theartofservice

Nearly twenty years have gone by since the World Wide Web was introduced. Only ten years have gone by since the dot.com bubble. Pretty amazing when you consider that the glass mirror was introduced 800 years ago.

Today, the glass mirror is Web 2.0. All the hype may just be a lot of smoke for business. Commercial uses of Web 2.0 technologies are in full swing, but can they or should they be used in business. With proper planning, maybe.

Blogs are extremely useful tools for disseminating information out. The subscription features allow continuous updates to be sent to interested parties whenever the blog is updated. For business, the greatest concern is ensuring that the number of blogs that are supported is limited. Three opportunities seem the most likely uses of a blog: management to employee updates, departments like IT to employees, business to customers. Most other uses may be deemed extraneous and hinder productivity.

Compared to Facebook or MySpace, social networking has little use in business. However, the concepts behind social networking are valuable for creating learning organizations. On the technical side, mashup APIs can prove very valuable in facilitating communications internally and with customers.

Virtual environments are excellent places to host internal meetings that are more interactive than voice or videoconferencing, at a much lower price. The same is true for wikis for knowledge generation.

Web 2.0 technologies can provide interactivity on the web, but should only be used on web pages that change frequently or requesting customer information.

For companies that have already ventured into Web services, Web 2.0 is an excellent next step. For others, develop your strategy before selecting the solution.