Everything and nothing! Web 2.0 is not something you can "buy" or something you can "develop" so what is so bad about that! Nothing. Web 2.0 is not a product nor is it a label. It is more or less a phenomenon where new paradigms of information sharing focus on the inner ego of "me" millions of masses are eager to share over the Internet. I am not an exception! I revel in sharing my kids photos, sharing my mood swings with my friends, sending them cards, writing on my friends' walls, and opening up an inner window into my own life through a facebook or a meetup site. It is wonderful to say the least! I have recently became more active using facebook as I post stuff and my friends comment on them, I find myself connecting with them more easily and in a busy life and hectic schedule it is a great way of staying connected and keeping in touch with your friends. I just love it.
So what is so bad about such applications considering they are the hottest killer apps on the Internet? Well, in a nutshell, it is the hype that gives Web 2.0 a bad rap and the pressure for internal IT service provider to offer comparable products and services in corporate culture. Such pressure is causing an artificial introduction of a cultural phenomenon to a corporate world that is not ready to internalize or absorb such applications. The corporate cultures are not a swirling entropy of social exchange where social networking is the basic driver for linking and connecting. Corporate cultures govern and structure modes of communications and methods of expression. Corporate culture has a difficult time building the synergy that made Web 2.0 what it stands for today: a thriving and innovating medium for linking thoughts and ideas in full free form built all around "me" as an individual with my preferences, my likes and dislikes, my space that I can completely control, and my groups which I can construct and de-construct at the click of a few buttons. Web 2.0 is a paradigm for building an experience where the user stands supreme and everything else orbits around the individual experience. Corporate culture builds applications centered around the business and business processes and is focused on straight through processing (STP) or on automation or on massive processing of business intelligence to support business decisions. Corporate culture and applications are not built based on my identity, likes, my dislikes, my favorite applications, or my list of buddies I like to keep track of as I socialize and make new friends in cyberspace.
So what is bad about Web 2.0 in a corporate culture? Making Web 2.0 fit in a universe that is not centered around the user, user identity, and user experience leaves much to be desired. What is bad about early introduction of Web 2.0 products is the wasteful hype investments. Corporate users scratch their heads trying to figure how to leverage Web 2.0 to add business value in a structured ccorporate world and can not really figure out how to unleash its potential yet due to many ccorporate restrictions and lack of flexibility in changing business processes. It is not a bad thing really to adopt Web 2.0 inside the walls of the corporate culture but to reap the benefits a parallel empowerment and enablement of the "individuals" to freely share information and discover new ways to do business is what will unleash the power of Web 2.0 inside the walls ... also a parallel new way of building and designing new system architectures and application services centered around the user experience, the user behavior, the user preference, the user identity, and overall user knowledge and potential is an absolute must inside the walls to make the Web 2.0 experience worth the investment.
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