PROSPECTS AND RISKS OF WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS

Dr. Fanny Klett assumed the Directorship of the German Workforce Advanced Distributed Learning Partnership Laboratory, which is run in cooperation with the US Government, in 2009. She established the Business Area Data Representation and Interfaces at the Fraunhofer Institute Digital Media Technology. Fanny Klett earned her Ph.D. in Electronic Media Technology from Ilmenau University of Technology. She was a visiting scientist at the Graz University of Technology.

Dr. Klett's research and development interests are on advanced technologies in the area of information, data and content management, enterprise knowledge management, competency and job performance management, e-assessment, collaborative systems as well as metadata, repositories, data fusion and interoperability. She is regularly invited as a visiting lecturer at universities across Europe and Asia. Fanny Klett actively works in standardization bodies such as the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee, the IEEE Standards Association, the US Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, the Learning Education and Training Systems Interoperability Association, the ISO SC36 for learning, education and training. She is CEN WS-LT LTSO expert. Dr. Klett chaired and served on more than 20 conference planning and program committees of UNESCO, IEEE, APSCE, etc. She is associated editor of the IEEE Education Society and ASEE Electrical and Computer Engineering Division joint publication “The Interface” and serves on the peer-reviewer board of the IEEE Transactions on Education, and the IEEE Educational Technology and Society Journal. She was Guest Editor of the Special Issue of the Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal in 2010. In addition, Fanny Klett assists the European Commission, and various governmental and industrial research funding organizations in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Cyprus, the US, etc. as an independent expert. Dr. Klett is IEEE Fellow. She is actively involved in the IEEE Computer Society Member and Geographic Activities Board by representing Region 8 (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), and the IEEE Educational Activities Board. She is also Member of the Sponsor Executive Committee and Secretary of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee chartered by the IEEE Computer Society Standards Activity Board, and Member of the Council and the Academic Board of the European Association for Education in Electrical and Information Engineering. Dr. Klett has published more than 80 technical and invited papers, white papers and book chapters, and has organized numerous Special Sessions and Workshops on digital information, knowledge sharing and standardization themes at leading international conferences worldwide.

ABSTRACT

Gartner, Inc. annually examines the maturity of emerging technologies, trends and already established technological developments in a variety of technology, topic, and industry areas. These findings become published in the Gartner’s "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies" According to the 2009 Hype Cycle, Web 2.0 and Social Media technologies will be entirely accepted during the following two years; moreover, Cloud Computing, and Service-Oriented Architectures will hit the mainstream in five years. Further, the analysis points out that Web 2.0 technologies, such as Twitter, have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among enterprise users followed by a broad penetration of corporate blogging and wikis.

Web 2.0 solutions follow various complexity approaches, but they are technically mature and open new business and communication opportunities, especially for enterprises. We have to take into account that Social Media do not appear as information machines; they create new rules for communication. In the interim, this cultural change directs new occupational profiles, such as „Community Strategist“, and „Community Manager“.

The talk observes recent trends in Web 2.0 and Social Media technologies with regard to business processes. Starting from standard architectures and data formats such as Representational State Transfer (REST), and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 2.0, which facilitate meanwhile the integration of services, and moving to ready-to-use solutions such as widgets and Drag-and-Drop mechanisms as well as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), the speaker finally asks what can Service-Oriented Architectures learn from Cloud-Computing-Systems.

Employment of Web 2.0 and Social Media solutions offers credible advantages for internal and external use in enterprises as these advantages finally sum up to benefits worth more than the sum of the parts, for example better consideration of customer demand, new communication infrastructure with direct channels and effective reach, global operation between employees, clients, partners and suppliers, vibrancy as well as independence and individual responsibility. The factor of success called "Social Intelligence" covers now new aspects such as tracking discussions about particular themes and enterprises on various discussion platforms (Social-Media- and Blog-Monitoring) with data analysis and data mining technologies. Enterprises are heading toward becoming similar to social networks.

Simultaneously, the Intranet and Internet related free access to services and data sources poses security risks. Enterprises increasingly face spam, phishing and malware attacks. The enterprises' need to secure social networking interactions increases, as more social media become a core aspect of their  marketing and business intelligence strategy. Therefore, the consideration of proper access and network security mechanisms is a key requirement mirrored in this talk by taking into account recent international studies from McAfee, 2010, and the Sophos Security Threat Report, 2010.

Finally, the talk reflects also the tendency of merging Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web to shape machine-readable contents toward driving future developments in user-friendly intelligent applications, especially networked assistive applications in a variety of use cases and knowledge domains.