Monday afternoon’s session at the Cutter Summit was devoted to Web 2.0, with Stowe Boyd providing the keynote address. I’ve known Stowe for several years, and subscribe to his blog, so I was interested to hear what he would have to say about Web 2.0 — and in particular, the impact of “social tools” on business, media, and society — to an audience largely composed of middle-aged IT professionals and managers from traditional companies in North America and Western Europe.

As an aside, he mentioned that the experience of blogging — which he’s been doing for several years longer than most of us — has changed the way he presents talks at conferences: no longer does he present a bunch of standard Powerpoint bullet-point lists, with a set of neatly-constructed conclusions at the end; instead, it’s more of a stream of consciousness consisting of fragments, conjectures, cheap shots (of which there were hardly any in this talk), and biases. (And as another aside, I find it refreshing that most conference speakers today have moved away from the deadly-boring Powerpoint presentations; almost everyone finds a way to inject some music, some videos they’ve downloaded from YouTube, some animation, and various other bits and pieces that demonstrate energy, enthusiasm, and individuality.)

Also somewhat as an aside, he showed us a web page from an “alpha” product known as Dopplr, which provides one bit of simple functionality: it helps business travelers provide a simple itinerary of their upcoming trips to their fellow business travelers — so that if business colleagues X and Y discover they’re both going to be in city Z at the same time, they can explore the possibility of getting together for a beer, or for dinner, or possibly even for a serious business meeting. It’s such a simple thing that it would normally be thought of simply as a “feature” in some larger, more grandiose Web-based tool (e.g., in Travelocity, or some airline-reservation website). But it’s simple, it’s easy, it’s not tangled up with a thousand other features that you’re not interested in using … and it’s free. As such, Stowe remarked, it’s the epitome of a successful Web 2.0 application — though I don’t know anything about it, except for a brief description on its Website indicating that it comes from Helsinki, Finland — but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was developed by just two or three people people, in their spare time, and with a budget of only a couple thousand dollars. (Because it’s still at the “alpha” stage, it’s accessible only by invitation, which I just got this morning. In the meantime, you might want to look at Pairup as a roughly equivalent example that has made it to the beta stage.)

The idea of starting with something small and simple was a theme that Stowe continued talking about for a while, and it is indeed important. From the developer’s perspective, the technology is so cheap that you don’t need millions of dollars of venture capital; you can fund the initial development with a home-equity loan, or even a cash advance on your credit card. And from the customer’s perspective, many of the intriguing new Web 2.0 tools/products/services are free, or are “freemium” — free access to a limited, basic level of services (which are typically underwritten by banner ads, or other forms of advertising), and then a subscription model (which may be $5/month, or $50/year) for premium services.

I found it particularly interesting that Stowe said, fairly early in his talk, that the most important thing he has ever done in his career is blogging — that it trumps his Master’s Degree in Computer Science, and trumps everything else he has ever done — because it makes him part of a network of people, struggling to grope with large complicated problems. Blogging (and posting comments on other blogs or Web 2.0 apps/sites), he argues, is a fundamental aspect of all social networking applications; it involves connectedness, involvement, and being part of a group where what you say actually matters. As such, Web 2.0 is, to a great extent, the world that blogs built — and are continuing to build. There are now roughly 71 million blogs worldwide, and the blogosphere is still doubling every 5-6 months, with approximately 175,000 new blog-sites being created each day; it’s a worldwide phenomenon with hundreds of millions of blog postings. And while it’s convenient to think of it as nothing more than a social phenomenon (e.g., lonely teenagers talking to themselves), it also has a huge business impact: as Stowe put it, the combination of blogs and Craig’s List has been a “one-two punch” for traditional print media, driving several newspapers to the brink of financial ruin because of steep declines in classified advertising revenue.

As it turns out, I ended up spending most of today talking about various technology trends with a group of very savvy, up-to-date colleagues who also heard Stowe’s presentation — but who nevertheless felt very strongly that blogging is a largely narcissistic, unproductive, self-centered activity, and one that presents significant risks to companies. I’m beginning to think that all of this is somewhat of an existential thing: if you don’t blog on a fairly regular basis, you can’t imagine why anyone else would do so; and if you’re predisposed to think that blogging is just narcissistic chattering, then you’re not likely to spend very much time (if any at all) reading anyone else’s blog either. It may also be a generational thing: middle-aged and older people are less likely to read or write blogs, and younger people (and those who still feel young) are more likely to do so. This is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, but it may be one more thing that separates the generations these days. (As for me, you may or may not find it useful to read my March 29th posting, “Why Are We Blogging?“)

Anyway, back to Stowe … he spent some time talking about the business models associated with “Enterprise 2.0″, some of which could be seen at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which drew some 10,000 attendees (but, in response to a show of hands, drew no attendees from this Cutter Summit conference). Traditionally, Stowe reminded us, the software business model has been based on sales and licensing — and in the case of enterprise software, it has been quite expensive: even if you’re just thinking of office productivity software (word processing, spreadsheet, email/calendar/contact list), the cost of equipping 10,000 employees with this technology can be enormous. By contrast, most of the Web 2.0 products and services thus far have been free, and have typically been aimed at consumers; Stowe predicts that as this stuff starts to move into the enterprise marketplace, it’s going to be quite a revolution for the entrenched competition like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc.

