This past week has provided quite a lesson in the functioning of credit markets, and potential impacts on the economy at large. Will the credit crisis broaden into a deeper recession?  Who knows. But, as I’ve said in previous posts, the next economic downturn will be different than ones in the past, thanks to Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

For one, companies looking to trim expenditures will find Enterprise 2.0-style tools to be compelling solutions. eWeek’s Clint Boulton just explored some of the scenarios we may see in “Recession 2.0,” if it were to come to pass.

For example, there could be more Web conferencing instead of business travel. This was a shift first seen in the 2001 post-dot-bomb downturn.

There would also be more interest in collaborative and cloud computing. “Organizations that are looking to move into new technologies, normally a project that would be put on hold when budgets are tight, can still do small implementations with SAAS, including blogs, wikis and social-networking tools to lower costs.”

One more observation on this. Even if the economy suddenly broke into a growth surge, and money started flowing from all directions, we’ll still see growth in collaborative and cloud applications. Companies recognize that the growing capabilities now offered by Enterprise 2.0 and cloud applications offer a huge competitive advantage, not only because they are low cost, but also because they are flexible, and even more important, open up the information flow between teams, departments, partners, and customers.

We have seen the future, and it is online, it is collaborative, and it is wide open — no matter what the state of the economy.