According to an Oracle whitepaper, collaborative Web 2.0 technologies enable enterprises to foster employees critical thinking and creativity while providing a platform to capitalize on their innovations for product and process improvement.

But what goes into the process? Web-based end-user content management, user-driven applications, blogs, wikis, aggregation, user participation, collaboration, etc… most features that would complement unified communications technology. And yet are the enterprises adopting Web 2.0?
Dhruv Singhal, Director, Sales Consulting Fusion Middleware, Oracle India admitted that non-enterprise segments are easily adopting the technology. People coming to Facebook or LinkedIn are comfortable using it. he agreed that security continues to remain a concern, but that vendors are introducing tools to address it.

So how mature is the Indian enterprise? Well, they are using Web 2.0 for internal communication. It is used to share information with internal customers, or with partners and dealers. The information is largely regarding a new marketing campaign or a new product launch. Enterprises want to make their people more productive and use Web 2.0 as one more tool.

Oracle has sold its Web 2.0 products to some large enterprises in India, but did not disclose names because of NDAs. Singhal however gave examples of how the automotive, manufacturing and telecom segments could use this technology. The auto giants can direct interact with customers. Blogs can be dry. They are not interactive. Moderated forums can be much more alive. The manufacturer can talk about features and other things, and the users can give live feedback. Similarly, telecom companies can use information to sell products, study user behaviour to form marketing strategies.
Right now our focus is on expanding the customer base and penetration Web 2.0. What will be Oracle s USP when competition such as IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and even Intel has products which offer enterprise and SMB customers with Web experience which enables the management to communicate with workers and external customers on the same lines of Oracle s UC offering?

Singhal said that on the collaboration side, Oracle can integrate the front-end with the backend applications. We support SAP, IBM, Lotus Notes, email, and any other middleware. Java and .Net make interoperability easier. This is a great value proposition. We also have ability to offer rich client interface (also through browser based applications.). This is besides Web 2.0 feature staples like tagging, ranking, and commenting.

And Oracle is also utilizing its business intelligence (BI) expertise to further ease communication and collaboration tools, back-end integration efforts.

Not to be left behind, SAP too lay focus on this technology. None other than Leo Apothekar, CEO SAP at the Sapphire 2009 event said, The digital generation are joining the workforce, and they expect enterprise software to be easy to use, to be rich, and to be collaborative. They even want enterprise software to be fun.

Microsoft too explained its Web 2.0 strategy in terms of its Microsoft Office 2007 and enhancements in products released thereafter.

As you know, Facebook can be an invaluable source of marketing for your e-commerce business. However, keeping up with the ever-evolving social bookmarking service is a challenge. Since we covered Facebook Marketing and Business Pages in our How-To Guide back in February (see Facebook How-To Guide: Create Business Pages and Ad Campaigns), Facebook has rolled out changes to Business Pages that directly influence how you use them and how your fans can interact with you on Facebook.

To help you adjust, we take an in-depth look at recent changes made to Business Pages. Plus, we offer tips on how to use new features, such as status updates and Wall feeds to better connect with your Facebook fans.

The New Wall and Tabs Layout

The new Business Pages are designed to make your page look more like a personal profile page on Facebook. If you think of the new Page layout as being divided into three columns, the left-most column is where your brand logo, information, fans, links and admin tool links are located.

The center column, like the new personal profile pages, is the largest by width and importance. This center column is divided into tabs, with the Wall tab being the default. Here the Facebook mini-feed and Wall have been merged into a Twitter-style update feed that puts an emphasis on “what’s new” updates on Facebook.

As you make status changes, add links and share other information on your Business Page, it appears in the new central Wall feed. Updates and Wall posts made by your fans are also shown in this feed.

You will also find tabs to access the full-length version of your company information (you can duplicate a portion of this in the left-hand column also), as well as tabs for custom Facebook applications that you choose to add to your Business Page— like RSS feeds, and other applications. Business Page admins can rename and customize these tabs.

The far right-side column is now used to display Facebook ads on your Business Page.

Feed News to your Fan’s Feeds

The changes to Facebook Business Pages are tough to digest. While you may find it difficult to adjust your brand pages, there is a silver lining in all this.

he old Facebook Business Pages were static pages that were disconnected from the rest of Facebook and its millions of personal users. With these changes and a new emphasis on news feeds, your Business Page now is more viral, and your brand has more prominence in your fan’s news feed.

