Great spot by Mike Gotta over at Collaborative Thinking. He picks up on an article in CIO magazine by CG Lynch, “Web 2.0, Social Networks in ‘09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation“, originally spotted by the The Connections Blog. This quote puts it all into perspective quite nicely:
IBM, for its part, has more aggressively shown willingness to move forward with Lotus Connections, which right now has a better design than the social software features in SharePoint, which is largely still a document management system.
I think most people would agree with that - well at least those that are struggling to implement Sharepoint as a social software solution.
The CIO article goes on to say:
But both companies are further removed from innovation than the enterprise 2.0 vendors. While enterprise 2.0 vendors mimic what they see in the consumer market, thus keeping them a degree of separation away from where the innovation actually occurs, the incumbents are even further removed; they simply copy the enterprise 2.0 vendors.
This isn’t a sustainable model for innovation in the enterprise Web 2.0 market. With shrinking access to venture capital, there’s reason to believe some of the enterprise 2.0 start-ups will fail or struggle to make money in 2009. When this happens, they’ll either fold or be purchased by IBM or Microsoft.
Web 2.0, Social Networks in ‘09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation - CIO - Blogs and Discussion
Mike goes on to say:
Sure, Connections is ahead of SharePoint when it comes to some of the key aspects of social software - but I find “Enterprise 2.0 vendors” to be ahead of Microsoft and IBM when it comes to certain technical capabilities or user experience aspects. Sometimes I think that Microsoft and IBM are so intent on stealing away the install base of the other, that they are not paying attention to other market signals regarding what customers are looking for in social platforms. Still, the economic downturn will make it difficult for smaller vendors to survive so IT strategists should expect some vendors to fail and others to be acquired (which really is not anything terribly insightful based on past downturns and bubble bursts).
So, on reflection, I’d say that Google are pretty well placed to just get on with mopping up the Social Computing space that the ‘Enterprise’ boys are ignoring. The key differentiator (and potential weakness) between enterprise vendors such as IBM and Microsoft and their erstwhile nemesis Google is the very fact that they only know ‘enterprise-speak’, i.e. negotiating and selling at a corporate level, whereas Google’s market is the end user, a market they they know far better than their competitors in the social computing stakes. So, whilst users wait for their organisations to provide what they really want, Google is out there delivering it, e.g. Google Groups, Google Apps, Google Sites, Google Friends Connect etc.
Yes, we know that the likes of IBM and Microsoft will survive the credit crunch, and that consolidation is a natural consequence of a recession, but I know which horse I’m putting my money on to flourish in these difficult times!
These are my links for December 15th through December 31st:
- Community Spark - Developing online communities
- The Shorty Awards - The best producers of short content on Twitter in 2008 - The Shorty Awards honor the world's top Twitterers. You can nominate as many people for as many categories as you'd like until midnight December 31st. The final voting round will be held in January.
- Welcome to TweetMinster – the place where real life and politics tweet. :. - Forget the corridors of power… you can take an active role in UK politics right here, right now. How? Follow and Tweet MPs and Ministers to get involved and use the power of Twitter to make your voice heard and conversations more open. You can take a back seat… or you can tweet.
- Twitter Buttons - Get Free Twitter Buttons for your Blog, Websites, Profiles in few clicks! Get Twitter Button you like - How this thing works?
Its very simple… Enter your Twitter ID below and Press GO, then you can copy the code (click "Copy Code") of any button you like and past it on your Blog, Web Page or any where and let others follow you.
- Tweetree - Birds in a tree. - Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them right in your stream without having to click through every link your friends post
- Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies - ReadWriteWeb - Analysis of the trends and technologies that power the Semantic Web. The article identifies patterns that are beginning to emerge, classifies the different trends, and looks into what the future holds.
In a recent interview Tim Berners-Lee pointed out that the infrastructure to power the Semantic Web is already here. Not only are the bits of infrastructure now in place, but we are also seeing startups and larger corporations working hard to deliver end user value on top of this sophisticated set of technologies.
