20 entries in this space mid-last year and so it's interesting to see how quickly Friendfeed has risen among the various players. Ease of use, visual elegance, and breadth of service tracking appears to be the competitive discriminator here, like it is with so many things in the Web 2.0 world. 

 

This morning Duncan Riley at TechCrunch covered the best ways to track Web 2.0 and he omitted social aggregators as something users should be taking advantage of, while explicitly including things like TechMeme and blog readers.  That's because social aggregators are far from being mainstream yet and the long term staying power of these individual Web applications aren't clear either, making it a challenge to decide where to "move in".  But increasingly -- as Robert Scoble did this week -- I'm finding that I'm checking my Friendfeed stream and not Facebook or Techmeme as much as I used to, and I suspect many others will as well as they find aggregated social activity streams the fullest and most convenient picture of their social network.  The egalitarian nature of social aggregators is also appealing at a time when many social networks are trying to put up as much of a walled garden as users will accept.

The wild cards for this space include major players such as Google or Facebook credibly adding social aggregation to their own offerings as well as a killer app mobile entry.  Open social networking standards such as Open Friend Format will also make this space interesting in the medium to long term.  Please tell us your favorite social aggregator below.

One of the hottest topics in the online world in the last couple of years has been the growth of social networking services such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as the addition of a social element to existing user experiences.  Despite riding several waves of hype, it's now clear that the social networking space will only get hotter in 2008 according to most watchers.  Social software has come fully into its own as of 2008 -- for all appearances permanently -- and understanding the reasons for this rapid rise as well as figuring out how to leverage it best is the job of everyone who wants to make the most of the Web 2.0 era.

Gaining a deeper insight to the social networking phenomenon, now exhibited by the tens of millions of users employing them globally on a daily basis for both personal and businesses uses, currently means understanding the fundamental unit of the social network, also one of the biggest new buzzphrases of the year: the social graph.  Fortunately, that's simple enough despite the term's oblique reference to graph theory, which it is heavily based upon.

Simply put, a social graph is a set of people, referred to as nodes, that are connected together by vertices -- better known as links or connections -- that reflect their social relationships.  You can see a conceptual social graph above, showing the typical distinction of social networks to reflect whether a connection with another person is direct or indirect.  For example, the popular business social networking service LinkedIn, uses this model and sorts a member's social graph into different degrees of separation, which you can see a typical example of below and taken from my LinkedIn profile:

 

Also becoming popular is the burgeoning field of social analytics, such as the Socalistics application in Facebook and the Interactive Friends Graph, though there are also commercial standalone products here or on the way for the enterprise and open Web spaces from companies like KnowNow and Bravadosoft.  The Interactive Friends Graph is a nice, simple example anyone can try on their own and you can see mine from Facebook below.  Hovering over nodes in the live version in your Facebook profile allows you to see who is connected to others in your network and begin to gain insight and understanding of the relationships in your network.

 

But what are the top issues one must understand about the social graph in 2008?  As I've seen social networks become common on corporate intranets and in daily use on the Web, some of the issues are rapidly becoming clear.  However, the full story will certainly continue to unfold for the next several years at least.  Here's what we're seeing at the moment:

Strategies and Issues for the Social Graph - Circa 2008

• The social graph is poised to replace the address book and contact list as the preferred organizing structure for personal and business relationships. This was one of my Web 2.0 predictions for 2008 and it won't fully come true for the majority of users for at least several years since there's such an installed base of traditional tools for managing relationship information.  What's the difference?  Social networks are usually opt-in, two-ways for one.  And they are social for another, meaning they tend to encourage communication and collaboration, such as through user profile event streams and status messages.  They also offer up and actively make use of the deeper insight into the full graph's social surface area beyond direct contacts, such as LinkedIn's introduction service.
• Ownership of the social graph is going to be a ground zero issue in 2008.  Robert Scoble's widely covered attempt recently to use Plaxo Pulse to export his 5,000 Facebook contacts recently got him banned temporarily from the service.  But as users begin to realize that the contact lists they are building using online Web tools might not be portable, this will become a growing concern, particularly since two-way opt-in makes a social graph more valuable (and accurate) but significantly harder to recreate on demand elsewhere. This takes us to our next subject...
  
