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Imagination in the use of Web 2.0 thrives!
I have just been invited by two ‘friends’, meaning good colleagues within the IT industry with whom I like to interact and exchange opinions, to join Dopplr which is a new and imaginative way to solve an interesting issue for people like me who travel widely and often. Too often I discover that I was in the right place at the right time to meet one of my Web 2.0 social ‘friends’ some time afterwards and we both quietly curse a missed opportunity for some real ‘face’ time.
Well now we can all publish our travel plans in such a way that our ‘friends’ who are members of Dopplr will know all about our schedules and we can see connection possibilities. I love it! It’s a great solution to an annoying issue. BUT and here is the big problem, it’s yet another community to manage and enter information into, and I am looking for the services of a ‘Community Integrator’. Yes I know there are work arounds and some clever things you can do, but that’s still hardly a scalable approach.
Right now the functionality of Dopplr and a number of other communities, some of which I have provided links for in past blogs, is at a level when it would be a real benefit in a large group such as Capgemini, but not if every community is separate and needs to be managed separately etc. I need all of them to be cohesively integrated together as a superset and for this to be linked to, what I guess is mine and most other peoples normal corporate working environment – Microsoft Outlook. At moment Web 2.0 is providing me with too much imagination and not enough consolidation to be corporately useful, which is a shame because I really like, and want quite a few of these new capabilities, but only if I can gain the advantage of integrated scale.
To me this is rapidly becoming the issue, the creation of a superset community which makes sure that a significant enough number of my ‘friends’ are linked up for us both to benefit regardless of the individual communities any of us may belong to for different capabities. And that takes me to an interesting opinion piece from Bruce Richardson and analyst at AMR, who in the midst of the boom about Facebook was courageous enough to ask the question of what the future for Facebook might be once the hype, or novelty factor, had worn off. It’s a good question, and to me begs the old answer; ‘get niche, get volume or get out’, to which is added the rejoinder ‘and remember niches always close up and squeeze you out, or open up and you drop out’.
Bruce suggests that when he looks at what some of the mainstream software vendors are doing about Web 2.0 and communities that the niche will move into mainstream and that Facebook will drop out. It’s a fair point and I certainly agree that the speed at which these guys are moving suggests that Web 2.0 type technology and capabilities will be firmly integrated, if not embedded, into their products by the end of 2008. And that will probably answer my plea for corporate integration, but to do what?
Is it really right to suggest independent free standing communities are not required? I don’t think so, in fact I think this whole area will grow as the ‘online’ village of users expands and expands, or put another way as more people choose to work as independent value creating or deploying experts how will they find each other and collaborate?. So I would expand Bruce’s comments to suggest that there is a need for a real over arching integration between communities built around specialist capabilities like Dropplr, or around specialist interests for collaborating and sharing expertise or content.
To me it could be like search engines, were Google is a super set search engine that many other specialist search engines use to power their own more focused activities. Maybe that’s where the future of Facebook, or MySpace, or Bebo etc. lies.
Posted by Andy Mulholland on January 28, 2008 in
Innovation
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» Wait and they will come, but don’t stop them first! from CTO Blog
I got some interesting feedback on my post ‘Imagination in the use of Web 2.0 thrives’, of which one point was about the need to work differently when using Web 2.0. This pretty well crossed with two other events; the... [Read More]
Comments
# on January 28, 2008 9:19 AM, Bernd Sailer said:
If you´re a Facebook User you can try the dopplr Application to use dopplr via your Facebook profile. That´s not the full solution of the challenge you mentioned, but a step in the right direction, i think.
# on January 28, 2008 11:57 PM, andy mulholland said:
Hi Bernd
It seems that Facebook is really developing into a platform for web 2.0 collaborative working tools like DopplR.
This seems a good direction to see it going in and i guess the more it grows in this way then the more it will become the defacto standard for tools like DopplR.
no bad thing as we both agree but interesting to see happening!
# on January 29, 2008 4:33 AM, Daryl Mather @ Consulting Pulse.com said:
Andy, good post and a relevant theme for right now. Personally I use LinkedIn almost exclusively, I don't actually "get" Facebook, and I have never even seen MySpace.
For me this is the super business community. Why? Everyone is already there!
What we (it) needs is the ability for us the end user to access it and become developers and start to use it to customize our own community experience.
This could mean a Force.com. (No don't say it.. the community as a Service?) Where people can create their own additions and modifications, allow others within their community to use them, or keep them for private groups and networks.
Actually - seems like a good opportunity for consultancies to capitalize on within the Enterprise 2.0 space.
My 2c worth, good post!
# on January 29, 2008 5:57 AM, Niraj J said:
Andy ,
This is a hot topic for discussion in an evolving market. The problem of having multiple communities and linking them is a difficult one. Efforts like open social(from google) are a step in the right direction but their view of integration up till now has been limited to sharing widgets and transfer of information from one website to other - which really boils to portal like functionality for the master social application (like facebook)
I think the key is - where is your central data profile and where is your console where you can administer tiered visibility of your information. Efforts like http://openID.net are great but they have not yet got the momentum from key vendors like google , facebook etc.
