Gartner: Social networks analysis is in, folksonomies out

I've just caught up with the annual "Hype Cycle" report by Gartner, published in July, in which the analysts discuss emerging technologies with an eye on their impact on businesses and society over different time-horizons.

Techs rated "transformational" or with a likely high impact over the short term include social networks analysis, VoIP, Ajax, mobile-phone payments, e-paper and location-aware technology, and generally Web2.0 (which I understand is intended more as an "umbrella" philosophy than a specific technology). RFID is considered transformational but still a few years off. Interesting is that the Gartner analysts shrug off corporate blogging, mashups, smartphones, entreprise IM and RSS, speech recognition for mobile devices, wikis, and folksonomies ("folk" and "taxonomy": the product of collaborative tagging), as having a moderate or low potential. Here is the matrix that summarizes their assessment (click on the image to enlarge):

Comments

[zeno]

Very interesting, thanks

[Howie]

Dear Bruno

At http://mobile.moblog.ch/mobile-communities/triple-play-vs-communities.html
you will find a studie/report regarding Web 2.0, Mobile, SN/UGC etc. from ADLittle with a link to order a free copy from them.
I have got it a views weeks - and was quit impressed about it. It could might be interesting as well.

Regards - Howie

[Emanuele]

Hi Bruno, I don't think Gartner is getting the revolutionary impact of the Web 2.0 and especially Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon.

This prediction (18 July 2006) seems to be already old and denied by what is happening today (with a stronger evidence in the US market). Web 2.0 is a revolution for millions of users (even Time bought it) and Enterprise 2.0 is deeply changing the way large companies collect, aggregate, manage and make use of their knowledge.

For me this is a transformational "technology". Maybe the point is that this is not technology for Gartner. It is a social and cultural shift. Gartner imho finds difficult to evaluate this kind of evolution.

Gartner considers as low benefit a technology that is difficult to translate into increased revenue.

Folksonomies are definitely a part of the Web 2.0 thing and to say it completely, Gartner doesn't exclude that tags can prove useful into corporate intranets. They simply seems to lack a way to give them a place inside companies and to measure this effect.

Anyway Gartner suggests to conduct pilots to directly evaluate the usefulness of folksonomies in your place "in acquiring and sharing corporate knowledge". They continue saying that folksonomies "may translate into enterprise productivity, but the causal relationship will be difficult to prove and the impact hard to measure".

My feeling is that they aren't fully considering the new paradigm that folksonomies support but, more than that, the potentialities they have.

KM has been out there for a long time. Folksonomies are here only since 2005 and my prediction is that they have a long evolution underway and they are already used into enterprise social tagging platforms (like Cogenz and Connectbeam).