• Many social networking services will adopt open data initiatives.  Both Google and Facebook recently showed support for DataPortability.org and Google has an interesting play in their OpenSocial initiative.  This is welcome news that will resolve some of the concerns around who owns the graph but interestingly, traditional corporations will be the slowest get this and will rarely let workers take their hard won social graphs and user profiles with them elsewhere as they move to new jobs.  Public social networking sites Web sites are leading the way here and this will only drive more business users to the open Web, where they at least have some control over their social graph.  Smart organizations will provide their workers with some form of open social graph support, lest they lose control completely as workers keep more and more of their graph in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo and not in prescribed relationship management tools.
• Attempts to monetize social graphs will drive interest in regulation and legislation.  Social networking is now a global Internet phenomenon and that the information contained within them is highly central to everyone's lives.  This will make everything from protecting children to individual privacy of social graphs a hot issue for some local and federal governments.  All it will take is one or two widely covered exploits to make this happen.  Expect the European Union and the U.S. government to begin seriously examining the issue this year with many other governments following suite.  Good citizenship of sites that manage social graphs will be essential to prevent excessive government involvement.
• The line is blurring between personal and business use of social graphs.  We're all rapidly getting one large social graph each already, with everyone we know in them.  Most public social networking sites do a poor job of separating different subgroups of our social networks, such as allowing pictures and status messages to only go to a specific subgroups (work messages to business, family message to family, friends messages to friend, etc.)  This actually works a little bit better in enterprise social networks, but not much, since it largely consists of a Contact Type field.  Segmentation of social graphs will be an increasingly requested feature by users struggling with their use.  The social graph management services that make this distinction and enable its leverage may do very well indeed.
• Open Web identity, which will ultimately form the global "primary key" for social graph nodes, will not get anywhere soon.  This despite it being needed badly but the users of the Web have not yet felt compelled to demand it.  Data portability of social graphs will begin to drive adoption of user controlled Web identity, and hopefully government regulation will not.  See Dare Obasanjo's deep exploration of using openid to enable social graph interoperability as an example of what will need to happen, despite there being little incentive currently for sites to use other site's openids.
• Making social networking "gardening" and administration easier will drive new innovations.  Most individual social graphs are primarily tended by hand today, although a growing number of products, such as Visible Path, do all the tedious work for you by watching your social interaction online such as through tight integration through e-mail and instant messaging, building a rich graph for you (even sending invitations) as you go about your daily social activities.  New innovations like these will make social graphs easier to maintain and richer in overall information while also driving adoption through ease of use.
• The optional two-way confirmation of a social graph link becoming standard.  Many social graph management platforms (Facebook and Linked for example) require confirmation from the other side of the connection before adding a person to your graph.  Sites like Spock, which make it optional, will ultimately be more practical for managing a social graph while still allowing discernment of two way confirmations, which tend to be more valuable and convey key information about the trust and real extent of a social relationship.
  
• Social networking fatigue will not set in as perceived constraints such as Dunbar's limit do not prove to be universal.  While there are many theories on how big a social graph can get before it become unmanageable and sees diminishing returns on growth (note that both Facebook and LinkedIn encourage ceilings), the fact is that the are many different purposes for a social graph, from data mining and historical research, to marketing and customer relationship management.  

What else is going to be key to dealing with the social graph in 2008?  Please leave in comments below and I'll update this post with any good submissions.

It's the first work day of the new year and I thought I'd take some time to offer up my predictions for what will happen on the leading edge of the Internet this year.  2007 saw Web 2.0 -- defined here as the pervasive two-way Web used for social media, mashups, user-powered Web applications, and social networking -- go far more mainstream than it had in 2006.  Web 2.0 poster children like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube pushed their way into the top 10 Web sites globally and stayed there for virtually all of 2007.  Fresh, new Internet startups were created by the hundreds (even thousands, if you count the innumerable garage and bedroom attempts) last year and that trend isn't going to stop any time soon and the reason is fairly obvious: The Web is simply the best place to create an incredibly scalable business for the least possible investment and effort. 

However, that's not to say that it's easy to be successful online.  It's not, and the history of the Internet startup arena is littered with failures large and small, and many -- even most -- startups will inevitably succumb if they don't provide a fairly compelling offering to the users of the Web.  But fortunately for those that get the right mix of capabilities and user engagement in their online products, the upside can be nearly limitless.  This fundamental fact helped drive the whole conception of Web 2.0: A new set of models and patterns creating Web sites and applications that looked at the best practices that actually worked from the success stories of the early Web.  My point here is that the Web itself is in a state of perpetual evolution and we are all still learning a great deal all the time about what works and what doesn't and the industry tries innovative new ideas all the time.  In this way, 2008 will continue to be a fascinating year as we see what history's largest ever business laboratory and incubator will turn out for us.

We are however assuredly seeing the maturation of the Web 2.0 industry, with many of the less successful online product plays falling by the wayside from first and second Web 2.0 wave as infamously tracked by Michael Arrington's Web 2.0 Deadpool, with only a few meteoric stars rising to the top.  The good news: That doesn't mean there won't be many exciting and innovative new things happening online this year, if you only know where to look.

