I agree that like many technologies, there is probably too much hype around Web/Enterprise 2.0. It’s a nice little term to describe a variety of evolutionary technologies. If you look at each technology, you will find that the new technology addressed issues that earlier technologies or approaches were not able to address. For example:
- Blog are easy to create, can be tracked, and can be commented upon. Contrast that to the old centralized content management approach and you see an attempt to make it easier to both create and consume content.
- RSS feeds are the underpinning of many 2.0 technologies and evolved because the content sync technologies of the early dot com era were much too difficult to use. For those of you who remember Vignette’s Synchronization product, you know what I mean.
- Tagging made the creation AND use of meta-data much easier. Anyone who created a meta-data model only to have it never be used or applied knows what I mean.
Now I don’t mean to say that these are bad things. I personally like almost all the technologies in the “Web 2.0” sphere. I just see a trend that is more evolutionary than revolutionary. In keeping with that, if you look at the major vendors, they are all hard at work incorporating Web 2.0 in their products. Pretty soon, it will just be a part of what we do. That makes the toolbox approach even more appropriate since they will be even easier to use no matter what vendor you have chosen.