On the comment of
"Is it really right to suggest independent free standing communities are not required?"
IMHO they absolutely are required. All communities like Linked in , Facebook , Dopplr , Wasabe.com
and Last.fm have some representation of me in a different aspect(Professional , social , travel , banking and music)
One place cannot and should not be the place where all my information and finer interactions are stored.
A Platform that addresses the following concerns will truly be an open social operating system.
1.Authenticity : What you Claim is what you are (WYCWYR)
2.Data Control : The confidence that my data is in my control (Create , update , DELETE)
3.Tiered Data Visibility : Control over the amount of information I want to share with others
# on January 29, 2008 3:45 PM, andy mulholland said:
hi daryl and niraj
two great posts and even better having them together as they offer two sperate views on a key issue. Me and my profile.
on one hand the admisterative convienance of one identity versus the other hand of using different identities for different personal 'roles'.
a few years back there was an interesting research piece for retailiers on how we change our personalities and how we wish to be served in different roles. as an example for business car hire i want it now and no dicusssion, for my hobby i want to take time and chat through the options and possibilities.
this leads me to conclude that we need to seperate what i will call 'commercial' aspects of our personality for when we need them for transactions from what i will call the 'social' aspects which are highly variable under different circumstances.
all of this is really usefull input to the white paper i am currently writing on the role and use of communities for business purposes.
welcome any other thoughts on this
# on January 29, 2008 6:01 PM, Niraj J said:
on : "the role and use of communities for business purposes".
Traditionally , businesses have focussed on Profession as separate from the individual.
Things like
- I dont care about the social groups you belong to as long as you come on time and do your job
- What you do in your non-office time is your problem.
The above does not necessary hold true for new business's. Enterprise 2.0 corporations like google , amazon look for what you have done outside of your job before hiring. In most cases, your web personality is atleast searched and looked at before hiring. I know of a Employment verification company that has Linkedin as an item to check in its verification list.
The walls between your professional world and your personal world are diminishing .
One implication of the above is that building any software today that exists 100% inside the firewall and has zero interaction with outside world is stupid. The argument could be that if I am building a call center application why do I need to go out of the firewall. Well , maybe you want to pull more generally available information about the caller from the web before taking the call.
# on January 30, 2008 3:37 AM, andy mulholland said:
I fremember at the time of the first internet boom scott mcnealy of sun saying privacy is dead, get over it.
i suppose the argument is that private behavoir on the web is now as publicaly visable as behavoir on a public street therefore business would not want to see its employees in the newspapers for some misdemeanour hence why they feel they have a right to check.
interesting new social argeuments are coming up all the time as we encounter new possiblities and outcomes with a mass online world.
# on January 31, 2008 12:10 AM, r fahey said:
Is not a simplier tool than Dopplr twitter? While I appreciate you must subscribe to feeds it is simple and quick to use to perhaps meet up with colleagues?
# on January 31, 2008 3:36 PM, andy mulholland said:
my son is a huge fan of twitter - he blogs on mobility, microblogs, etc at http://jonathanmulholland.com - and it certainly works for him. He has a lot to say on Twitter and Jaiku etc.
if you can be online constantly updating it definately works well. i lack that kind of continious presence - may be an age thing? and find the more structured routine of Dopplr works better.
but thats the great thing about web 2.0 that is a personalised people environment and it allows choice - now if we can bring these core apis together then may be we are getting close to a real global environment !
# on February 1, 2008 8:24 PM, Jonathan Mulholland said:
What we're talking about here is 'lifestreaming', and as you say there are a number of interesting hacks that can achieve this. One I've been toying with is to use Yahoo! Pipes to collate my various RSS activity streams from around the web into one 'Pipe', then run this as a widget on my blog.
Interestingly Six Apart this week announced an 'Action Streams' widget for their Movable Type blog platform. This creates a very clean summary of your activity across the web. You can see it in action here (http://www.majordojo.com/)
My favorite lifestreaming service (currently in private beta) is 'FriendFeed'. Started by 4 ex Googler's FriendFeed lets you collate all your activity streams from around the web, but crucially lets you decide whether you want to make these feeds public or private, shared only with nominated 'friends'. Mine is publicaly available here - http://friendfeed.com/jonmul I'll send you an invite.
I think that both of these services are signs that 'community integrator' services are on the way, and will likely be very popular by the end of the year.
# on February 2, 2008 11:33 AM, Jonathan Mulholland said:
...and from the announcement of the OpenSocial 'Social Graph API' made yesterday by Google, it looks like they're on the way to a solution to this.
See: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/googles-gathers-social-graph-information-from-the-web-launches-api/ for a really good video explanation of how the API manages 'me' / 'friend' links and http://blog.plaxo.com/archives/2008/02/introducing_pub.html for details of Plaxo's implementation of it.