A recent CNet article on "do-it-yourself Web" let me know that I have not been speaking in vain about the "Self Service" trend we have been tracking for the last year.

Although the CNet article focuses on building your own web sites, we see the same trend occurring in the collaboration space, where people want to build collaborative applications that solve a specific business problem, or build collaboration into a critical business process without having to go to IT to do it.

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Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) and John Seeley Brown (former chief scientist at Xerox PARC) both see the rapid commoditization of hardware and software, and an increase in available bandwidth, with more and more hosted (ASP) services available. Add these trends to those around MashUps and you can see the evolution towards user developed applications. Right now most application development frameworks are aimed at developers. It is a lot harder to make something easy enough for end-users to use it.

Web 2.0

Blogs (like this one) and wikis like: Jotspot, Atlassian, Grovesite, SocialText and others allow you to share content. New tools from Google like Writley and Google Spreadsheets allow you to share more traditional content and information. Others offer online Office-like services like: Dabble DB (group spreadsheets); Zoho Sheet, virtual office, etc. The difference with these new applications is that they are web (browser) based (however not to be leftout so if Microsoft Office Live) and they are more focused on interaction then just publishing.

First, Second and Third Order Effects

A first order effect of the Web was to take what we had as paper and publish it up on the Web using FrontPage or DreamWeaver. This happened at the end of the Millenium when "eyeballs' was the way to count how many people had viewed your static information. First order effects are all about taking something you already have and extending it or making it work in a different environment.

But the Web was not built for publishing but rather more for interaction. So in the new millenium we have seen the rise of collaborative functions and applications, even Microsoft jumped in. This is what we are in the midst of today. It is a trend we at CS believe will grow stronger over the next few years.

The simple logic here is that people know their own problems better then any IT person or developer would, and if given the right (easy to use) tools, they can build a solution for themselves and be a hero!

This is a second order effect, where you build on the first order effect and take it a step further. For example, when people moved from horses to cars, that was a first order effect, it allowed them to go further faster. When we built the U.S. freeway system, that was a second order effect which would not have been possible without the first order effect of cars.

No, "self service" does not put IT out of business, on the contrary, it would allow them to vette the applications (instead of building them) and integrate them with the corporate infrastructure so that they do not go against policy or take up too many corporate resources. However, the end-user (as developer in this case) would have to check the information sources for the application and determine their validity and relevance.

Sites like Ning allow you, through the use of templates, to create your own social network applications; sharing links, vote on who is the hottest girl, share bookmarks, share reviews on books, etc. Coghead is more corporate focusing on templates for users to create: incident tracking database, project management for engineering teams and tasks, workflows for sales tracking, etc.

We have focused on this trend in the collaboration space with vendors like JotSpot, iCentera (portals for mortals) and SiteScape all working to make tools available to the end user for collaborative applications.

The Future of Collaboration

Just like the explosion in Mashup applications we are currently seeing, as more "self service" collaborative tools become available, we expect to see a similar explosion in collaborative solutions. These solutions will be much less general and much more specific to the problem the end user (developer) has.

They may be publicly shared or shared on an intranet, and used as the basis for other solutions (end users are more tweakers then real developers) and thus feed this rennisance in collaborative applciations and solutions.

We expect 2007 & 2008 is when these applications will really take off, but we have been tracking them since 2005.

For the example above (horses and cars) the third order effect is "shopping malls" which would not be possible without cars and freeways.

So what might a third order effect be for collaboration and the Internet, if the first order effects are publishing (content) and the second order effects are interaction (collaboration), a third order effect might be "intelligent content" that is smart enough to trigger or initiate an interaction or be an entity in the interaction itself. Can you imagine a document that is smart enough to help you write the application for it's use?

What do you think the third order effect will be?