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The following sites demonstrate the power or collaborative Web and point the way to the Web of the future:
amazon.comThe first company to capture the spirit of collaborative Web and to make money from it was Amazon. Not only did they add value by their user reviews but their "Was this review useful?" vote helped save customers time by elevated reviews other people found useful. Other ways they used customer data to increase sales was their lists of recommended books on a subject written by reviewers and their people who bought this product also bought this product information.ebay.comEbay were another pioneer in creating a business out of their users data. They provided a marketplace that enabled individuals to sell goods across the Web. They then built a trust mechanism by getting customers to rate the sellers that they bought goods off. They built on this by letting sellers set up their own shops also using the trust system and they have some very sophisticated back end api systems for remore managementb.ecademy.comEcademy, one of the first of the serious online social business networks was set up by Penny and Thomas Power. It has attracted a hundred thousand members over its eight years in existence of which ten thousand are now active paying members. While they are not as large as some of the free networks, the depth of content, commitment and connection level are much higher. I am a life member of Ecademy, one of a small group of hard core networkers who see on-line networking as live R&D for the future of work and social connection.linkedin.comLinkedin are a much larger on-line business networking group with 7 million members but they lack content and although they are trying to edge into friends reunited territory they lack a social dimension. They primary purpose of Linkedin is as platform for people to show their CVs and career information for employment opportunities.myspace.comThe big social network player on the block these days is Myspace who have recently passed the one hundred million members mark. It originally attracted music and youth audiences but these days it has a much wider age appeal. Social networking starts to make a lot more sense when everybody uses it, much like the telephone being more useful when everyone has one. MySpace could be the first social network to achieve critical mass.flickr.comFlickr took the concept of the photo album and created something far greater by adding a folksonomie tagging system and making it a community resource. This enables you too navigate a massive graphic resource by subject grouping or the person that took the photo.del.icio.usDel.icio.us did the same for link bookmarks or favourites, which was a definite boon for anyone who used multiple Web browsers or computers. The tagging system meant that you did not have to remember where in your category hierarchy a bookmark was to find it. Also the community aspect meant that someone had already bookmarked the site you wanted to add, so the tags and description could already be available.digg.comDigg used its member base to rank the importance of news articles by allowing them to submit stories to its site if they were interesting. Like Amazon's rate the review service, the ranking helped Digg's members quickly identify news stories of interest without having to plough through the combined news output of the Internet, another clever application of the wisdom of crowds.wikipedia.orgGroup wisdom really started to come into its own with the growth of Wikipedia, a giant free encyclopedia. A massive exercise in collaborative writing, Wikipedia tapped into a massive expert base to create a unique information resource. In my view it really comes into its own in areas of emerging knowledge like the Internet where traditional encyclopedias would take years to catch up and waste vast quantities of paper.squidoo.comAnother group knowledge resource is the squidoo site set up by Seth Godin, succesful author and the guru of viral marketing. It differs from Wikipedia by letting experts create their own identity profile and set up their own areas of expertise and link back to their own Websites and resources if they want.earth.google.comNo discussion of the future of the Web would be complete without the mother of all Web innovation Google. Although it has done much to push forward the envelope of what the Web could do, its most impressive achievement in my eyes is Google Earth. As a stand alone resource it would be a marvel in itself but when you take into consideration the community layer where people can add and annotate their own places and then you look at the API where you can take geographic information from one site and mash it up with Google maps, Wow is all I can say. |