Many tools are now available under the social media banner. Most are cheap and readily accessible; some, like Facebook and MySpace, allow groups of individuals to exchange all sorts of information including, or even consisting entirely of, information about themselves. YouTube lets them add their own videos: everyone can now be on TV.

Teenagers, or “screenagers” as they have been dubbed, have taken readily
to social networking’s open and sharing character, but the notion of collaboration has spread to the corporate community. As information turns digital, so organisations and departments are starting to come out of their silos.

Attitudes are changing, too. The managerial style of the 1990s is facing a challenge from newer ideas and what may look like a waste of time within one organisational culture is real work when looked at within another.

Cultural crossroads
Organisations have a raft of communication choices to make:
• Do they stick with their process/management culture, or go for democratic networks of engaged volunteers and no conscripts?
• Should they hold meetings with little sense of collaboration, or make use of short, sharp, connected exchanges?
• Is one-way (top-down) communication better than an open space?
• Should they make security their overriding principle, or rely on trust?

The approach to these alternatives is apprehensive in some cases, welcoming in others. Technological generations are now rapidly outstripping human generations.

Standards take a long time to agree but a short time to go out of date. Innovation comes out of dissatisfaction: good ideas are refined and bad ones dumped. The tiny ship of order sails in a vast sea of chaos.

Search is now popularly viewed as the gateway to information and knowledge. However, search engines return links to information that is not necessarily accurate, and articles that are not peer-reviewed for authenticity.

Not only does the Web 2.0 world ask for trust from its participants, but it sets a high value on popular or trusted versions of knowledge and information. On the web, much of that data is transitory and personal. For in-depth research and scholarly knowledge, the popular search tools are still merely a way in to access the source documents.

Search also covers social bookmarking. Services such as Furl, Del.icio.us, Connotea and 2collab are free or cheap and, while time-consuming, may provide more useful web pages than a straight search. They embrace the wisdom of crowds concept and can be tagged and date-stamped for relevance, and even delivered to your desktop in RSS feeds.

But as with all socially provided information, you have to decide how much you trust it.

The next level, Web 3.0, will be the semantic web. It will link document searches not just with other documents but also with data, ideas, people and actions, eventually embodying the six degrees of separation concept into our knowledge base. Eventually, access to exactly what we are looking for should be possible in no more than six hops.

Web 2.0 conundrum
But before this golden age is reached, two other increasingly important issues have to be negotiated: privacy and security. The more people make information about themselves public on the web, the harder they find it to maintain their security. But the more they surround themselves with security, the harder it is to share and collaborate, the watchwords at the heart of Web 2.0.

Despite throwing up these dilemmas, social networking is still growing apace; MySpace started life in 2003, Facebook in 2004 and YouTube in 2005. These three, plus Wikipedia, are among the top 10 most popular global websites, according to web information company Alexa.

Interestingly, most of the favourite websites are the same, regardless of country or age group. In the UK, for example, the top 10 lacks Wikipedia but the other three social networking sites are all there. New visitors to YouTube and Facebook have almost trebled in the last year.

Many of the world’s favourite websites, such as Amazon and eBay, are commercial, so the top ranking position of social sites is even more impressive.

Not only are many individuals engaging with social sites on a personal basis, but also as employees. In the latter case the conflicting aims of security and openness are thrown into sharper focus.

Social networking sites (where users interact creatively) are distinct from social media sites (where users publish and share information). Classmates.com, MySpace and Facebook top the former category, while YouTube is the easy winner for the latter category.

Fun, usefulness, creativity and friends seem to be the drivers of most usage for both categories. But use mainly for business purposes, while not rising much above 10%, still represents a huge number of people in the online world who are trusting these sites for at least part of their business agenda.

At the moment it looks as though share and trust are winning the battle against security and privacy. There is a danger of hyping the vision of a Web 2.0 world beyond what is safe for security and privacy. It may even be that personal privacy is already impossible and that governments, corporates and other organisations are going to have to live with a lot less of it in future.

The world of Web 2.0 is already shaping users’ lives. The Web 3.0 world may make their heads spin.