It was only last June, when I visited the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, so I didn't expect a sea change when I went to the West Coast version in Santa Clara last week. That's why I was surprised to find several new trends have developed, some of which we just started hearing about in June. It just goes to show how quickly technology changes.

Get ready for video

One thing I was hearing a lot about as I moved throughout the conference was video. It seems that more social platforms want to find ways to provide what many are calling "YouTube for the enterprise." What vendors mean by this is a simple, straightforward way for regular end users to share video content. This could be particularly useful from a training standpoint where employees can use Flip (or other brands) video cameras and make an instructional video about something they know how to do.

Working in place

Last week I sent a link to my Editor's Corner, "Can Enterprise 2.0 help the disconnected knowledge worker," to a friend who is in fact one of those workers. His response was he didn't want to learn another tool. Vendors must be hearing that a lot because many of them are finding ways to incorporate their enterprise social networking software into tools where users are working. This means instead of explicitly opening a new tool to social network, the functionality is built into Outlook, your CRM tool or SharePoint (as examples). This should help push adoption for users who share my friend's feelings about using yet another software package.

Surfacing the important stuff

The other complaint you'll often hear about social networking tools, whether they're enterprise or open web, is the amount of noise you have to contend with to get to the stuff that's important to you to do your job (or to find the people that share common interests). That's why several vendors were talking about ways to reveal what's most important to you and to make suggestions for groups and associations based on your behavior and activity within the social network. It's a bit like Priority In-box in GMail. After analyzing your activity, GMail starts placing items in a Priority section. If you don't think it belongs there, you can mark it as not important. These tools take a similar approach offering you suggestions about what's important in your enterprise social stream.

All three of these approaches are attempts to make it easier to share and work in these tools. Should be interesting to see what happens next time at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston and what's on the horizon for Enterprise 2.0.

Prediction: Look for some sort of unified communications dashboard approach to social networking incorporating all of your communications regardless of the source.  

Related Articles:
Lessons learned from Deloitte's collaboration 2.0 deployment 
Enterprise social data could help provide customized employee experiences 
Can Enterprise 2.0 save the disconnected knowledge worker?