Notes from web 2.0 expo in New york

Web2.0 is not about technology. Web 2.0 isn't about products. It’s not about services. It's about your customer. It's about social interaction within customers and with your company. Customer first is truly core subject in Web 2.0. Bring down the shield between your company and your customers. Empower your customers..

This has proven to be successful whether it's about customers helping each other or even the companies to solve their own issues. This happened with Twitter, which wasn't working in T-mobile phones until Twitter users pressed T-mobile to enable Twitter. In web 2.0 companies need to get out of their own comfort zone to approach their customer in their backyard. Such as Comcast, which hired “Comcasters” to find proactively their complaining clients in the web communities and helped proactively with their issues. Similar approach has been adopted for example by Crysler.

The change with the social web has fundamental effect also in marketing. Timbuk2 uses only photographs taken by their customers. Dorritos Superbowl commercial was done by their customers. The benefits are easily measured, with Ebay where people who participate into their community create 50% more sales than other Ebay users. The social web affects truly all the areas of the business. In the product development Web 2.0 enables companies to minimize the noise between customers and company. Dell Ideastorm has over 10 000 ideas for product development. Such as “preinstalled Linux instead of windows” has over 150 000 “thumbs-up”. Similarly Starbucs was asked by the community to "stop cutting trees.. don't give us receipts if the payment is under 2$). It’s like brainpower. You have some, your team has more, with the focus groups it’s getting big, but with your customers it’s huge. The community can be compared to distributed computing.

Don't do it yourself, let your customer do it. The key is to give your passionate customers the possibilities, the tools, the power, the reward (not money.. appreciation..). This is the key for cost-effective and rapid development. The amount of people in Amazon.com is half of the amount of their API (application interface) usage. This is a result of external developers, who have created their own solutions for their own purpose, but leveraging the Amazon data. T

he core is the unique data, which people want to use. These people are your co-developers and co-creators. Waterfall process is dead, be agile in web. You cannot know what the customer really want before the solution is out there. So do not spend time to do extensive amount document defining something that probably in the end needs to be changed anyway. 37 signals doesn’t create requirement definition documents or roadmaps. They do not even know their development plan for next three months. But still they created project management service (Basecamp), which has 1 000 000 users. So keep it simple at first and be agile to scale things up i.e. Meebo which started from 0 users 3 years ago and has now 100 million registered users. It could be that you need to sift the focus completely i.e. Flickr which started as a gaming site and is now world 1. image databank.

Do the development with rapid/agile methodology so you can react and enhance. Create your own sandbox, where failure is ok from which you can learn. Technology is there and it will evolve. So you can use Ruby, Ajax, Flex, Silverlight, Json, Javascript, Python, OpenID (by the way, if you can use 5 or more of these.. please come to talk to SW department.. you are hired). The industry standards are open and will be growing which turns the web one big pile of possibilities to choose from. You literally can develop a piece of application within a day or two and give it to several hundreds of thousand persons. For example like Widgetbox that has served various applications over 450 million times. There are standards just as Google Open Social that enables applications to be used with various communities such as LinkedIn, Myspace, Salesforce, Hi5 etc. The web browser is the future desktop, the capabilities of the web/browser based solutions are growing rapidly (like InstanAction which is purely browser based 3d gaming site).