Enterprise 2.0 Predictions for 2007

Now is the time to make predictions for 2007. Jerry Bowles did my work for me with a nice set of forecasts in his Fast Forward Blog, post, Five Predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007. I agree with all of them. Here are Jerry’s headlines with a few comments. Got to Jerry’s posts to see his explanations of the headlines.

Social networking will go vertical. What he means here is that the rage for communities led by MySpace will expand to niche areas. This is already happening and I would agree that it will get bigger in 2007. Here are a few things I wrote about the trend in 2006, The MDjunction Story – A Healthcare Community Site, Rise of Rating Sites, Building a Community to Support a Brand.

Multi-purpose collaboration platforms that deliver applications for blogging, wiki creation, and social networking within a single framework. This makes sense alothoug many people will be already invested in their blogging an dwikis tools so the added functionality will have to be sufficient to overcome the added work and to switch.

The Empire will strike back. He means that IBM and Microsoft will get into the act. They already have. The new Sharepoint is going much closer to web 2.0 functions. IBM is getting into Web 2.0 in a big way. Here a series of posts I did on a press conference they held a while back on the topic, IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications. They continue to expand these efforts. Here is a longer piece on IBM and Enterprise 2.0 that I did for the Fast Forward blog.

The Anti-Empire will emerge. Here he refers to ““consumerizing” the experience of endless toggling between desktop and web apps.” And refers to Serendipity Technologies. There has been an anti-IBM as long as there has been an IBM. In the 70 and 80s it was called the Bunch and included such companies as Burroughs, NCR, Honeywell. It will be interesting to see how the latest David and Goliath wars pan out.

User-generated applications will become the next hot thing. If Web 1.0 was “read only” and Web 2.0 is “read/write,” the next logical growth phase will be “read/write/execute.” He refers to Teglo here. I think that mash-ups or composition applications will be big and assume that jerry is referring to this or an expansion on it. enterprise 2.0 enterprise social media