RESEARCH LABS — Forrester analyst Tamara Barber says it’s time for the industry to embrace online communities as a research tool – and defends the increasingly unfashionable term ‘Web 2.0’. I’ve used a buzzword in the title that some readers will chafe at: Web 2.0. But most of us at least have some general notion of what this term means, which is what makes terms like it so useful. If I look it up on Wikipedia – my most trusted source of web information – one phrase in a very long definition crystallises the concept for me: "A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content"...

RESEARCH LABS — By now you’ve probably heard about the showdown at Friday’s Virtual Goods Summit between Mike Arrington, editor of TechCrunch, and Anu Shukla, founder of Offerpal, at the conclusion of the "Payments Infrastructure for Virtual Goods" panel. For those who spent their Halloween weekend in the depths of costumed carousing, you can still check out the details of that on TechCrunch. At Friday’s conference, both Shukla and Arrington spoke on behalf of the users regarding the quality of user experience. We agree with both parties that user experience is of paramount importance – over the weekend, we took things one step further and asked Facebook users what they thought. To the best of our knowledge this is the largest survey of its kind conducted on the FB platform...