Here's my take on what we will see happen in 2008 in the Web 2.0 arena:

Web 2.0 Predictions for 2008 

• Open APIs finally go beyond free as successful business models emerge. Sites like Twitter are finding that their APIs get ten times the use of the site itself (Web 2.0 principle: A platform beats an application every time), but monetizing them is a challenge for all but a few major player such as Amazon.  While you can charge for each transaction across the API boundary, that isn't appropriate for many types of API uses.  Some have speculated that Twitter's API usage is making them the middle-man, like the cable companies are with broadband, but with no reasonable way to charge for API usage that typical users would accept.  Companies will continue to experiment with techniques such as injecting ads in the API data to requiring a small yearly fee to open an API for an individual user so they can use apps built for it. However, at least one major new API monetization model will emerge in 2008 that will prove to have long term legs.  My bet: The costs will increasingly be bundled into a Web 2.0 application's subscription fee or other business model, even if they use an API of the user's preference, such as Amazon's S3.  This would require billing support from API vendors to chargeback for excessive use by a customer but it would work.

• Rich Internet Application (RIA) platforms such as Adobe AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight get major traction as the development of non-trivial Web applications in Ajax remains difficult and time-consuming.  While Ajax is made from 100% open Web standards, it was never explicitly designed for the job of creating rich user experiences and it's proven tough going for many companies trying to create next generation Web experiences in Ajax.  Adobe and Microsoft have been making enormous investments in browser plug-ins and supporting development tools that will change the way the Web will look in 2008 and beyond.  These two platforms will be huge successes this year, despite the many challenges that RIA platforms face such as supporting page view-based business models, analytics, accessibility, network effects, link structure, search engine optimzation (SEO) and more.
• Google's product strategy begins to coalesce into a mostly coherent picture, though a few big pieces won't fit into the puzzle.  While appearing to overextend itself into everything from online office application, mobile phone platforms, energy, and health, some of it will begin to make sense as the missing pieces begin to emerge next year.  Look for a strategy that combines a long-term vision to integrate enormous user reach (online, mobile, SNS) as well as function (software apps and utility capabilities such as search and location) and business (advertising)  into an interlocking platform play of a scope and breadth that will, pound for pound, out maneuver the vast majority of their competition.  Disclaimer: I am a Google shareholder.
• The Web 2.0 industry consolidates as it begins to mature.  This has been covered extensively on Mashable and John Battelle's 2008 prediction list so I don't need to repeat their outlooks, which I generally agree with.  Most startups, as in any generation, will fall by the wayside and a few major success stories will emerge.  Mergers and acquisitions will ensue. The next generation will begin, and so on.  The reality is that most new Web apps are still mostly Web 1.0.  We still have a long way to go before Web 2.0 design patterns are standard fare but Web 3.0 (whatever that turns out to be) will come upon us while that's still happening.  2008 will see a lot of old Web 2.0 faces be acquired or leave the scene entirely.
• End-user mashups will be a reality but adoption will be slow for most of the year as users take time coming to grips with the possibilities and mindset.  A little while back I wrote a detailed list of reasons why end-user mashups wouldn't happen in a big way in 2007.  Since then, it looks like only a couple of those reasons will be addressed in 2008.  Despite this, we'll see mashup platforms being rolled out by IT departments and high-functioning businesses as a significantly better and cheaper way to solve many problems by remixing the immense pool of content and functionality on the Web and in our organizations.  The average user will need time for this potential to be appreciated and understood but we'll see the first significant creation of end-user assembled Web applications in 2008.
• The Web widget format wars will ensue as Google Gadgets/OpenSocial takes on just about everyone else.  No one will win yet.  2007 was the year of the Do-It-Yourself era when it comes to users creating their own experiences out of the Web, often by just pulling off the parts of a Web site they liked and sharing it with others in their blogs and user profiles.  To embrace this demand, almost all major Web sites currently offer their sites in modular chunks known as widgets, or if you're Google or Microsoft, gadgets that their users can distribute.  However, like many aspects of Web 2.0, Web widgets are an emergent phenomenon with no large company or standards organization having created it up front with lots of engineering and funding.  As a result, there are many different ways to design and offer a Web widget with Google taking the clear lead at the moment with well over 30,000 different Gadgets currently being offered.  Throw in SNS widget/app platforms such as Facebook applications and OpenSocial and you have a recipe for fragmentation and an increasing to do list for Web sites which want to participate in what is a growing and often captive ecosystem of users controlled by each format's backer.  No consensus will be reached by the Web industry in 2008 but many solutions will be proposed, such as the W3C's Widget spec.
• Page view "inventories" for online advertising continues to fall short of demand, even if an economic downturn takes place.  The well regarded McKinsey & Company predicted last year that advertising will actually have fairly significant growth challenges for the next five years from high demand and lack of maturity in the management of online advertising through traditional outlets.  My personal take: I've seen enough pent-up demand that I don't think even an economic downtown will noticeable affect the fortunes of online adveritising for the foreseeable future.