Let’s say you update your status or post a new link or photo on your Facebook Business Page. This update is shown on the homepage news feed of all Facebook users who have become a fan of your Business. Your Business Page news appears right alongside the fan’s friend news updates. While a fan of your Business Page is catching up on what’s new with friends, they will also get updates from any Business Page they have become a fan of in the same news feed.

This removes the barrier between personal and commercial information fed to Facebook users.

Getting the Most out of your New Business Page

If you had a Business Page on Facebook before the recent changes, you’ll want to edit your page layout and also change some permission settings. Here are some tips for getting the most out of the new Facebook Business Page options.

• Wall Tab: Remember, the new Wall Feed is now the main focal point for fans and page visitors. It is also the entry point to your Business Page. As an admin you will want to check permissions for what types of updates are sent to your Wall tab.
• Status Updates: Business Page admins can now share a status updates with fans. These updates will get posted to your Business Page Wall and can be seen by fans in their homepage news feed.
• Less Custom App Space: With the new layout you will need to look at the custom applications you display on the Business Page in the far left-hand space. Ensure you use this space only for apps relevant to your business—like links, notes or RSS feeds. Applications you add for entertainment that are not related to your business should be moved to a secondary tab that admins can rename to make navigation easier. Also, some apps may also need to be moved to secondary tabs because it requires a display width that exceeds what is available in the far left-hand column in the new layout.
• Focus on Facebook Content: The recent changes also means you should start adding fresh content and updates to your Facebook Business Page on a regular basis, now that you can blast your updates and status to the homepage news feed of your fans.

Keep in mind that a user can simply click a little X beside your update in their news feed to hide all future news updates about you. While it’s nice to have your brand and updates mentioned in news feeds, Facebook users are less likely to keep receiving your Wall feed if your updates start to outnumber friend updates.

When you update your Facebook Business Page you’ll need to find a good balance between getting your business message across to your Facebook fans without “commercially spamming” them. Keep the updates light and useful rather than advertising-heavy.

Facebook has announced a new partnership with online classifieds ad vendor Oodle, which revamped its social classifieds Marketplace. The new Facebook application uses an Oodle-developed interface that lets Facebook users sell, give-away, buy, ask or search for anything they want.

The Oodle Facebook Marketplace currently has 656,460 monthly active members. You can use the application to see what your Facebook friends have posted for sale and what items are available in your local area. You can also use Marketplace to support charities by selling for a cause.

The Marketplace discussion topics and user reviews have not been overly positive since recent changes to the application.  Annoying existing Marketplace users, Oodle was unable to move existing listings over from the old Marketplace.

Also, the new Oodle-driven Marketplace supports only locations in the United States, which has also led to several negative reviews and discussion on the app’s Facebook page.

In a recent update addressing Marketplace users, Oodle posted, “Frankly, we goofed by not launching full international support right off the bat.”

Marketplace is expected to launch support for the UK and Canada within the next week with global support to follow.

Kyozou Integrates with Bidtopia

Toronto-based online auction and e-commerce management solution, Kyozou, recently announced plans for full integration of its online auction technology with Bidtopia.Currently, Kyozou’s tool works with eBay, Amazon and Overstock, as well as with other popular online marketplaces.  Using Kyozou’s technology, you can control over their product sales on several marketplaces from one application, including the capability to sell items in you own private marketplace or Web site.

The tool will support all three of the current Bidtopia formats — traditional auctions, inverted auctions and fixed price.

Speaking of gold mines, Twitter is sitting on a huge one–if it could just figure out how to refine it into something we’d buy.

New stats from Pew Internet suggest that 20% of 25 to 34 year olds online have used Twitter, with those 18 to 24 only 1 point behind (19%). While that number drops off to just 2% by the time you get to adults over 65, 11% of the total US online US population have used the micro-blogging service.

Other interesting stats:

• 27% of bloggers use Twitter
• 35% of city-dwellers use Twitter
• 76% of Twitter users use the internet wirelessly
• Only 10% of those earning more than $75,000 use Twitter, while 17% of those making less than $30k use the service.

No data on how many people have ever seen a FAIL Whale, but we suspect it’s in the upper 90’s

Back in 2005, we launched Yahoo! MyWeb with the goal to help our users save valuable information they discover on the Web. As we have continued to innovate with the 2.0 release of Delicious and the upgraded Yahoo! Bookmarks, we saw that MyWeb users’ needs are being served by our newer products. To streamline our bookmarking services, we will discontinue the MyWeb service starting March 18, 2009 and focus our efforts on improving Delicious for social bookmarking. We are working on many Delicious product enhancements for 2009 – in the meantime, we’ll make the transition for our MyWeb users in the least disruptive manner possible. MyWeb users have three choices to migrate their bookmarks:

1. Yahoo! Bookmarks: For users primarily interested in private bookmarking, the switch is simple – all MyWeb bookmarks are already available in Yahoo! Bookmarks.

