If you like the mashups that show Flickr photos or Craigslist rental properties or Twitter posts on a Google map, you might be interested in using similar tools at your job.

But Web2.0 for business will go above and beyond what the consumer version offers today. Because it may be fairly easy to slap together a Housemaps.com today, it's still far from trivial.

18 Jun 2007

What are lacking are easy to use development tools that make building a mash-up as easy as setting up your own blog. That’s where IBM and others see a juicy market.

But before enterprises get there, they also need to unlock data from a slew of legacy applications and systems, allowing them to be combined, mixed and mashed up. Enter: service oriented architectures (SOAs).

SOAs aren't just about code reuse (that's merely the development angle), they are also about creating applications that are built by stacking up functionalities. Another way to look at functionalities is to consider them data that is either changed or presented.

So image that you're working for a shipping company that has boats all over the world. And with a few clicks you'd combine information from you enterprise application on the ship with weather data and news reports. It wouldn't be an earth shattering application to most of the world, but it's priceless if you receive calls from clients wondering if their goods will get to their destination on time. The picture below shows for a working example of this application.

You can probably think of a few applications where the ability to craft your personal Web2.0 mash-up would take repetitious tasks out of your day.

Web2.0 for business will turn you into a programmer without realizing it. At last, applications will meet your requirements instead of you learning your way around an application.

Business web2.0 mashup, developed using IBM's "Quick and Easily Done" (QED) mashup tool.

(Click to enlarge)