Business 2.0 looks at The Next Net

Over coffee this morning I read some interesting new product reviews. After dismissing the term Web 2.0 as "defined and redefined into near meaninglessness by squadrons of aspiring entrepreneurs, marketers, and other fortune hunters," Erick Schonfeld adopts the term The Next Net to mean - well, Web 2.0. Writing for CNN's Business 2.0 last week he selected his 25 web companies to watch in the near future. Many of these are among the developers of the "new web" apps I've tried out over the last six months - Writely, 37 Signals, Digg - while others are companies with offerings I hadn't encountered yet. Usefully, Schonfeld divides his Next Net offerings he reviews into five categories, revealing the wide range of applications we've lumped together under the web 2.0 rubric - from social media to platforms for building real business apps. Quite a few of the products are the type of free or low cost tool we've gotten used to in the web 2.0 world: individuals sign up, easily create an account, and data can be shared with other users. But some are a different order of application altogether. For example, Newsvine is a read-write news site with a revenue sharing model for its members. Eurekster is a swiki - a customizable search engine you can tailor to your particular community and subject matter and host on your site. This site too offers a way to to make money from its use. This monetization of the web seems to be a big thing in the products the article selects. But Zimbra is a different beast: a web-based email system trying to enter the enterprise email space. Offering both client and server components, Zimbra couples web-based email with the calendaring functionality of outlook and a variety of workflow management capabilities. Zimbra, as well as some of the other products reviewed, is challenging not just what we think of the web, but how we conceive of our core business applications. The article is worth a read - and the products worth your own review! Tags: nptech, web2.0,