Collaboration, the essential aspect

So many people ask me why is Web 2.0 so big. Well lets think, they technology has been there, AJAX, yeah its cool, but none of this would be what it is without collaboration. No one in the enterprise really cares if your intranet looks good. To be honest, they want the design to be effective, but not overdone. I know, you are now looking to see how ugly your companies intranet is. The money is there if it needed to be pretty or AJAXified. The real value is in collaboration. Worker A working more effectively with Worker B. It should start reminding you of those nice hug it out session you have between IT and the Business decision makers. Many of us sit in our corners of an IT office and think boy this would be awesome if it was pretty. However, remember the power is in the people, not the graphics for all your Web 2.0 applications. Without the collaborative aspects of the technology, it would never get adopted into the enterprise.

With that being said, I must give my insight into how to make the collaboration more consistent and rewarding. For Web 2.0 applications to succeed there must be some visualization to the user as to how they impact the system. Think if digg never showed how many diggs your story got, or the one you just voted on got. This is critical. People need a benefit. So if you are using information from the user to resort results or relevancies on a page, make sure you show their impact. A great example of this would be to have a small explanation box that they can scroll over and it pops up (more javascript), yet it would explain why the results showed up where it did. Have you ever used Pandora? Well it gives a great sampling of music, want to know your impact, well they tell you exactly why they picked the song for you. It is an immediate feedback loop. Now the user has implicit value in their system. So in order to make better Web 2.0 applications, we must embrace the collaboration and lets the user know that they truly are valued.

Look forward to the coming days where I will release the top Web 2.0 development tools.

John