• Web-based Software as a service (SaaS), aka Office 2.0, continues to encounter serious challenges but grows at a record pace anyway.  Offline access to applications and data remains one of the biggest challenges to true Web-based software, but Google Gears and offerings from firms like Etelos are offering more and more options to make Web apps work offline (albeit with reductions in functionality).  Other challenges include the cumulative drag of paying a periodic subscription fee for access to software as well security and overall capability.  Despite this, positive aspects of SaaS will continue to prevail and 2008 is looking to be the biggest SaaS year yet.
• A wave of new killer mobile Web applications (and their startups) appear, spurred by the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and ever more untethered workers.  Twitter was likely just the first in an era of fundamentally network-oriented applications with communications and collaboration at their design core.  The release of the iPhone last year proved that Web apps could be nearly as functional and pleasing as desktop apps.  The coming iPhone SDK, which will let anyone build iPhone software legally, will help usher in a new era of useful new consumer and business mobile applications, many which will sport Web 2.0 capabilities or even be fundamentally Web 2.0 based, such as route capturing software and automatic traffic tracking, particularly as more mobile devices add GPS capability in 2008.
• The first Android-powered phones will fail to impress and a decent, though not spectacular, iPhone upgrade keeps Apple ahead of the industry.  Google's widely covered Android platform will experience the usual beta/1.0 issues, particularly since one company doesn't have control over the entire product development process of Android phones.  Expect a somewhat rocky second half of '08 for Android while Apple maintains its market lead with what is still the most Web-friendly communications device yet created by releasing a solid upgrade of the iPhone this year, perhaps even twice.  Mobile Web 2.0 apps will continue to get very popular in 2008.
• Social media begins to grow up, leading to the first significant onset of Web 2.0 versions of talent agents, production companies, and other supply/demand enablers.  Blogs and other forms of social media such as backyard produced YouTube videos let anyone reach out to the entire audience of the Web at the cost of nothing more than a little bit of their time.  Despite the hugely democratizing effect this is having in the media world, the new online stars of the Web 2.0 still need professional help to maximize their opportunities and potential.  While this has been going on for a while with media companies cultivating paid bloggers and other forms of leveraging social media, expect that the social media phenomenon will being to create its own cottage industry of agents that can help the talented reach the Web mot effectively, for a cut of the action of course.  On the other side, production companies will form to give rising stars the resources they need to succeed.  We'll see a spate of new companies forming around this growing need in 2008, as traditional companies in this space continue to struggle with the medium.
• Leading social networking sites MySpace and Facebook continue to maintain their traffic but struggle to ignite significant revenue growth. Facebook's widely covered struggles late last year with the business model of its Beacon product is somewhat indicative of the entire Web 2.0 era: Incredible levels of participation with serious challenges to leveraging said participation due to privacy, governance, ownership, copyright, and other issues.  Make no mistake, however, these issues will be solved given the massive global stake in a successful outcome but it'll take at least through 2008 to do it.
• The Web moves into the living room as sites like Hulu and others make it practical and rewarding to participate on the Web using a large screen for entertainment.  Digital convergence in the main room of our homes has been in progress for a half-decade or more.  I'm a little reluctant to call it but I have definitely noticed a sharp uptick in the people I know starting to use the Web on the big screen.  New Web apps are emerging to make it popular and mainstream, and in 2008, will see the first big major uptake of Web usage -- with rich media apps in particular -- in our living rooms.
• The first generation of pure Web 2.0 auteurs emerge, creating social media and user-centric online experiences that are highly imaginative and popular, but difficult to access for the non-digitally literate.  The first generation of users whose most formative years were primarily spent in the Web 2.0 era are beginning to reach the age where they will become significant creative forces in their own right.  As the Web has become easy enough for semi-technical people to create nearly any experience they wish, expect that a generation of youth who consider the Web as natural a medium as the air they breath will begin to generate not just content but the next aspects of the Web itself.  While we continue to hold up movie directors, authors, TV production firms, and commercial Internet companies as the creators of most of the common large-scale group experiences we have, expect that Web 2.0 will impose its egalitarian influences here as well.  I predict we'll see an initial handful of Web 2.0 auteurs emerge that will offer large-scale Web-based "experiences" that will not only redefine the notion of the Web site itself but will be widely used as well.   I also expect that many of them will come from developing nations or from other unexpected locations and less from the United States and Europe.
• Update: Ownership of data contributed to Web 2.0 sites becomes a growing public relations issue, though the average user won't care much this year.  I added this because the growing brouhaha about Robert Scoble's blocked Facebook account reminded me that we'll continue see many sites attempt to control the data they receive from users in a very Web 1.0 way.  This is somewhat surprising given it's 2008 and we've learned these lessons in the industry the hard way already.  However, it's entirely correct that Web sites should maintain control over their valuable and hard to recreate data.  A good example is how YouTube jealously protects its videos and doesn't let you download them, only view them on the site or through the badge.  Yet the often contrarian nature of the Web sometimes requires the opposite of an action to get the desired effect.  In this case, it turns out that the more control you give up, the more value you tend to get back.  Sites that lock users in, prevent them from having the experiences they want, and exert excessive and unfair control, will lose in the end.  See DataPortability.org and the GraphSync project, which aims to enable the open movement of a user's social graph, as examples of where all this is headed. 