- MyTweetSpace.com - Free Twitter Backgrounds - Brand your Twitter Profile for Free! - Customizing and branding your Twiiter space on the web.
- Top 40 social news/media sites - TECH.BLORGE.com - The idea behind social news or social media websites is that users submit news items so that they can be shared with other users. Pioneered by the likes of Slashdot and Fark, but it was with the advent of Digg, that social news sites found a wider audience. This is a pick of the top 40 social news sites, listed in alphabetical order. The list also includes social booking marking sites, which allow users to store, organise, search, manage and share interesting web pages or websites.
- Why Wiki - Wiki - Why should I use a wiki?
A wiki is a website that may be easily and quickly developed by a community using only the Web browser on their computer. Wikis are easy to use by groups with common interests or communities of practice. This link provides several reasons why you may want to use a wiki.
- Twitter Grader - Measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user.
- The State Of The Twittersphere (HubSpot Edition) - How many followers do most people really have on Twitter? The average number of both followers and other members people on Twitter are following is about 70, according to the State of the Twittersphere, a new report by Web marketing startup HubSpot. (Full report embedded below). But that average is skewed by elite Twitterers who have hundreds or thousands of followers. The vast majority of people on Twitter use it to keep in touch with a much smaller circle of friends and peers. For those with 50 or fewer followers (three quarters of all users), the average number of followers is 15.6 and the average number of people they are following is 18.4.
- .:: NOTEPAD++ ::. - Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL Licence.
- Wikipedia Official Mobile Site - ReadWriteWeb - While the Wikipedia is one of the most popular destinations on the Internet, it surprisingly lacked an official mobile version until today. Over the years, a number of companies released their own mobile versions of the service, but an official version the Wikipedia itself was never available through a dedicated mobile interface. Now, you can surf to mobile.wikipedia.com to see a stripped down but highly functional version of the Wikipedia on your favorite mobile device
- Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008 - ReadWriteWeb - The gap between the major search engines and their alternatives continues to widen — a lot. Google has been compared to a luxury liner that turns around very, very slowly, whereas the startups are speedboats that can turn (or innovate) on a dime. I guarantee that if you try any of these top 10 alternative search engines of 2008, you won't come away saying, "Hey, that was just like Google."
- Official Google Blog: Google Friend Connect: now available - Google Friend Connect is now available in beta to any webmaster looking to add a "dash of social" to his or her site. This service lets webmasters add social features to their sites by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code — no advanced coding or technical background required.
- Main Page - Health 2.0 - This wiki has been set up as a service to the community of visionaries, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, policy makers, and professionals who are working on fundamentally redefining the healthcare industry along the lines of "Web 2.0". This movement was initiated at the first Health Camp, which took place in December 2006 in San Francisco, CA. A new series of HealthCamp events kicked off in June 2008. More events are planned in 2009. Check out http://barcamp.org/HealthCamp for the latest details, or at the HealthCamp Wiki. In addition since Fall 2007 the Health 2.0 Conference has been held on a semi-annual basis (Spring & Fall) with the next one planned for Boston, MA on April 22-23, 2008.
- Levels of engagement with social media - Whilst working on the Mini Tutorials for the 25 Tools resource earlier this year, it became clear to me that I needed to address the requirements of three very different users. For example, with YouTube there were those that would want to share their videos online, there were those that would just want to view videos, but a third (middle) group of users who want to interact with the videos by commenting on them (and thereby help others to identify the best videos around). I named these three different levels of users as follows, (albeit after struggling for some time to find the most appropriate labels).
1. Reader or passive Consumer
2. Participant or (re-)active Contributor
3. Creator or proactive Producer
ReadWriteWeb have re-posted a very interesting account of the Common Craft story. The following is an abstract:
Five years ago Lee LeFever was an online community manager for a B2B healthcare company called Solucient. Today, his voice has been heard by millions of people around the world, making strange new applications feel easy to use and offering some of the clearest explanations of how the Internet is changing.
