The internet has evolved into a social medium that is enabling mass collaboration. Wikipedia counts 16,000 contributors; YouTube has more than a hundred million contibutors; and Linux has thousands of programmers testing, tweaking and enhancing the operating system code.
2006 saw a deluge of social media web sites emerge where anyone, not only journalists and editors, are able to produce content. These new web sites provide vertical topic-driven slices of the internet and attempt to attract many like-minded individuals. So many social media sites have appeared that products like ProfileLinker are now available that allow you to aggregate and link multiple social network profiles into a central location.
Web-based collaboration isn’t limited to the consumer world. Similar technologies are being applied in the workplace, providing business teams tools to be able to share, communicate and collaborate. A new book called Wikinomics by Don Tapscott describes how companies are harnessing collaborative external resources via the web to benefit organizations. Web-based technologies are particularly attractive to Small and Medium sized Business that don’t have the cash to build out infrastructure, and for teams where many of the members are located remotely.
A recent survey from Frost and Sullivan finds that Global Web-based Collaboration Services will grow to $2.6 billion by 2010 from $682 million in 2005. Web collaboration includes technologies like Instant Messaging, Web Conferencing, wikis and podcasts.
Some examples of collaborative technologies in the enterprise include corporate blogs, project-based wikis, Web conferencing and RSS.
Web Conferencing is evolving into VoIP-based infrastructure. And Per-minute costs are expected to plummet. Video conferencing and video chat between remote colleages will become commonplace.
The Burton group is predicting incremental growth in RSS/XML syndication in 2007, followed by a big surge in the latter part of 2007 and into 2008. XML syndication in the enterprise helps to cut through email clutter — RSS feeds can be set up to be automatically populate data into email folders, aggregator products or custom web applications.