Update: TechCrunch covers JP Morgan's bullish predictions for the Web business in 2008.

Where do you think the Web will go in 2008? Please leave your take in comments below.

I've spent the last few days keeping track of the seemingly endless stream of news and blog coverage about Google's new OpenSocial model for social networking applications.  OpenSocial has been described by some as Google's industry "chess move" to outmaneuver and corner Facebook. This is fascinating set of developments to watch since Google's own growing social networking platform, Orkut, was eclipsed by Facebook in terms of overall traffic back in September.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock lately, you know that Facebook is presently the industry darling in social networking, having largely pushed MySpace off the industry's stage, as it seems to offer a more compelling model for social interaction to users overall.  Just as importantly, Facebook also lets any other company that wants to join in party do so by building 3rd party Facebook applications, of which over 7,100 now exist, making Facebook increasingly rich in functionality and content by leveraging the creative capacity at the edge of the Web.  In the Web 2.0 era (and in all computing eras before), the central truism is that a platform beats an application every time. This applies here with a vengeance and MySpace and other social networking sites have suddenly rushed to embrace openness and 3rd party widgets and gadgets to such an extent that MySpace has thrown in with Google on OpenSocial.

So the damage is done and in the fickle world of online social networking, Facebook currently has the upper hand.  This demonstrates yet again a powerful but counterintuitive aspect of networked software: the more control you give away, the more value you can get back.

Read my ZDNet coverage on how Facebook got ready to overtake MySpace and the challenges of setting up shop inside in Facebook.

However, much of the blogging around OpenSocial would have you believe that has Google now trounced the competition with a strategic move that counters Facebook's open SNS platform move with an open SNS application model that can work everywhere else too.  At least, that is, the other social networking sites that support OpenSocial's API.

But as Don Dodge noted in his OpenSocial coverage this isn't going to stop developers from building apps natively for Facebook any time soon and will have little practical effect on existing Facebook users for quite a while.  Not to mention the rest of the Web, since not even a single real OpenSocial application yet exists.

That's not to say however that OpenSocial doesn't have its advantages.  Joe Kraus, a Director of Product Management at Google, wrote today on the Official Google blog that OpenSocial will make life easier for developers "because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places."

So, despite the early beginnings, does OpenSocial make sense from the production side of social networking applications?  It still remains to be seen, despite the enormous amount of early partner support for it, if the consumption side in terms of these kinds of applications really generates value.  Most of the applications on Facebook provide so little actual utility that they are barely worth installing.  While making these mini-apps portable between social networking sites is convenient -- and it probably will appreciably increase the total number of available social applications --  it's really people and the network effect they represent for a given social networking site that makes the site truly valuable.  In other words, if my friends and colleagues aren't on the social networking site I use, then that site is of little or no use to me, even if I can take my apps with me.

It'll be interesting to see what ultimately happens to OpenSocial.  I suspect it will actually see fairly good uptake since it's based on the highly successful Google Gadgets model, for which over 23,000 different Gadgets presently exist.  But will it change the playing field in the social networking wars? Probably not as much as a federated social identity would.  Federated social identity could potentially let you exist and participate simultaneously in all the social networks you wanted to at once using one set of social metadata you control.  That's probably a lot closer to the Facebook killer that so many are looking for and things like openid are bring that world closer to reality all the time.

In the meantime, here's the six things you absolutely have to know about OpenSocial to have an opinion about it:

