2008 will no doubt be a telling year in the corporate social media and Web 2.0 space. And if this CIO Insight story is any indication, the race will again pit David v. Goliath. But what’s different this time around? Will the Web 2.0 shakeout be any different than all the other enterprise software battles?

What happens in 2008?

Here’s some thoughts:

• The incumbent enterprise software vendors have the edge in total dollars spent in 2008 as they give away what Web 2.0 functionality they have.
• Pure-play social media and Web 2.0 vendors get out of the gate faster because their platforms are easier to stitch together — the gap shortens in late 2008 as acquisitions are made.
• Bigger vendors will provide the underlying architecture and deep integration to existing apps.
• Enterprises will learn that mixing and matching Web 2.0 technologies with existing apps provides real value - advantage upstarts.
• Pure-play social media vendors will quickly evolve their alliance strategies — the lines of coexistence or competition will be blurred.
• Enterprise software vendors will go wide while smaller vendors go deep. In other words, the small guys will do one or two things really well and the big boys will do a lot of stuff kind of well.
• Vertical expertise will take precedence very soon. Advantage: enterprise software vendors.
• Bigger vendors will sneak web 2.0 inside the enterprise. You’ll get the content repository from IBM — and it’ll include publishing and subscription capabilities, AKA blog and RSS.
• Pure-plays will rely more heavily on 3rd-party services..similar to the early enterprise portal days and all those clunky content gadgets.

But don’t count out the current crop of social media upstarts so fast, though. They can still can put their best enterprise foot forward when they have to. Below is Awareness Networks’ (formerly iUpload) passage marketing to the deer-in-the-headlight IT decision-maker.

..if a corporation deploys separate tools for each form of social media (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, etc.) they will create disparate islands of information that later will have to be somehow integrated. A common approach to all forms of social media allows an organization to employ the most appropriate form of social media for each business need with the assurance of knowing that the content is re-purposable to any other form. In this mode, a user can generate content in one participation style (e.g., a blog) that later appears in another participation style (e.g., a wiki or a discussion group) . This maximizes the value of the user-generated content and avoids any silos of information.

What else do you see in the coming months?