But while Stowe acknowledged the potential interest in, and relevance of, corporate-level Web 2.0 activities, most of his presentation was devoted to “social tools” and “social networking.” It’s certainly true that there are social networks within companies — after all, how can you have 100,000 people drawing a paycheck from the same employer without some kind of “culture” and “social network,” even if the employer doesn’t want to acknowledge it, nurture it, or talk about it? But in any case, most of Stowe’s presentation seemed to be aimed at the “personal” level of social networking — i.e., how all of us interact with our friends, family members, and business/professional colleagues outside the corporate firewall.

The important characteristic of social computing, Stowe suggested to us in his talk, is the emphasis on “me first,” and the focus on me, my friends, and the potential marketplace consisting of my friends and me. For vendors and companies interested in participating in this activity, the question is: can you make the interactions between me and my friends (and between the various members of my “grouping” of friends) easier, more efficient, more fun, and thus more “liquid.” If you can’t do so, then you probably don’t have something worth productizing.

Stowe also talked about the notion of “traffic” and “flow” and “conversation,” and I’m not sure I can even find the words to articulate what he was trying to explain to an audience who appeared to have found much of this fairly alien. Let me put it this way: Web 1.0 was a world in which most person-to-person conversations took place; Web 2.0 is more a world of immediacy, of conversations, of instant-messaging. I’m writing this blog posting as if I’m talking to you (whoever “you” might be), and I’m assuming that you’ll read it within seconds after I upload it. I know that’s somewhat unrealistic, but most of the people who do read this blog post will probably do so within a few hours after I upload it; I’m always surprised when I get a comment from someone about a blog article I wrote three or four weeks ago.

The ultimate form of immediacy in the Web 2.0 world is Twitter; Stowe describes it as “social presence” that’s equivalent to a wink, a nod, a slap on the back — or, as he puts it, a form of “ambient intimacy.” My fuddy-duddy colleagues dismiss Twitter as the epitome of narcissism, imagining that it will degenerate into the most banal and trivial of commentaries about one’s activities: “Now I’m taking a sip of my coffee,” followed seconds later by another Twitter message that says, “And now I’m taking a bite of my blueberry muffin,” and then “Now I’m taking another sip of coffee.”

Well, yes, it could degenerate to that level of banality — but chances are that even the most ardent Web 2.0 aficionado wants to listen to anything like that, and one would would quickly find one’s Twitter-friends disconnecting themselves from such a Twitterer. And I have to admit that while I’m registered on Twitter, I don’t bother sending updates on my whereabouts or activities to anyone: I work alone, and I can’t imagine that any of my friends care where I am, or what I’m doing, on a moment-by-moment basis. But if I worked in a collegial office environment (admittedly, it’s a leap of faith to assume such things exist!) or if I was attending college with a group of friends moving around the campus during the course of the day, then it seems eminently reasonable to me that my friends and I would gradually a rhythm and pattern of twittering to stay abreast of one another’s activities. Perhaps one twitter-message a day would be appropriate for some groups; perhaps one message an hour would be appropriate for other groups; and if we were all converging on the university football stadium for a big weekend game, maybe a message every five or ten minutes would be appropriate. In any case, it isn’t going to bother anyone outside the group; indeed, none of it would mean anything to anyone outside the group. As Stowe said, to understand the meaning of what is being said, you have to be in the flow of the communications.

Stowe had more to say about all of this; and his colleagues in the social networking universe have much more to say about groups, groupings, networks, and the ways in which all of these new Web 2.0 tools will help them all communicate, coordinate, and collaborate. I don’t think the specifics matter all that much; for example, Twitter may or may not survive; the Dopplr service that Stowe mentioned at the beginning of his talk may or may not reach a critical mass of loyal supporters; and the technology landscape may look quite different a few years from now as our mobile devices get faster, cheaper, and smaller. But it’s safe to say, I think, that blogging is here to stay; and social networks of one form or another are here to stay, too. Ultimately, everyone will figure out for themselves how much, or how little, of these tools and technologies, products and services they’re going to use. Some people won’t join in the Web 2.0 revolution at all; and as Harvard Business School professor Andy McAfee (who, for whatever it’s worth, has a blog of his own) observed in a panel session following Stowe’s talk, some (perhaps many) companies will ignore Web 2.0 altogether, and/or will do everything they can to keep it outside their corporate firewall.

But people like Stowe will be doing their best to explain and articulate what’s going on in the social networking corner of the Web 2.0 world; and I think it’s important for the rest of us to listen closely to what he has to say.