6 Essential Things You Need To Know About Google's OpenSocial

1. OpenSocial only offers the lowest common denominator, not the full richness of each social networking platform.  While application developers can create apps using the OpenSocial model and they will be able to run on dozens of different social networking sites, OpenSocial can't help you leverage the full capabilities of the site it runs on.  Social networking site APIs aren't anywhere as complex as say, the Windows APIs, but we've seen this before with platforms such as Java, where the development model can't support the full capabilities of the underlying operating systems.  Like Java, write once, test everywhere is the name of the game for OpenSocial and while economies in this model certainly exist, a single universal widget model tends to discourage product differentiation in favor of broad distribution.  This means to get at the full richness of the underlying platform and create a competitive product, you have do custom coding for that site and you've just broken the reason to use a common application model.
2. OpenSocial is largely based on open standards and there's only minor developer lock-in.  Overall, it actually seems pretty safe to do a lot of your social application development using OpenSocial.  It uses the essential browser open standards of XML, HTML, Javascript, and the data formats are all ATOM and RESTful/WOA.  You can even host Flash content and functionality inside the OpenSocial application as long as you don't break the rules.  Finally, most of the really popular development platforms, including Ruby on Rails, can support the server-side API.  All in all, Google seems to have stuck to a fairly open and non-proprietary model including avoiding crufty proprietary markup.  OpenSocial documentation and sample code all uses the Creative Commons licensing and Apache 2.0, and the OpenSocial FAQ says everything will be open sourced at some point.  Kudos for this open stance, Google.
3. OpenSocial is a real doorway to social networking data portability as well as potential security holes. A site that supports OpenSocial applications provides that application with all the people data in that user's account.  Their own info as well as their friends.  This can be used to export user's social data from sites that don't support themselves directly and it could even be used to knit together a person's social data across other social sites that support OpenSocial, with properly designed 3rd party apps.  But it also opens the door to security problems and expect to see that security, cross-site scripting, and exploits become an issue over time, as it always does when platforms open up to the rest of the world. Update: Michael Arrington has reported that the first OpenSocial app has now been hacked.
4. OpenSocial is simple and straightforward but also capable of developing full-blown, rich Internet applications.  And without server-side infrastructure.  Developers can simply innovate with a few bits of markup and procedural code and drop it into the OpenSocial ecosystem and leverage the massive audiences and scalable infrastructure of OpenSocial compliant sites.  OpenSocial even supports powerful interactive Web user interface models like Ajax explicitly.  Like we saw last year, with the new productivity-oriented Web development platforms, this will change what's possible while also creating mountains and mountains of relatively useless, uninteresting apps amongst a few real gems.  But a lot more wildflowers will bloom on the OpenSocial landscape and some will likely rise up and show us how useful these applications can be.
5. OpenSocial is from Google and excessive philanthropy should not be expected.  Google almost certainly thinks OpenSocial will ultimately be very good for Google, if not outright bad for a few others (probably Facebook).  While the openness is encouraging, if OpenSocial is successful, Google has a plan to make that success work for it. Those plans may not always be to the benefit of everyone playing under the OpenSocial umbrella.  User beware.
6. A new era in competency in social software is being ushered in by models like OpenSocial.  A lot more social applications are being created because of open social platforms have become so popular.  But building successful social applications is a lot different prospect from building traditional business and consumer applications.  Expect that many developers and software designers will fail to build applications successfully until we learn that a different focus and way of thinking is required.  I've written before about the basic rules for building good social applications, but these are just the beginning.  Understanding people is the key to building effective social networking applications, and that is often the hardest thing for us in an industry obsessed with connecting with each other via 1s and 0s.

What else do we need to know about Google's OpenSocial?  Put your ideas in comments below or drop me a line at dion@hinchcliffeandco.com.

Going to Web 2.0 Expo Berlin?  I'll be there November 5th and 6th giving two sessions (What is Web 2.0 and The Rise of Widgets) as well as on the show floor at the Reply booth, our European partners for Web 2.0 University.

It's been an incredible year in 2007 as we've continued to make our way on the "2.0" journey that we embarked upon last year.  I thought I'd re-inaugurate this blog with my return to regular posting and to catch up our colleagues, friends, and contacts in the industry with what's been going on with us lately. The good news, much of our current hard work is over and I'm going to be returning more to writing and speaking in the near future, though I'm always going to work closely with clients.

Building a dedicated business around helping organizations transform themselves to the business models of the 21st century has proven to be no minor task. Founding Hinchcliffe & Company as well as creating our enormously popular Web 2.0 University, growing a close-knit passionate team, crafting a set of quality consulting and education products that we believe in, all the while keeping customers happy has been an enormous effort, consuming virtually all of our time. However, we've begun to see the fruits of our labor by seeing our clients and partners succeed in applying Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 to invigorate themselves, grow, and innovate. Along the way we have been rewarded with an absolutely top-notch set of clients and valued industry contacts.

As to our future, the good news is that the key catchphrases of our business, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, seem to be as popular as ever. In fact, surprising as it seems for those of us who have been involved in them for the last few years, I believe that 2008 will be the first truly mainstream year for both of these of strategic new approaches to business and technology.

We have a lot of very exciting projects in the works that we'll announce over the next few months.  I'm also pleased to go on record predicting that 2008 will be one of the most interesting years in the business as organizations begin to globally grapple in earnest with the disruptive business models of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 which we see advancing on virtually all industries and institutions today.

As I have in the past, I'm going to use this blog to cover mainstream Web 2.0 topics while using my ZDNet blog to focus specifically on enterprise applications of Web 2.0.  Stay tuned.

What else have we been doing lately?  Plenty as it turns out...

New Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 publications, education, events, and partnerships

• A new Web 2.0 book. We've just help complete a major new book on the topic of Web 2.0 with Adobe's Duane Nickull and Redmonk's James Governor, due for publication from O'Reilly shortly.  You can read James' take on it on his blog as well as Duane's recent blog overview of it.
• A new Enterprise 2.0 course. Our Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp has recently finished development after successful trials at major conferences such as Interop and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.  It will be offered shortly as part of Web 2.0 University.  You can attend in locations around the world or it can be brought to your organization.
• Refining the revolution. We recently posted our latest assessment of how to use Web 2.0 social platforms in the workplace in The State of Enterprise 2.0 on ZDNet.
• A conference on Enterprise 2.0. I'm speaking at Avenue A | Razorfish's Reinventing the Enterprise summit this Friday in Boston, MA.  I'll be covering the latest topics on Enterprise 2.0 along with Jimmy Wales, Andrew McAfee, and and Forrester's Rob Koplowitz.
• A major event on Web 2.0 in Business. We are speaking at and sponsoring the East Coast's largest Web 2.0 conference, The New New Internet in Tyson's Corner, VA on November 1st, 2007.  I'm hosting an armchair discussion with Salesforce.com's Peter Coffee and Amazon's Jeff Barr.  There are still a few tickets left for this event, and you can use my special registration discount code at this link to save off the retail price of admission.
• We help take Web 2.0 to Europe.  Web 2.0 Expo Berlin is kicking off next month on November 5th.  Mark the date, we'll be there to provide a half-day version of Web 2.0 University as a workshop on the first day. It was enormously popular at Web 2.0 Expo SF in April with over 600 people attending in a standing room only crowd.  I'm also giving an extensively updated talk on the rise of Web widgets and new online distribution models which was also very popular at the last Expo.
• Web 2.0 University(tm) is coming to DC.  On November 16th, the world's leading learning event on Web 2.0 is coming to Washington, DC.  Thousands of business leaders around the world have attended this strategic business event to rave reviews.  Seating is limited to sign up now to make sure you're there.  Web 2.0 University will also be given in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and San Francisco in the next few months.
• We expand globally. We have recently licensed Web 2.0 University to one of the top consulting firms in Europe.  Reply will exclusively deliver our leading courses courses to their clients and the general public in Italy and Germany.  We've also established a partnership with LG CNS of Korea on bringing Web 2.0 consulting and education to Korea ( press release in Korean).
• New faces.  We've had some key new additions to our executive line-up.  Denise Kalos and John Fandel have come over to us from O'Reilly Media and have deep experience with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 solutions around consulting, education, and online communities that support Web 2.0 initiatives.  Denise has joined us as Executive Vice President of Sales while John is Executive Vice President of Business Solutions.  You can reach them at denise@hinchcliffeandco.com and jpfandel@hinchcliffeandco.com.

Please do keep in touch in comments below, via Facebook, or contact me directly at dion@hinchcliffeandco.com.

Note: Normally this blog is used exclusively for exploring Web 2.0 in all its facets but this is an update on what I've been doing the last few months and so it definitely mixes business and subject matter.  Most posts are here have a minimum of business promotion and this post is a rare exception.  

It's the second day of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here at the Boston waterfront.  Yesterday was the workshop day for the event as well as the much-ballyhooed showdown between Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport, the original point of disagreement around the real impact of Enterprise 2.0 which I've covered before .  Today the main conference sessions begin and a quick look at the show program tells you that an all-star cast of Enterprise 2.0 folks has been assembled here.

I was fortunate enough to be able to provide one of the morning workshops yesterday, an Intro to Social Computing, which I billed as a panoramic tour of the concepts and platforms of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 as well as a look at the organizing principles around how to create a strategy around them for your organization.  If you weren't able to make it, Doug Cornelius has done a great job blogging a rather detailed summary of the session, which seemed to be quite popular with the audience overall.

The big debate between McAfee and Davenport yesterday can now be viewed on video on Veodia.  I missed it personally since it ran during my workshop session, but by all accounts it was an informative debate, even if some felt that violent agreement frequently took place.  You can read good coverage of debate here from Andrew McAfee, ZDNet's Dan Farber (who moderated the debate), and John Eckman, the latter which has a detailed transcript.  For those of you who don't know it, Andrew McAfee is the Harvard Business School professor that defined the concept of Enterprise 2.0 last year.  If you're trying to get a handle on all this, I definitely recommend that you watch the video of the debate or the first episode of our Enterprise 2.0 TV Show.

Is Web 2.0 Really Moving to the Workplace?

I'm a big believer in using measurable numbers to define the scope and importance of trends online.  One thing I often do in my of my talks on Web 2.0 is to ask the audience to raise their hand if they have an easy to way to create a blog or wiki on their local Intranet.  Last year at the Collaboration Technologies Conference (the event that was renamed this year to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference), I asked the question and just a handful of people raised their hand. Yesterday, in a crowd of around a hundred, about 10-15% raised their hand.  Compared to the same question I ask audiences about LinkedIn usage (which have gone from that same handful last year to nearly 70%), and it's a telling indicator of how enterprises are lagging behind in adoption of these tools.

