Discussion on Web 2.0 has gained prominence since the thought provoking discussions led by O’Reilly Media, followed by success of the next generation Web sites like Google Earth, Flickr, myspace.com etc. At its core, Web 2.0 is about harnessing the potential of the Internet in a more collaborative and peer-to-peer manner with emphasis on social interaction. Really speaking, it has less to do with technology and more to do with a metamorphosis aimed at facilitating collaborative participation and leveraging the collective intelligence of peers. The challenge for Web 1.0 (as we would like to call the earlier wave of Internet) has been to involve the end users in a collaborative, seamless, peer-to-peer fashion in an economical and reliable manner and at the same time ensuring rich user experience. Rich user experience and a sense of affinity are two critical aspects of Web 2.0 and play an important role in encouraging collaborative information exchange.

Customer and partner facing processes using Web 2.0 have the potential to not only radically transform peer-to-peer collaboration, but also inter-entity collaborations and commerce by enabling various types and combinations of business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), Consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-government etc. collaboration and commerce. Indeed, Web 2.0 has the potential to enable collaborative value creation across business partners. These could, for example, include scenarios such as Rich Internet Applications (RIA) based delivery tracking system leveraging Web 2.0 standards for desktop-like rich functionality on client side within a web page. There are opportunities such as providing rich information on all the convergent services subscribed to by a consumer (including third party services) leveraging Web 2.0 standards which could be achieved through the use of Mashups based on content from multiple sources (exposed using APIS, Web Feeds, Web Services etc.) to create new services. These could even be multi-channel mashups or RSS feeds. In particular, the interplay between the emerging Web 2.0 paradigm and the already popular paradigm of SOA seems to be of special interest owing to the complementarities of the two schools of thought. While Web 2.0 can offer an intelligent, rich, customizable, and interactive service consumer base for a service provider, SOA can offer the standardized conduit for the enterprise information and data to be consumed by Web 2.0 applications.