There is so much discussion these days surrounding Web 2.0, Social Applications, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Software and the like, it’s enough to make your head spin. Given that we are on the verge of launching our first release of Apeer Professional we are also very interested in finding the right niche (or niches) and discovering where we fit in the universe of categories that describe web based interaction, communication and collaboration. For a long time, we were avoiding the “social” categories – and at one point were strongly of the opinion that we were NOT Web 2.0. Well, that hasn’t entirely changed – but we are now coming around to the realization that Apeer does have elements of Web 2.0 and Social Media Applications.
Look at the following descriptions from the Gartner Hype Cycle report of July, 2008:
Web 2.0
Definition: Three anchor points describe Web 2.0:
• Technology and architecture — consisting of individual technologies associated with
Web 2.0, such as Ajax and Really Simple Syndication (RSS), as well as overall
concepts, such as Web platforms and Web-oriented architecture (WOA)
• Community — describing the “architecture of participation,” dynamics of social networks
and other personal content publish/share models, including wikis and other collaborative
content models
• Business model — consisting of Web-services-enabled business models, mashup/remix
applications, long-tail economics, advertising and other monetization models
Social Applications
Definition: Whereas social software is about the tools that encourage, capture and organize
open and free-form interactions among community participants, social applications are instances of social software tools and capabilities implemented to target specific and defined collaborative business challenges.
Examples of rapidly emerging horizontal social applications include idea exchanges,
crowd sourcing, prediction marketplaces, community-enabled self-service, customer-driven
product and service design, and long-lived and dynamic documentation. Existing process-centric
applications will continue to add in social capabilities, but social applications focus on delivering
collaboration-centric applications targeted at harnessing collective intelligence to address
challenges and opportunities that are fundamentally social in nature.
Apeer not only fits these descriptions – but in some cases we even extend them. I posit that we are the epitome of participation – and we make it real time and synchronous. And what better way to communicate in a collaboration-centric manner than to be able to exchange, play and listen to rich media files at the same time, in the same window. It’s one thing to be able to post something to a site and hope that someone someday sees or hears it, but taking it to the next level of being able to see and hear it AT THE SAME time is in my opinion the true essence of communicating in a collaborative manner.
So, where do we fit? Everywhere. And anywhere. Can’t wait to get out there.
