Today, I am researching trends that emerged in 2007 with regards to Web 2.0 . While the term itself was coined in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly and O'Reilly Media, the concept took off in 2006 and 2007, thanks to the publication of books like Wikinomics, The Long Tail, The Google Story, etc, and thanks to a global marketing campaign by O'Reilly Media. While the early adopters, and those on which the Web 2.0 already emerged in the late ninties, the real story began with the explosion of the new market of collaborative platforms such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Xing, LinkedIn, etc.. This was further fueled by the availability of software that allowed mashups such as Google Maps and other social collaboration tools such as tags, wikis, blogs.

While the first years of Web 2.0 (2004-2006) were dominated by the mushrooming of social networks to harvest social intelligence, Web 2.0 penetrated the business world in 2007.

In December 2007, Dion Hinchcliffe posted an interesting article reviewing past, present and future of Web 2.0 ("The top Enterprise Web 2.0 stories of 2007):

However, even though one could make a case that businesses have been leveraging even the most consumer-oriented sites for some commercial uses (at least for marketing, but also even in one case for outsourcing their intranet), the story is — as it often is when the trends are complicated and intertwined — a bit more complex. In fact, while many have perceived a recent plateau in Web 2.0, citing the flow of investment dollars, the case can be made that we’ve actually been in a “rebuilding year” and putting in places the pieces needed to reach to the level.

So my premise is that 2007 was actually quite an influential year in terms of laying down what we’ll see happening in terms of the next generation of the Web in 2008 and 2009. Not only are the large Web firms working on comprehensive and often novel industry plays in terms of building new platforms on the next level of the Web application “stack”, but the industry itself has been busy noodling its way through a number of important issues, challenges, and innovations with varying degrees of success.

I agree with him in the prediction that the application of Web 2.0 platforms in organizations will be a mega trend in the years to come. Already many organizations encourage their employees to engage in social platforms, create OpenIDs, use Wikis and Blogs for internal and external communication. The outsourcing industry, in particular in India and other tigers, has already benefitted at large from systems like ODesk which allow clients and service providers to find each other, to agree on contracts and to manage work flow, all virtually.

Some people already predict the death of Web 2.0 (like many predicted the death of the first Web, back in 1995). But there is also serious criticism of the Web 2.0 principles and mention of the risks. Michael Zimmer writes in his introduction to a special edition of First Monday, an online journal on Internet related issues:

We start with “Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0,” a provocative probe by Trebor Scholz arguing that Web 2.0 represents not a socio–technological advance in the World Wide Web, but rather a powerful “framing device of professional elites that define what enters the public discourse about the impact of the Web on society.” Scholz deflates the claims of revolutionary technical innovation and social empowerment held dear by many Web 2.0 evangelists, revealing instead that the technologies and communities underlying Web 2.0 have existed, in one form or another, long before Tim O’Reilly first uttered the phrase. By embracing Web 2.0, Scholz concludes, we are acquiescing to a market ideology of crowdsourcing, the exploitation of immaterial free labor, and the “harvesting of the fruits of networked social production.”

In the same issue, Kylie Jarrett ("Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0") writes that "... interactivity may indeed function as a disciplining technology within the framework of a neoliberal political economy."

I object. And I vividly remember the early time of personal computer, ATMs and other devices without which we wouldn't like to live. In the early eighties, PCs were evil, an artefact that will mainly be used to increase oppression and exploitation of people. In the early nineties, Internet was evil. And, in fact, without the PC and without the Internet, globalization wouldn't have happened at the pace it did.

I don't want to fall into the trap discussing globalization. However, while PCs and the Internet have indeed helped corporations (and governments) to be smarter in getting what they want to get from their comsumers (and citizens), PCs and in particular the Internet have also allowed countries which were formerly call the Third World, to become part of what was formally called the First or the Second World. More important, they have empowered individuals to become entrepreneurs, indviduals who would not have had any chance to participate in the Global Business.

We are at a cross-roads now if it comes to where Web 2.0 will bring us. More prosperity and democracy for many, or more exploitation by global corporations and almighty governments.

Time will tell. Soon.