LeFever is the founder of Common Craft and his story is an inspiring one.
He’s gone from social media consulting to co-producing the wildly popular “…In Plain English” video series. Common Craft’s videos have been translated into scores of other languages and landed the company big jobs making custom videos for companies like Google, LinkedIn and MeetUp. Now Lee and his wife Sachi LeFever are making another major work transition. They’ve stopped producing custom videos for clients and have found an interesting new business model.
What is Common Craft going to do instead of making themselves available for hire making custom videos? Lee says that for the past year they’ve been getting requests three or four times a week for permission to re-use their Plain English videos. The solution they decided on was licensing them for corporate and eductional use.
Common Craft now sells licenses for high-quality, downloadable versions of their explanatory videos. All of their time working is now spent building out the library. Videos are licensed for under $20 for individual use and $350 for site-wide use, like on a company intranet. Commercial licensing, for use on public commercial websites, is the next option the company will be offering.
Of course the video content is available free to anyone online, but Common Craft says that many companies feel far more comfortable paying for official permission to use high quality, unbranded versions. There’s certainly no DRM involved. “People want to do the right thing if they know the rules,” Lee LeFever says. “Our challenge is to educate people about how we expect our videos to be used. We’re lucky to have fans that feel good about supporting us with their purchases. Given limited resources, we would rather spend time educating people on the right thing to do than trying to make the wrong things impossible.”
It’s great to hear that Common Craft have turned what was once an interesting hobby into a successful business model and I’m sure their back catalogue of ‘PLain English’ videos will continue to help and inspire all of those grappling with the complexities of social computing.
I came across this potentially useful compilation of the 100 most popular sites mashing up and remixing Twitter, as measured by the number of bookmarks at Del.icio.us. Thanks to the Museum of Modern Betas Labs for this list.
- twittervision (4194 overall)
- twitterfeed (3557 overall)
- twhirl (3149 overall)
- twistori (2589 overall)
- tweetscan (2567 overall)
- twitter-search (2198 overall)
- tweetdeck (1977 overall)
- twitpic (1967 overall)
- hellotxt (1895 overall)
- twitterrific (1692 overall)
- twitterholic (1421 overall)
- tweetstats (1356 overall)
- quotably (1337 overall)
- twellow (1265 overall)
- twitscoop (1261 overall)
- twitturly (1253 overall)
- twitterlocal (1249 overall)
- twubble (1192 overall)
- twittearth (1155 overall)
- monitter (1142 overall)
- grouptweet (1133 overall)
- twitter-grader (1115 overall)
- twitbin (1082 overall)
- hashtags (1073 overall)
- tweetburner (1066 overall)
- terraminds-twitter-search (969 overall)
- tweetvolume (907 overall)
- twittercounter (890 overall)
- twist (880 overall)
- twitthis (861 overall)
- qwitter (849 overall)
- tweetlater (815 overall)
- twitter-karma (786 overall)
- xpenser (777 overall)
- twemes (772 overall)
- twittermail (767 overall)
- twitdir (763 overall)
- tweetbeep (755 overall)
- twitxr (751 overall)
- twitterfox (745 overall)
- friendorfollow (696 overall)
- hahlo (664 overall)
- botanicalls-twitter-diy (632 overall)
- tweetmeme (631 overall)
- tweetwheel (618 overall)
- twittersnooze (602 overall)
- snitter (593 overall)
- twittercal (583 overall)
- remember-the-milk-for-twitter (577 overall)
- twuffer (566 overall)
- strawpollnow (555 overall)
- twitterpatterns (552 overall)
- twinfluence (552 overall)
- twitterfone (538 overall)
- tweetr (517 overall)
- election.twitter (508 overall)
- whoshouldifollow (496 overall)
- tweetclouds (493 overall)
- pockettweets (490 overall)
- favrd (490 overall)
- twitterverse (467 overall)
- twittermap (456 overall)
