It is not what you application does, or even how many people currently use your application.

To win in a networked world, what counts is how many other systems your application can reach out to!

Some observations to back up that assertion.

• One reason YouTube succeeded was because it let you embed a YouTube video in your blog or wiki page. Each new blog added reach. Rather than diluting the YouTube brand, having their videos playing in at least one post on a large portion the blogs on the Web actually drove more users and traffic to YouTube.
• Bloggers that only post, and never link to other sites, or comment on other sites are usually not nearly as successful as bloggers who actively step out and engage the rest of the world.

The implication of this insight for system design in an Enterprise 2.0 world are profound. For example, if you are building a wiki company, you have to think about your wikis being used in the context of everything else that your client organizations do, including traditional CMS sites, blogs, transactional sites, application sites and all the off line work that people do.

Too many companies out there try to own the entire knowledge worker experience. “Our site has a complete framework to do everything you ever wanted to do”. Who would ever believe that? Wouldn’t it be better to say this:

“Our application does some of the things you need to do. We understand that you do some things before you get to our site, and we understand that you do other things after you have worked with our app. We try to make it easy to fit into the way you want to work. We help you get information into the system easily, and we try to make it easy to get value added information back out. We also understand that some times it will make sense for you to work at our site, and sometimes it will make sense for you to take our app, and run it within the context of your environment, just like running a YouTube video clip within you blog post”.

Companies that get the statement above understand how to be a successful node on a network. They are flexible. They consume standards. They expose standards. And they aim to have lots of successful types of business partnerships.

We live in a networked work. Just as people celebrate when the EU expands or countries like Vietnam are admitted to the WTO, in an Enterprise 2.0 world, you win when each new node and each new connection is added to your company’s ecosystem.