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22 April 2008Web 2.0 is set for spending boom
Web 2.0 is set to be embraced by Enterprise 2.0 as businesses prepare to spend nearly $5 billion by 2013 on social networking tools.
Over half of the companies in North America and Europe see Web 2.0 as a priority for next year, a report says.
The news comes as San Francisco plays host to the Web 2.0 conference on next generation of the web. Conference co-chair, Jennifer Pahlka stated that
"This is where we see the future of the web,"
"The companies making announcements here are building that future."
Forrester, the research company which carried out the Web 2.0 survey, believes the technologies being developed and unveiled over the coming days represent "a fundamentally new way" for businesses to communicate with employees and customers.
The report found that consumer giants such as General Motors, McDonald's, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance and Wells Fargo Bank will drive much of this growth and have already embraced tools like blogs, RSS feeds, podcasting and social networking.
Forrester analysed seven Web 2.0 categories: blogs, mashups, podcasting, RSS, social networking, widgets and wikis. Of these, social networks will attract the greatest levels of investment but even then that will be dwarfed by the multi million dollar revenues the software industry commands.
Oliver Young, the analyst behind the report states that,
"Advertising revenue has been hard to come by with even sites such as Facebook finding it hard to monetise their high volumes of traffic."
"Companies are now looking over their shoulder to the business market where even revenues of $50 (€30) per user per month are looking increasingly appealing."
He also points out that there will come a saturation point and investment will start to slow down as Web 2.0 applications become increasingly prevalent and absorbed into collaborative software packages.
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