- twitterposter (452 overall)
- twistory (448 overall)
- peoplebrowsr (442 overall)
- cursebird (441 overall)
- loudtwitter (421 overall)
- mrtweet (418 overall)
- colorwar2008 (408 overall)
- twitteroo (405 overall)
- twitter100 (403 overall)
- spaz (399 overall)
- tweetag (389 overall)
- twitbacks (387 overall)
- twilert (383 overall)
- fuelfrog (383 overall)
- twitter-blocks (380 overall)
- tweetake (378 overall)
- tweeterboard (376 overall)
- be-a-magpie (369 overall)
- twerpscan (367 overall)
- twittergram (366 overall)
- matt (365 overall)
- twitternotes (359 overall)
- twitter-friends-network-browser (359 overall)
- twitlinks (359 overall)
- tweetrush (355 overall)
- twitterblacklist (350 overall)
- twitku (348 overall)
- foodfeed (330 overall)
- tweetgrid (325 overall)
- mytweeple (321 overall)
- twitter-charts (316 overall)
- spy (314 overall)
- trackthis (313 overall)
- twittersearch (308 overall)
- politweets (306 overall)
- tweet-cube (301 overall)
- phweet (301 overall)
- tweetwasters (297 overall)
Further reading:
I’ve just picked up on (yet) another Twitter app called TwitchBoard. Twitchboard watches your Twitter-stream and notices anytime you post a url, and automatically sends the link to your Del.icio.us account. It represents the emerging class of cloud agents that are supposed to help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. Others in this genre include Friendfeed, Stumble! and Digg (to name just a few).
I may be in the minority here but I feel slightly troubled by apps such as Twitchboard that want to think for me. I’m perfectly happy to create my own bookmarks in Delicious, which are reasonably well organised and categorised, or to click on Stumble! to add a link to a particularly interesting article I’ve read to my Stumble! These are conscious decisions I’ve made to provide the ’semantic glue’ for my personalised social web. I tend to Tweet about fairly trivial stuff and will occasionally link to an article or picture that I’ve found particularly amusing. I don’t necessarily want to store these links for prosperity, or worse, create my own personal tag cloud around a random stream consciousness (though happy for other to use my Friendfeed if this is what they want to do!)
I accept that our social networking connections are getting ever more dense and the data we’re working with is growing too big for ordinary mortals to handle manually. We need help in organising our interests, affiliations, businesses, and collaborations and any applications or agents that can do some of the heavy data lifting for us while allowing us to focus on the meanings and relevance of content are to be welcomed. But ultimate control of our own personalised social web must - in my opinion - be juts that - a personal choice.
Online Information 2008
The slides from my presentation at the Online Information Conference have been posted to the conference website.
The presentation covered the following key points:
- How social media tools (wikis, blogs etc.) and Web 2.0 technologies can facilitate more effective networking and collaboration across the public sector.
- How virtual CoPs are delivering innovation and improvement to local government services.
- What does a successful CoP look like and how is success measured?
- Lesson learnt from the project.
I’m happy to answer any queries about this project or the slides.
These are my links for December 9th through December 14th:
- Community Toolbox - Bringing Solutions to Light - The Community Tool Box is the world's largest resource for free information on essential skills for building healthy communities. It offers more than 7,000 pages of practical guidance in creating change and improvement, and is growing as a global resource for this work.
- 19 Handy Twitter Mashups and Tools | Design And Marketing Blog - Houston Web Design - Search & Social Media Marketing - Twitter mashups and tools put a unique spin on the way we use Twitter. By “mashing” information from Twitter with other applications, you get an unmatchable user experience that can be both fun and useful. Enjoy these top 19 Twitter mashups.
