The current wave of social networking phenomena seems to spawn a new website or next big thing on a weekly basis. Facebook is hot, MySpace is fading, and Friends Reunited is simply dead. However, the social networking trend has already begun to stray beyond the bounds of keeping up with friends - business is starting to take advantage of the technologies spawned by the social networking revolution. Web 2.0 changes the way businesses interact with customers having economic, communal and technological impacts.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. These functions may be provided locally, remotely, or via an external system. SOAs effectively build applications out of existing software services. Using an SOA methodology or mash-ups (the difference being that mash-ups are always web-based whereas SOA is not) to bring in useful communication and information services could see an online convergence of services like email, news aggregation, account management and so on. The standardised technology within most business (XML, HTTP, AJAX, REST, RSS) provides almost boundless possibilities for creating business oriented, efficiency-increasing Web 2.0 applications.