Web 2.0: Use , create and evaluate it

Yesterday Andrew McAfee wrote a excellent post on what characterizes Enterprise Web 2.0 software. Key points from the blog is that Enterprise Web 2.0 software must be:

• Freeform
• Frictionless
• Emerging

Use it
All software team members should use Enterprise Web 2.0 tools to learn about the possibilities it opens up and to improve the processes. Especially Web 2.0 software is good at capturing the messy parts legacy processes and other tools has failed to encompass. Most Agile projects has already adopted wikis, for supporting the process, to scale beyond the ideal number of project members. Today many projects are geographically distributed or members telecommute. Here the social media part of Web 2.0 will be valuable.

Create it
During the whole process of developing software the characteristics of Web 2.0 software described by McAfee must be consulted.
These abilities must be ubiquitous in the software design and architecture both when developing brand new Web 2.0 software but also when extending legacy software with modern features.

These characteristics will probably evolve so stay tuned the Web 2.0-sphere.
Most developers will not create all features of a software product in the projects they are participating in. This will certainly be true for Web 2.0 software since a lot of Web 2.0 services are present already on the internet. They will only integrate with these software to add value to the service or vice versa. Software products may even thrive on existing social software with large user bases. By authenticating with e.g. OpenId or Facebook Connect you instantly get access to a large mass of users. Facebook users will probably soon be so spoiled that they may even try new services that does not support Facebook Connect. It also useful to look for open dataformats, such as those described at Microformats.

Evaluate it

Developers and others must evaluate existing software Web 2.0 products and services that they have to integrate with. Short time to release and economical constraints forces reuse of existing software/services. Especially reuse (social media) that has large user bases can be fruitful and be a critical success factor.
The characteristics McAfee describes should be used when evaluating Web 2.0 software.