- Is social media becoming a social mess? - Lately this is how social media has felt like. From both as a blogger and as a consumer. Services that are suppose to make things easier only seem to be muddying the waters. Distractions become almost the norm as we flit from one service to another and then try and pull them altogether with some sort of aggregator.
There is this underlying pressure to be a part of conversations, to create new conversations. It wasn’t so hard when all we had to do was remember what blogs we might have left comments on. Now though our blog comments are being spread all over with services like Disqus or IntenseDebate; which are then pulled in - or not pulled into - aggregrators like FriendFeed or Strands
- Anecdote - Whitepapers - Building a collaborative workplace - Today we face an entirely new environment for innovation and getting things done. The days of the lone genius quietly toiling away in pursuit of that Eureka moment to revolutionise an industry are all but over. We are now in the days of asking and listening to our customers and working with them in our innovation cycles. Innovation demands collaboration. So does production. In the past we could focus on a single task in an assembly-line fashion, handing our completed activity to the next person who would in turn do the same, until the job was finished. Now the jobs change fast, requiring learning new skills rather than merely repeating the old. We have to seek out people who have other pieces of the puzzle and work with them to tackle increasingly complex issues at a much faster pace.
- Net Gen Nonsense - Two British researchers have just completed a study of undergraduate students that found "many young students are far from being the epitomic global, connected, socially-networked technologically-fluent digital native who has little patience for passive and linear forms of learning." Instead, the study found that students use a limited range of technologies for both formal and informal learning and that there is a "very low level of use and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools such as wikis, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies."
These are my links for December 7th through December 8th:
An interesting study by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu over at HP on the social interactions within Twitter. To quote from the preamble:
Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.
Key points from the report:
- A ‘friend’ is loosley defined as anyone the user has directed at least two posts (tweets) to.
- They conjecture that users who receive attention from many people will post more often than users who receive little attention.
- Users with more followers and friends will be more active than those with a small number of followers and friends.
- There are two different networks: a dense one made up followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of friends.
- The number of friends is the actual driver of the user’s activity and not the number of followers.
- Users with many followers post updates less frequently than those with few followers.
The full report is available at the HP website link above, or can be downloaded here.
Twitter under the microscope
These are my links for November 27th through December 4th:
- 100+ More Ways to Organize Your Life - Last year we featured over 100 web applications to organize every aspect of your life, from your belongings to your social calendar, and more. Since then, many have been significantly improved and lots of new apps have been released.
From basic to do lists to event planning, fitness, educational organizers, and more, here are 100 new applications to get you even more organized.
- 30 Alternative Tools To Twitter Search And Tracking Memes On Twitter | Smart Advi$e.info - 30 Alternative Tools To Twitter Search And Tracking Memes On Twitter. If you are as disappointed (annoyed) about twitter search as me, here are 30 alternatives to twitter search and to track memes on twitter
- Wikipatterns - Wiki Patterns - Want to grow from 10 users to 100, or 1000? Applying patterns that help coordinate people's efforts and guide the growth of content, and recognizing anti-patterns that might hinder growth - can give your wiki the greatest chance of success.
Wikipatterns.com is a toolbox of patterns & anti-patterns, and a guide to the stages of wiki adoption. It's also a wiki, which means you can help build the information based on your experiences!
- White Label Social Networking Software - A list of white label social networking software. Software available for you to launch your own social network today.
- Imaginatik - Idea Management, Innovation Management software, open innovation and collaborative innovation - Imaginatik is the leading vendor of Innovation and Idea Management technology and services. With over ten years experience, spanning over 300 clients, we offer our customers unrivalled insights and technology expertise to support their innovation initiatives.
The old adage 'a fool with a tool is still a fool' applies for Innovation Management software as for any people-driven technology solution. Our ongoing research commitment allows us to incorporate leading-edge insights into our approach, and our large client base gives us a real-life testing ground for new features and business methods. We have the resources and expertise to help clients design and successfully implement their programs, from simplistic systems to advanced Ideas-to-Cash environments.