2. Delicious: For users who enjoy sharing their bookmarks and exploring the bookmarks of other users, we recommend migrating to Delicious. The migration is a three-step process – see details here.

3. Export. For users who choose to use other bookmarking services, we recommend using our export tools, which will provide an archive of your bookmarks that is easily readable by 3rd party services and browsers such as Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

For publishers using the MyWeb Bookmark button or the MyWeb badge, we recommend migrating these to the Delicious button or badge.

If you have any questions about the migration, please contact at the MyWeb Feedback page.

I’m not going to tell you that “content is king.” You already know that. There are reasons why your best bet for running a successful online business revolve around your content though.

1. Links

If you provide good, quality content, it is going to attract links period. It is true that this will not always happen without the appropriate attention to site promotion, but once people see your content, they will link to it if it is good. It’s that simple. There are tons of sites dedicated to linking to (what they perceive to be) good content alone. That is their whole purpose.

Look at sites like Drudge Report or Techmeme or even Google News for that matter. While the ways these sites choose what content to display may differ from each other, they are each rooted in what they consider to be valuable content, and everything on these sites links out to other sites. With good content, there is no reason why sites like these (or others depending on your niche) can’t be linking to your content.

When your content generates more links, it is likely to achieve greater visibility right along with them. Whether that be from search engines, blogs, or sites like those mentioned above, more doorways are created for entering your own site. People don’t link to bad content (generally speaking) unless they wish to insult it, or are for some reason misled about what they are linking to.

2. Sharing

Links are really just a way that people share content. But there is no question that as an online entity, you have to consider social networks. People love to share content via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Not to mention the ones that are made specifically for content like Digg and StumbleUpon.

In fact, you might as well give readers an easy way to share your content by offering social links within it. RSS feeds are typically a good idea too. This is just one more doorway for people to get to your content, and an ongoing one at that, should they stay subscribed to you feeds (they will also keep your brand fresh in readers’ minds). Then There’s the fact that feed readers often offer their own sharing features leading to even more opportunities for more people to see your work.

These things are the word-of-mouth of the online world. There’s no reason to rule out word-of-mouth in the physical world either. For example, I might tell my mother-in-law that I read this fascinating article on WebProNews today, and she might say something like, “Hmmm, what is this WebProNews? That sounds like something that I would be interested in. I should check that out. What’s the URL for that?”

But again, if your content sucks, nobody is going to share it unless they intend to insult it. This brings me to the next reason why content should be a priority, and that is…

3. Reputation

If people are out there insulting your content, your brand’s reputation will only be damaged. Remember, word-of-mouth works both ways. This is one reason why reputation management is so important. It’s not just about your own personal reputation, it’s about that of your entire business.

Creating good content establishes credibility. When someone views your content and learns something from it or likes what they see, they will (if even on a small scale) develop some amount of trust toward you (and potentially your brand) as a credible source for information within your niche of expertise.

4. Audience

The more linking and sharing of your content, the more your audience is likely to grow. Isn’t this reason enough to make your content good? When you develop a positive reputation online, that in itself tends to snowball as well. People throw your name around a lot, and you can even become something of a mini-celebrity. Then people will be inclined to check out your content based on name recognition alone. People will see your name referenced frequently, and want to know what you’re all about. If your content is good and appealing to them, they’ll keep reading it and share your content with others.

5. Money

In the end, it is truly money, which we all seek is it not? It’s not all that matters, but in the business world, it’s a pretty good chunk of what matters. That’s why we’re all in it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be businesses. We’d be non-profit organizations.

Well, when you have an established audience and a good reputation, the amount of revenue your business brings in is likely to increase. If your business plan entails selling ad space, there’s nothing advertisers like better than getting their messages out to large numbers of targeted people (in this case, your audience). And there’s nobody that customers like to buy goods and services from (particularly online) than a business with a good, solid reputation. And both your audience and your reputation can be boosted incredibly by the quality of the content you offer the general public.

I’m not giving away trade secrets here. I’m not selling anything other than common sense. I know this isn’t groundbreaking advice. Yet nearly every day, I see people trying to earn a living online using wretched content, and they’re (possibly even unknowingly) only hurting their chances of doing so.

Content can be the road to riches or the path to poverty. That is why if you’re trying to run an online business, it must be a priority.

