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It’s amazing! Without great effort I’m already an integral part of the Web 2.0 business economy. Because of my blog? Far from it. Because of my facebook profile? Far from it. There’s a much more simple reason for it. Let’s check some of my web activities within the last week:

Monday: I sent an email via Windows
Life Messenger and bought some books at amazon.co.uk

Tuesday: I sold my old mobile phone on ebay and bought some DVDs there

Wednesday: I searched for information on Wikipedia and googled a journal article

Today: I called my friends in Germany via Skype

I could easily go on like this! To put it into a nutshell: There has been hardly any day within the last weeks… months…let’s say even the last year (maybe even years?) without network
effects caused through my usual web activities.

Curse and blessing of ‘traffic’

I really like the following quote of Amy
Shuen in her book ‘Web
2.0: A Strategy Guide – Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web
2.0 implementations.’ (by the way: as this is already my second quote of Shuen’s book you see I’m really satisfied reading it. It’s a great, very well written book I really like to recommend to every PR student who deals with Web 2.0) “FOR MOST OF US IN THE REAL (OFFLINE) WORLD, TRAFFIC IS A BAD THING. More cars on the highway at rush hour create negative network effects. Each driver reduces the quality of the experience by congesting and overloading the highway network past its limit. But in the online world, traffic is a powerfully good thing.” Just try to picture it! Her figure of speech is great.

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What Shuen refers to: There’s no doubt that positive network effects increase the value of a good or service the more people use it (To get an idea of it: A well known theory illustrating this is Metcalfe’s
law stating about the value of communication). Positive network effects created the Web 2.0 network platforms and contributed the online hypergrowth of networks such as Google, Yahoo!, ebay, Skype, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Flickr and other.

Apropos: Why not watch Amy
Shuen talking about network effects herself? For me it was very interesting to see this famous lecturer in person – but be aware that it’s more an informative video than an animating film! Suen has
got a blog, too. Unfortunately, it has not been updated for a longer period of time.

What comes to your mind first?

Let’s go back to where I started: I just followed this train of thought about my web activities within the last week because it seems to me as if many people think they aren’t a part of the Web 2.0 business economy at first glance. In fact, they are! Just to give you an idea about two of the web services I used last week: ebay counts 86 million active and Skype 400 million registered users (see
source).

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Not bad! Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that people first notice all these social networks like Facebook or MySpace when thinking about Web 2.0. activities. I sometimes even catch me thinking the same although I know it better!