Immerse yourself in a program that will teach you how to use web 2.0 tools and service to become a high performer. Then teach your organization how to become web 2.0 savvy.
The new model creates a more trusted environment for reaching high-value, frequent purchasers, whether of airline tickets, electronics, clothes or other items. Where does that leave the less-frequent purchasers? Probably looking to their friends rather than to advertising for advice. I’m an expert on travel; my friends may look to me for hotel choices. When I’m in the mood to buy a book or a new computer, I’ll check out what my friends on Facebook are doing.
This does not mean that traditional online advertising will go away, just that it will become less effective. Value is being created in users’ own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks. The new value creators are companies — like Facebook and Dopplr — that know how to build and support online communities.
Alloy Media + Marketing commissioned a study by Harris Interactive toward the end of the 2007 school year. Social networking ranked highly, and was listed as a daily activity by 54% of respondents, second only to e-mail.
More than one-quarter of respondents also said they viewed online video daily, which explains why many students listed YouTube as their favorite Web site.
For the past few years, I have been using Firefox as my standard browser. But over the weekend I read a review that said that Safari for the Mac was much faster than anything else these days. So I moved my bookmarks back to Safari and I have to say that I find it to be faster. Given the amount of web based work I am doing, the difference in speed is noticeable.
Tim Berners Lee: a cloud around connections between computers and web documents.
New set of complexities. New social sites being built all of the time.
We assume email is part of the web and part of your default experience. Younger people hate email. They only use email to talk to us. We think of email being us. But they think of their social network as being them.
All these things on the web we think of us as documents are actually people. People have links between them. Links between web sites that are people are expressing relationships. XFN and FOAF.
Social Graph API: finds web sites that can be treated as people (blogs and social network profiles) and returns the links between them. These are the publicly declared links on the web. The Social Graph API allows you to find out the friends they have and have already expressed.
The Social Graph API puts a cloud around finding me and finding my friends on the web. These connections can be discovered and used in other places. Open Social abstracts out these relationships and enables you to build this into your application. The cloud is people friends, actions and data.
The future of enterprise social computing looks like it will involve a combination of internal systems and tools augmented and extended by cloud computing and services. The interaction and adoption models for this will look less like Outlook and more like Flickr or Delicious. Google has bet big on cloud computing, which may eventually form the basis of an appliance business as well for inside the firewall; but Microsoft holds the ring right now with their dominance of internal email (Exchange), the desktop (Windows and Office) and the rise of Sharepoint.
Yahoo currently have some amazing assets that could be deployed to transform Microsoft’s stale, C20th enterprise offering. First, there is Zimbra - a really good communication platform with over 11m mailboxes, according to the company. It provides an excellent Exchange alternative to act as a centre of gravity for a number of enterprise collaboration and interaction modes. Then there is Delicious, Upcoming and some of the other recently acquired services, plus others being developed in-house. Each of these has the potential to make enterprise web apps a lot more useful and interesting than they are right now. Finally, there is the Yahoo interface and design patterns libraries, and the company’s knowledge of how to make useful and compelling Web-native applications that users will enjoy. The problem is, Yahoo have had neither the will nor the culture to turn these assets into valuable enterprise offerings.
Rather than segment the new business into clearly delineated enterprise and consumer divisions, I think there is real scope for throwing the pieces up in the air and recombining them in a more imaginitive way. Enterprise needs the innovation and user experience of consumer-facing web apps, and the consumer side could benefit from the experience of enterprise apps in suporting the basic needs of less motivated and web-aware users.
Only time will tell whether such a coming together of different groups, cultures and tools is possible.
This was the other big announcement on Friday (the first being Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo). Google has opened up the API for the Social Graph. Brad Fitzpatrick describes it as:
Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they’ve said they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site.
The internet doesn’t need more social networks. The internet is the social network. We have our identities, interests, reputations, relationships, information, and lives here, and we’re adding more every day. The network enabler that manages to help us tie these together to find not just connections or email addresses or information or songs but people — friends, colleagues, teachers, students, partners, lovers — across this open world, that will be the owner of the biggest network of them all: The Google of people.
Using the Google API, Swift will be able to understand my social relationships without any explicit action from me.
I’m very excited about this because it is going to make our new web platform, Swift, much more powerful in that it will be able to go beyond Facebook or Linked In. Here’s how Raffi, our Technology Lead on Swift, describes it:
One thing that we can do is mine google for information about
my friends that i have not _explicitly_ stated in facebook or linked in — I
guess that’s the primary difference — facebook or linked in requires that I
state who my friends are and who i trust, whereas via this API google is
“inferring” who it is. The data can be richer this way.
Additionally - its not just going to be the friends that i know, but through
google we’ll also know who thinks i (as raffi) think is trustworthy, and i
can display that “back link” information as well.
I’m planning to take Oprah’s online class on A New Earth. It is a ten week course with a live webcast every Monday. It will be interesting to see how she manages the instructional design and interaction. It could well become a model for high production value e-learning.
Here’s what I’ve discovered so far:
The weekly webcasts will be streamed by Move Networks. Looks like an HD Stream. No buffer. Extremely high quality.
Participation is simple: you have access to assignments, a workbook, video archives, and discussion groups.
It looks like you can submit videos as well as text.
You can find local f2f reading groups.
There is at least one blog in the mix.
If you want to follow along, you can register for the course at Oprah.com.
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