LinkedIn puts its current user base at about 33 million, and as such, it’s easy to believe that the odds of finding professionals with even remotely common names are beyond slim. The site’s trying to keep this from happening, though, with some interesting new search upgrades.

The first offering is something that more casual users should like. On the LinkedIn Blog, Adam Nash explains, “[O]ur old search interface had a limitation: you had to use the actual Advanced Search form to target specific fields for your queries. The new LinkedIn Search allows users to easily target specific fields directly from the search results page.”

It takes just a few clicks or pushes of the “tab” key to search for an imaginary Bob Smith who’s a product manager at Microsoft and attended Cornell, then. Or who used to work at Google and for some reason is known to have the word “windsurfing” in his profile.

The second search upgrade may suit a smaller audience. Nash writes, “The new LinkedIn search platform allows any query that can be executed from the user interface to also be executed straight from the query box using the new advanced search operators.”

We’ve pictured a list of them that LinkedIn provided, and not everyone will want to memorize the things (more are on the way). Still, since the economy has probably forced unemployed individuals to spend more time looking for jobs, they could catch on. HR people and perhaps some search pros will become comfortable with the advanced search operators, too.

Less than a month ago, Meebo announced that it would begin including both MySpace and Facebook into its instant messaging and group chat services. These two networks joined AIM, Yahoo, Google, MSN, and others in Meebo’s repertoire.

However, Facebook has now  requested that Meebo remove its network for the time being, and Meebo has complied. Seth at the Meebo blog writes:

We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they’d like us to connect to their network in a different way - a way that works with their log-in security protocols. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we agree with them.

However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo “really, really soon.”

In December, Meebo’s users grew to about 45 million, presumably as a result of adding MySpace and Facebook connectivity. Seth did not share how many of those are from Facebook, but I would imagine Meebo is eagerly awaiting getting the fast-growing social network back on board.

WhosTalkin.com has launched to the public after residing in private beta for 7 months. What’s WhosTalkin.com you ask? It’s a social media search engine that allows users to search across a number of social networking sites, blogs, news sites, forums, etc. And it’s pretty cool.

For those of you who actually are familiar with it, WhosTalkin has made the following changes:

- New design and logo.

- Improved the sorting algorithm to organize by freshness and source.

- Developed a URL API to allow third party developers and applications to tie in.

- Added around 15 new services that we aggregate data from, putting our total over 60!
While it still has some work ahead of it, the site appears to be a pretty solid first step toward searching a web that is getting more social by the day. “The problem is that social media is far more dynamic than the Web of yesteryear. And, unfortunately, WhosTalkin is only good for searching while you’re on the site,” says Rick Turoczy at Read Write Web.

“None of the pages are URL addressable - meaning you can’t save or bookmark searches that you perform on a regular basis. Also disconcerting is the fact that there is no obvious RSS feed or alert mechanism to ping users when new results are found. And since the pages aren’t URL addressable, it’s impossible to run a service like Dapper against them to create your own RSS feeds,” adds Turoczy.

I can almost see WhosTalkin as a reputation management tool as much as a search engine. For example, I can do a search for “WebProNews” and find out who’s talking about our beloved publication on Twitter or Facebook or Wordpress blogs, or many other places.

The web needs a go to place(s) for searching social sites easily, although this task will likely only get more difficult as every website and its mother adds social elements, and data portability increases in popularity. Still, I hear Google is looking for new acquisitions.

People are fired in all kinds of rude ways, but they typically don’t make the news. Get fired via Facebook, though, and the world goes “huh?”

Crystal Bell, fortunately, wasn’t humiliated via any public communication; her boss sent notice via private message. According to the Calgary Herald, Bell, who’d been employed at a spa only two weeks, skipped a staff meeting on a day she wasn’t scheduled to work.

This answers Smokey’s question: How the hell you get fired on your day off?

Other questions go unanswered, though, as those who are not self-employed may be taken aback by the impersonal method of termination. Bell’s boss defended the move saying she tried to call but Bell ignored her phone.

Still it raises the question of whether this is an isolated incident or the wave of the future: getting the digital ax via email, social network, instant message, yikes—Twitter? Will someone get fired in leet?

Blaise Alleyne at Tech Dirt plays out that scenario:

unfortunatesoul btw you’re #fired sry

Unfortunatesoul’s likely response: @bgboss i can haz welfare chek?

As someone with a communication background, let me say that this probably isn’t the best way to go about it. If management is unconcerned with the employee who is fired, management should consider the remaining staff and how they perceive the act. As they internalize and empathize, such indifference may contribute to I’m-just-a-cog-in-the-wheel bitter disloyalty in the future.