Vidhya Srinivasan

Web 2.0 - what is it doing for users?

With every company in the technology world wanting to implement web2.0, are companies really thinking of the end users? Its great that companies or social networking sites want to make it easier for users/customers to personalize and share content. As a user who is trying to network and participate in the communities, I am struggling to keep up with the different sites, my profiles, contacts, address book, tag clouds ... i can go on and on. I have to log into 5 different sites to network, update my content and customize. So, the web 2.0 wave, has it really helped us?

At Sun, we have tried to integrate and help our web users to leverage tools like digg and delicious if they have accounts already for tagging etc. At the same time, we also have some homegrown implementations that causes yet another set of information that users have to maintain, remember and track. What can we do about this?

Well, to start one of the first things is to tackle Federated Identity Management. Also, wanted to share some positive efforts that are happening in this realm.

Data portability group

Great start to get the leading players to come together to create the ultimate Federated Profile for us. If that happens, imagine the possibilities for users.

1. Single online profile
2. Companies like Sun can easily just leverage the common services like tagging, etc

These are just a few benefits. That gets us ready for Web 3.0 and the semantic web... I would like to hear from some of you out there who have thoughts on this subject.

Posted at 09:55AM Jan 11, 2008 by Vidhya Srinivasan in Sun  |  Comments[0]