Business Falls For Web 2.0

A new report shows that businesses are seeing Web 2.0 as a priority for next year.

Social networking, blogs, RSS, podcasting, mashups, widgets and wikis. They’re the Web 2.0 categories that research company Forrester looked into for itssurvey on business and Web 2.0. What they found was good news, with business expenditure on Web 2.0 set to reach $4.6 billion globally by 2013. Among these are some heavy hitters like GM, Wells FargoBank and northwestern Mutual Life Insurance.   Of the 60 companies surveyed, both in Europe and North America, over half see Web 2.0 as a priority in the coming year. And they tend to see socialnetworking as the biggest area for investment.   Analyst Oliver Young, who put together the report, noted,   “In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined bycommoditization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite themajor impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces.”   However, he noted that ad revenues have slowed, meaning this won’t bea lucrative avenue.     "Advertising revenue has been hard to come by with even sites such as Facebook finding it hard to monetise their high volumes of traffic.” He told theBBC. "Companies are now looking over their shoulder to the business market where even revenues of $50 (£25) per user per month are looking increasinglyappealing."   For all that, he said,   "If I wanted to be anywhere in the Web 2.0 economy, I’d want to be on the enterprise side."