Leverage your Web Investment with Low Cost Web 2.0

You’re probably using the Web–Web 1.0, that is–for brand promotion, sales and perhaps procurement. And you’ve probably heard of Web 2.0. You might be wondering what it is and whether you should be using it.

“… Web 2.0 offers an inexpensive way to keep your brand in the public eye and to help drive sales.”

Web 1.0 is mostly about content published by a company or an organisation on a Web site or blog. Web 2.0 on the other hand is about collaboration, combining data from different sources into one (“mashing”) and mobile content. A natural progression from the HTML, HTTP and RSS standards, Web 2.0 is based on open source and embraces third-party hosted as well as installed applications. In a tough business climate, Web 2.0 offers a very inexpensive way to keep your brand in the public eye via word-of-mouth marketing, bringing teams together and even driving sales.

Web Development with Web 2.0 Applications

Collaboration

No-cost/low cost wiki software, hosted social media profiles, and free tagging and bookmarking sites allow many people to combine their efforts to create, label and share content. A common use for wikis is in large organizations, where they’re used to track projects across different offices and teams. Other Web 2.0 examples are collaborative projects and applications like Wikipedia, salesforce.com, Basecamp and Delicious. If you want to explore a B2B or B2C collaborative environment or suite, ask your Web developer to scope out your current platform to work out what options you have for hosted applications versus installed.

Mashing

Mashing takes feeds from two separate sources (usually via APIs or scrapers) and combines them into one application (often called “rich interactive applications”). An example is housingmaps.com, a property rental price guide which combines rental price data from Craigslist with GPS data from Google Maps to show the end user a physical location along with pricing information. Mashups are easy and cost-effective for small companies. In fact, most mashups aren’t produced by large firms.

Widgets

Widgets (aka gadgets) are mobile content units. From a marketing and communications perspective, widgets are a good method to distribute content to other sites/blogs or to user desktops. Rather than visiting ten or twelve different sites for different types of information or entertainment, users are increasingly designing their own online destinations–personal start pages, social media and networking site profiles, blogs–and adding content to them from the ten or twelve sites they’d otherwise have to visit in turn, or, by pulling the same content onto their desktops.

Loosely based on HTML, XML, Visual Basic or JavaScript-like code, Ajax and Flash, widgets come in two major formats, web-only and desktop.

Web-only Widgets

Web-only widgets are based on HTML and CSS with extra features in scripts. Millions of users have embedded YouTube widgets on their own profiles and Web pages: YouTube therefore provides millions of views a day of its video to pages and profiles beyond its own site.

Desktop Widgets

Desktop widgets are written for the major operating systems (Windows XP or Vista, Mac), for Google Desktop, Yahoo! Widgets and the like. There are thousands of desktop widgets (calculators that measure calories burned per minute of exercise to restaurant guides) available from sources like Apple Dashboard, Microsoft Windows Vista Sidebar, Google Desktop Gadgets and Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator).

Find out how to leverage your existing Web investment with cost-effective Web 2.0 applications and development.

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