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Enterprise 2.0 To Become a $4.6 Billion Industry By 2013

For vendors specifically, there are 3 main challenges to becoming successful in this new industry, including: I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as "consumer-grade" technology Ad-supported web tools generally have "free" as the starting point Web 2.0 tools will have to now compete in a space currently dominated by legacy enterprise software investments

One of the main challenges of getting Web 2.0 into the enterprise will be getting past the gatekeepers of traditional I.T. Businesses have been showing interest in these new technologies, but, ironically, the interest comes from departments outside of I.T. Instead, it's the marketing department, R&D, and corporate communications pushing for the adoption of more Web 2.0-like tools.

-- Improved Community Insight -- Awareness administrators now have increased self-service capability to report and graph participation and success metrics in their communities, including user activity, content activity and more.

offering great new social networking capabilities, advanced reporting and community management that will really help encourage robust community participation

"Over the last year, the Enterprise 2.0 space has gathered significant momentum. We've been working with leading companies to realize the business potential of social media and the benefits of using Web 2.0 communities to stimulate conversations between employees, customers and partners around their brands," said John Bruce, CEO of Awareness. "Our Awareness Summer 2008 release builds on this and lets customers offer their community members a wider variety of engagement points across the Web and a user experience that really encourages participation."

The trend suggests that predictions of an economy run by freelancers -- such as those made by Daniel Pink in his book Free Agent Nation, and by MIT's Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher in their 1998 paper, "The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy" -- were shortsighted. In 2000, research firm EPIC/MRA of Lansing, Michigan, estimated that 41 percent of all Americans would be private contractors by 2010. But today, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that self-employment numbers have not grown at all over the past four years.

In his report, Band says that rapid adoption of Web 2.0 technologies is not just a critical factor, but a generational one as well, noting that "22 percent of adults now read blogs at least monthly, and 19 percent are members of a social networking site like Facebook or LinkedIn. Even more amazingly, almost one-third of all youth publish a blog at least weekly, and 41 percent of youth visit a social networking site daily."Band also suggests that the true 2.0 shift has been about control and power. "'Web 2.0' began as a user-focused revolution," he writes, "remaking the consumer Web into a landscape that is easy to use, efficient to navigate, populated by self-generated content (versus institutional publications) and driven by ad hoc and established communities of people with similar interests. In a Web 2.0 world, power moves from institutions to consumers because they can now rapidly connect and digitally converse among themselves about the products and services they buy."