Social Networking and Business

Social Networking is having the power to create online communities that can leverage the collective buying power over time. It is indeed interesting to study the Business and Revenue Models that will thus develop.
A First-Level Practice is the Activity-Reward Model where every activity on the Network begets the user with reward points. These may translate into cash or dicounted services from the portal.
In course of time, we can expect secondary and tertiary Models to develop that may benefit the individual, the community as a whole, or localized groups with common profile attributes.

Web 2.0 in Realty Portals and Collaboration

There are enough and more Realty portals offering the vanilla "Post and Search Property" features. The revenue models have almost stagnated around Listing and Advertising. In a sense, the Realty portals have been offering the "User-generated-content" angle for a while with users putting up their properties for rental or sale. Web 2.0 offers significant value to this vertical with Collaboration. Collaboration will be the next major milestone in Web 2.0. Collaboration integrated with Mapping will broaden the spectrum of services that a user or service provider may capitalize from the portal.
Collaboration will help users to evaluate properties in depth while leaving a digital footprint of all the discussions of the property. A new set of models will evaluate once the portal providers realize this aspect, especially driven by user demands. More on this subject later....

Web 2.0 - overview

When the web moved to 2.0 after the OReily intrepretation, the dynamics of the internet have taken a significant step forward. When revelling in "User Generated Content" and the consequent "Democratization of the Web", the web has actually give the power to the average internet User. Blogs, Wikis and Forums have become tools to express oneself and one's knowledge as indexable content. Youtube and the like have become metaphors for visual content and media.

In a sense, part of the quest for the "killer apps" are now being used prolifically. We have started a journey where we will see more such "killer applications" that we will enable users to express themselves in more forms than presently perceived. Time will help us break more ground by bringing in User managed Collaboration and Workflow to cultivate newer Social and Business Networking models and therefore, revenue models. The future definitely has much in store!