Despite the explosion of new Web services, a number of hurdles stand in the way of consumer- and business-oriented social-networking applications, experts at the Web 2.0 Summit said Tuesday in the US.
Panelists on two panels at the conference pointed out some of the technical deficiencies in Web technologies that could put a damper on so-called Web 2.0 applications, such as social-networking sites and collaboration software.
Applications that rely on end-user contributions, such as sites that share reviews, are limited by the lack of a universal online authentication system, "Next Internet Infrastructure" panelists said.
To spread social-networking applications into different fields, such as health care or business transactions, technologists need to address multisite authentication and ways to rate an individual's reputation, said Jonathan Hare, co-founder and CEO of Resilient.
"The Web created an open, shared user interface where you can reach anybody if you have a browser," Hare said. "But now you have islands of authentication, reputation, licensing and privacy...We need to get these services interoperable."
Meanwhile, business customers are dabbling with Web technologies, such as blogs and wikis, as a form of lightweight collaboration software.
But these systems, which are designed to make it easy to create applications and generate content, can pose technical challenges to IT departments, according to speakers at an IBM-sponsored panel called "What does SOA (services-oriented architecture) have to do with Web 2.0?"
American Express is experimenting with internal use of wikis. On its customer-facing Web site, it uses RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, to deliver information, and the company's Web site invites its customers to provide feedback to influence product design, said Bob Morgan, vice president of technology strategy at American Express.
"We're interested (in Web technologies) -- there's clearly some applicability. And we want to give customers the sense of community feedback," Morgan said.
"But we need to figure out how to make it industrial-grade," he said.
Specifically, he said security and privacy issues are not robust enough with Web-based technologies.
Also, the rapid application development methods of mashups are in opposition to the traditional methods of corporate programming and pose challenges in integrating and managing a large number of applications.
And as there are more mashup applications that rely on getting data from multiple sites, developers and end users are finding performance and reliability problems, the "Next Internet Infrastructure" panelists said.
Morgan said there is clear value in things like wikis, but American Express is still experimenting with these technologies because of some of these challenges.
"If the industry of technology providers can actually solve these challenges, it will speak volumes for the ability to deploy this stuff and make it very real for large companies," Morgan said.
