"Web 2.0?" Letters? Phone Calls? Email?

Heard of "Web 2.0?"  Good; I thought so.

Care to define it?  Right; I also thought so.

It can be a slippery concept, unusually prone to the "eye of the beholder" syndrome, but the uber -article about Web 2.0 was written by Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Publishing and one of the truly thoughtful writers about our evolving online world.   Here are some of his thoughts about it:

Some of the key concepts O'Reilly posits as characteristics of Web 2.0 are:

The Web as a Platform

In Web 2.0, you don't "surf" or look at things on the Web; you do things on the Web, and Web 2.0 participants such as Google provide services

Harnessing Collective Intelligence

For example, eBay is essentially an enormous platform for enabling, categorizing, and collecting the joint activity of all of its users, and like the web itself, it grows organically in response to user activity. 

Similarly, Amazon sells the same products as Barnesandnoble.com, with the same jacket photos, ISBN's, and Publisher's Weekly blurbs, but it has become extraordinarily adept at enabling visitors to contribute their own reviews, and to participate in a myriad of ways on virtually every page.  Through a virtuous feedback loop, Amazon uses the visitors' contributions to, in turn, improve its search and recommendation functionality.

Most spectacular in this area are the successes of sites like Wikipedia, entirely a creature of visitor contributions, or flickr or del.icio.us.  In a formulation at once cunning and appealing, this is known as the "architecture of participation."

Data is the Next Intel Inside

This signifies that every Web 2.0 initiative is tremendously data-dependent:  Google, Amazon, MapQuest, mashups (if you don't know what a mashup is, go here, which combines, or mashes up, Craigslist apartment listings with Google maps—right, you just got the idea).

The End of the Software Release Cycle

Google is famous, or notorious, for constantly releasing new functions, or applications, in "beta."  Sometimes they formally graduate from beta-adolescence, sometimes they disappear and sometimes they seem to remain in a sort of permanent beta purgatory.

I have often wondered when—but not whether—this will pose a bedrock challenge to Microsoft's business model.

O'Reilly has a few other candidates for characteristics of Web 2.0, which tend to be a bit more geeky ("lightweight programming models," "software above the level of a single device," and "rich user experience," for instance), but I think the point has been made.

Great.  What has this got to do with you and your firm?

The usual suspect, McKinsey, has fingered Web 2.0 for a survey on how global businesses are using it.  With nearly 3,000 respondents, 44% C-level executives, the survey essentially constitutes a widespread, but careful, endorsement of Web 2.0 in corporate land.  Some numbers:

• Asked how satisfied they are with the financial return on their investment in Web 2.0 technologies over the past five years:
  • More than half are pleased
  • Three-quarters plan to maintain or increase investments in the coming years
  • Only 13% say they are disappointed
• Interestingly, those who described themselves as "early adopters" were more satisfied than those deeming themselvse "fast followers."  This confirms my own personal prejudice that in technology investments, speed is a virtue.

Separately, McKinsey asked the classic "hindsight" question:  Knowing what you know today, what might you have done differently to make your investments in Web 2.0 technologies more effective?:

• Invested at the right time but didn't invest enough:  42%
• Should have invested sooner:  24%
• Would do nothing different:  18%
• Invested at the right time but over-estimated potential: 10%
• Should have waited for technology to mature further: 7%

Back to what exactly "Web 2.0" means in the business context:  The most popular application is "Web services," which McKinsey defines as follows:

"Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with one another automatically in order to pass information or conduct transactions. For example, a retailer and supplier might use Web services to communicate over the Internet and automatically update each other's inventory systems."

In law firm land, one of the truly useful applications of "Web services" I've seen is the knowledge management system of an AmLaw 25 firm that draws from essentially every database in the firm—not just the document management or matter management systems—so that if you find (say) a brief of particular interest, you have simultaneous on-screen links to every pertinent piece of data related to that brief, from the lawyers who authored it to the client for whom it was generated, the number of hours billed against it, the office and practice group it emanated from, etc.

"Web services" are in use at 80% of companies surveyed.

Second is "collective intelligence," at 48% of firms, meaning methods of enabling online collaboration, for example by allowing multiple authors to edit a document in one space.

"Peer to peer networking," which enables efficient sharing of a file over the Net or to a selected group, by distributing copies of the file across many machines, was in use by 47% of firms responding. 

After that, the remaining technologies were all used by between one-quarter and one-third of firms responding:  These included social networking, RSS feeds, podcasts, wikis, blogs, and mashups.

But let's not exaggerate the penetration of these techniques:  Very few report that their companies are using three or more of these techniques, and more than a third labeled the entire sector "experimental."

Still, among firms using them, the benefits seem clear:   The key objective is to communicate more effectively and efficiently with customers, business partners (e.g., suppliers), as well as internally (think KM). 

Is any of this a surprise? 

Yes: Because the key source of dissatisfaction with Web 2.0 applications seemed to be adopting them too late, not too soon. 

But no:  Because business (as law) is all about effective communication with the people who matter:  Your clients, suppliers, and your own colleagues within the firm. 

"Web 2.0" is not, conceived that way, novel in the least.  It's simply another way to communicate.  If communicating is key, Web 2.0 is here to stay.