The various services which fall under the Web 2.0 banner could meet with very
different fates in the coming months, according to analysts.
Services such as wikis and social networks will continue to grow, while
podcasts and forums could be on the decline, a recent report from Forrester
Research suggests.
The company predicts that enterprises will continue to make good use of
collaborative wiki pages for projects, while social networks will continue to
thrive in the workplace owing to their ability to connect employees with
co-workers and contemporaries in other companies.
Other Web 2.0 services, however, will not see continued growth in the
workplace, particularly podcasting, according to the research.
While corporate blogs remain popular, Forrester argues that they no longer
capture the attention of employees as they did in the past.
A third group of technologies, while not in decline, are also failing to
ignite the enterprise market due to under-utilisation, the report found. Among
these services are RSS syndication and web forums.
The report suggests that forum use is becoming flat, while RSS systems remain
under-used and under-appreciated.
"Web 2.0 collaboration technologies solve problems that enterprises have
today, but most companies have not used these tools anywhere near their
potential," said Forrester Research analyst Gil Yehuda.
This latest report is the second from Forrester to point to a slowing market
for Web 2.0 vendors. Last month, the company suggested that prices for business
services could
plummet
in the near future.
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