Andrew McAfee has described the SLATES mnemonic (details on it here) to capture the essential elements of an Enterprise 2.0 platform.  The "A" in SLATES stands for Authorship, in that if workers don't have the ability to publicly author material that the rest of the organization can find, use, and otherwise leverage, then these tools simply won't be effective.  Authorship is Step One in capturing the otherwise hidden and lost knowledge that is the submerged "iceberg" of information that is still not kept in the IT systems of a typical organization (i.e. "tacit instituational knowledge).  And my informal surveys over the last year have shown little practical growth here.

The bottom line is that the Enterprise 2.0 story has a long way to go and we aren't going to see the results until the tools get into most worker's hands and organizations understand the key elements of success with Enterprise 2.0.  Fortunately, the grassroots side of the Enterprise 2.0 story is quite good and informal data there suggests that workers are bringing these tools in to their organizations on their own when they're not being provided for them.  This has positive and negative ramifications both but it does indicate that E2.0 has serious momentum on the ground on its own.

In my diagram above, I depict the growth of the Internet and various new stages of it, including Web 2.0, which I often say that Tim Berners-Lee gave us, but we didn't get at first.  I put it together to show how each new development grew exponentially, unlike many of the other aspects added to it (things like Gopher for example).  Network effects for these extensions of the Internet (the Web and Web 2.0) have indeed been exponential in terms of growth and adoption, but Enterprise 2.0 does not fit nicely onto this Internet extension model.  This is because in practice Enterprise 2.0 presence will be highly fragmented since its implementations will exist just as much on private IP networks inside firewalls as well as on the open Internet, and often bridge them as well.

So how do we measure the growth of Enterprise 2.0?  That will be one of the toughest questions as we try to figure out what's really happening with Web 2.0 platforms in the enterprise.  There's little question however that it's become a major trend on its own, whether we give it a name or not.  For example, Wiki platforms have already begun proliferating inside most organizations, and so too with blogs, and other Enterprise 2.0 platforms.

How do you think we should measure Enterprise 2.0's growth?

Editorial Note: This is my inaugural blog post as the new Editor-In-Chief of Social Computing Magazine.  I've retired as EiC of the Web 2.0 Journal and AjaxWorld Magazine and have accepted Jeremy Geelan's gracious invitation to help head up this highly informative online exploration on the application of Web 2.0 and social software to business, society, and culture.  Stay tuned here at the Web 2.0 Blog for lots more and please do drop me a line and let me know what you're doing in the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 communities.

I'm here in New York City this morning at the start of the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo which I'm the technical chair for this year.  We expect it will be a exciting event that will bring the very latest developments in Rich User Experiences. I'll be blogging as much as I can about what's happening here -- and indeed on what seems to be a nonstop series of conferences coming up -- on this blog, on the Web 2.0 Journal, as well as on ZDNet . In fact, AjaxWorld is just the first in a several month long series of events as one Web 2.0-related happening after the other takes place.  It looks like this will be capped off  (at least in the first half of the year) by the expected industry blockbuster this year, the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco right in the middle of April.

In fact, there are a great many aspects to the way that the Web is changing and evolving in early 2007 and Ajax is only one of the elements of Web 2.0, yet it gets so much attention because it's enabling the browser to close the gap between what a Web app can do vs. a native PC application.  It's also the most visually obvous (and entirely optional) aspect of a Web 2.0 application.  But one things this is clear this year: Web 2.0 software models are beginning to evolve across the board. 

On the Ajax side this includes everything from very exciting major changes to the Ajax Framework Dojo expected to deliver the 1.0 version this year that businesses can finally commit upon, to real offline Ajax coming of age with everybody from Brad Neuberg (details here ) to Quinebox working on making sure Web apps can literally work any time, anywhere, on or off the network, which is one of the most serious complaints about Web apps for serious work use.  As for rich media (which Ajax can't do), the Flash platform is really starting to rise as well and Adobe -- which owns outright one of the few remaining vendor controlled technologies that helps run the Web today -- has Flex 2 and Apollo which could really change the RIA landscape this year.  OpenLaszlo also tells a compelling story in this space as does Microsoft with WPF/E.  This year really will begin the RIA technology war it seems.

Even more intriguing, we are seeing the emergence of genuine open Web component models such as what NetVibes has come up with recently with their cross platform widget API, known as the Universal Widget API, encouraging open, cross site widget compatibility.  Netvibes has made our best Web 2.0 software list two years in a row and for good reason, they remain the best Ajax start page out there and they also get how to fully leverage the Web.  Finally, if you're not sure why widgets are a make or break aspect of a successful Web app today, check out my two part series (Part 1 , Part 2) on the fast rise of the DIY (aka Do it Yourself) era.

There's far, far more going on with Web 2.0 of course than the user interface story, and Architectures of Participation, social media, and the many other relentless changes taking place on the Web are often the core of the value.  But as I say often, rich user experiences are now a virtually essential checkliist item for high quality Web software.  When presented with a static Web page vs. a satisfying, immersive rich experience, user's will