4. Release early and often

Wesabe, like Flickr, updates its site often, usually several times a day.. The constant interaction with users usually provides Wesabe developers with almost immediate notification of bugs, Hedlund noted.

In addition, Wesabe and many other Web 2.0 companies run so-called "shadow apps" of their sites, which are used to determine how users respond to specific feature updates. A report compiled by the shadow application could show, for example, how often users log off the site or whether the amount of financial information uploaded by users has dropped.

Recommended Reading's Mixx.com social news site, which allows users to submit and rank news items based on votes, is also updated far more often than traditional IT applications - about once every week or two, said CEO Chris McGill,

In fact, "long-term" for Mixx means a product roadmap that stretches out only six months, said McGill, who founded the firm in 2007 after stints as general manager of Yahoo News and vice president of strategy at Gannett's USA Today newspaper.

The Mixx.com development team, which meets daily to discuss the previous day's work, uses the Scrum agile development method.

5. Let users, not developers, determine new features

Top Internet companies like Amazon.com and Google release new features to small subsets of users and then compare their feedback to a control group. The companies say the method provides much better validation for new features and products than customer surveys or even discussions between users and product managers.

Mixx.com hopes one day to follow the same process, McGill noted, while adding that it has already moved to take advantage of a community formed by its users. Mixx uses the community as a "24/7 focus group" to bounce ideas off its members, he added.

IT Coming Onboard

While most large companies are unlikely to flock quickly to the Web 2.0 development techniques - and some applications would not be a good fit for this methodology, observers noted - some are starting to realize their merits, according to a July 1 TopCoder survey of more than 1,300 developers. The firm asked the questions -- compiled by Computerworld -- to developers taking part in a recent TopCoder online coding competition.

An overwhelmingly majority (70 per cent) of developers surveyed agreed that traditional corporate development teams could benefit from Web 2.0 techniques, specifically the incremental feature release, quick user feedback loops and quality assurance programs that include users.

What's more, 57 per cent of the respondents said that problem solving and analytical skills will be key requirements for next generation developers while 18 per cent cited the need to work with online communities. Meanwhile, 24 per cent said that code generation is the key long-range development skill.

Gribbons said that the corporate use application development 2.0 techniques - especially the focus on the user - could be critical to stemming the number of IT development projects that are scrapped before completion.

"No other industry would accept a failure rate that we have in our industry," he said.