Social Features are the Small Things That Matter

In most blogs posts, I have been constantly trying to address and better understand myself, how the “social” aspect is playing a key role in the way technologies of the future are shaping. It always did and will continue to excite me the way the social constructs influence the businesses. I have mainly covered the non-technology aspects of enterprise2.0 in most of my recent posts, however in this post I will cover a couple of the technology features that probably touch upon the human element of enterprise2.0.

There are a lot of triggers which have led me to think on these lines; one of them being a simple question that people ask – “why do we need a picture with our profile” or “what’s the big deal about thumbnails against each of our messages on various platforms like Faceebok, Twitter, or Yammer?” Well essentially what happens when you continuously start seeing the picture of a person you are interacting with is that, we as humans start registering it in our heads and soon start associating all things that come along with that photo. If one has built his credibility around a subject, we no longer really see the person’s name when we see his/her post/message, however if I were to see the same set of messages without those photos, the chances of me associating the various names will be considerably difficult. Try seeing a activity stream from Facebook, Twitter or Yammer without the photos and you will know what I mean. The photos obviously can go on further to help you when and if you happen to meet them in-person; but even an avatar of sorts can help in building the person's identity!

Another simple thing that really fascinates me is the very widely used (& probably abused) “like” button on most of the social platforms these days (Facebook, Yammer, FriendFeed etc). To the eye or from a technology standpoint it's probably a simple thing, but just imagine the power this simple feature brings. Like I have said earlier, when dealing with humans one must address aspects like emotions & expressions and this “like” feature absolutely does that. Just a simple click (on the like button) sometimes conveys so much and in most cases can go a long way in building strong relationships amongst community members. These are the kind of features that really communicate the sentiments of people; also not always that people want to reply to a message saying “I like this document or idea or news” etc. There have been various similar features in the past too, like a “thumbs-up/down” icon for example. Such features when further explored can lead to detailed analytics and in social network analysis, understanding the crux of the network; further assisting in understanding the character & spirit that prevails in a community.

Having said all of the above, we definitely need the right kind of coaching and literacy for people to understand and start using these tools, but (I think) simple technology features like these are what matter when we talk about going the social technology way!

P.S.: I am hoping to get some critical discussions around this post! :-)

Nikhil Nulkar is a knowledge management consultant within Capgemini and is passionate about web2.0, specifically in enterprise2.0 & social media. Want to know what he is up to? Follow him on Twitter

Posted by Nikhil Nulkar on March 18, 2010

Weekly digest of week 10 2010

This week it’s about the changing face of social networks, how SeaWorld used social media to react quickly to a major crisis and do you wonder what happens to you website when you die?

• Is Social CRM The Key To Innovation? We all want our businesses to grow and most of us can agree that growth comes through innovation. To innovate, a company must understand the needs of their customers
• SeaWorld uses social media to react quickly to a major crisis The recent killer whale attack at SeaWorld could have been the end of the theme park. It was that bad.
• Changing Face of Social Networks Five years is a lifetime for the average teenager’s habits. In 2005, MSN was top dog in the social-networking scene; two years later it was MySpace (owned by News Corp., publisher of this service), which was then quickly superseded by Facebook.
• Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends. In part, Steve Jobs stated that the iPad didn't support Flash because it was a "CPU Hog," so Apple used a technology called HTML5 instead
• What Happens to Your Website If You Die? You may not think that your website, your blog, your freelance business, is something you need to think about in your last will and testament, but it is. It’s an asset you own, and it needs to be sold, dissolved, or left to someone you trust to continue running it.

Light reading:

• 11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization
• Ultimate guide to table UI patterns
• RSA 1024-bits Key Encryption Cracked
• Foursquare + Google Maps = FourWhere
• Bing Took Another Slice Of Yahoo’s Market Share in February

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 15, 2010

Nielsen, Rogers and the lack of contribution

If you are implementing anything that is related to collaboration most of you will know and have used the rule for participation inequality or the 90-9-1 rule. This rule shows that in an average group of people 90% are lurkers, 9% contributes from time to time and 1% of the group members participate a lot and account for most contributions.

On the other hand there is the theory of the Diffusion of Innovations of Rogers, which shows us of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. He defines adopter categories of the members in a group, the categories are: innovators (2.5% of the group), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%).

If you combine to these two rules, you’ll notice why it is important to start with a group that is big enough:

Just the participation inequality rule

When you start with a group of 100 people, 1 will actively contribute (sometimes up to 90% of the content), 9 will contribute from time to time, and 90 will read. As you notice, 1 person creating 90% of the content is not that exciting, and only 10 people that contribute in total is also not that many. They might get out of topics for conversation.

Combining the participating inequality rule and the adoption categories

If you start with a group of 100 people, you know that 16% will be laggards (they are likely not to participate), leaving you with 84 people who might contribute to the collaboration platform. Taking into account the participation inequality rule, you will end up with maybe one person who will actively contribute, about 8 people will contribute from time to time and 75 people who will read the content.

Some even say that not only the 16% laggards aren’t participating but also about 50% of the late majority, which means that about 30% of the group will not be participating. Making the numbers to about 1 (if you are lucky) to contribute actively, 7 contributing from time to time and 62 people who will read the content.

Don’t despair

The group you’ll select will be not a standard group that will be a representation of your enterprise. Most often that group does not consist of any laggards and, but mostly of enthousiastic people who will help you driving adoption in later phases. However, always keep in mind that not everybody will contribute on your new platform, so be aware your group who will be using this platform is big enough.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 12, 2010

Enterprise2.0 is like a Business Function

Newer ways of working and emerging technologies were changing the way enterprises functioned, this lead to the existence of Enterprise2.0. The idea behind using 2.0 was to communicate that we are heading towards a next-gen enterprise. We all know the importance the technology plays in this transformation into the new enterprise of tomorrow. However many industry thought-leaders and experienced talents have expressed that most of us are over-involved in the technology aspect of it and tend to forget the real basics.

If you recall my post Enterprise2.0 is the new face of Knowledge Management from last year, then there was a reason for it. Both Enterprise2.0 and KM have come to existence for transforming an enterprise to be leaner and more agile helping them achieve their end objective. Both have the same set of advantages, challenges and myths. For me these two are like business functions – that are interrelated with most if not all, other functions within an enterprise. The name is not important – you call it Knowledge Management or Enterprise2.0 – but what and how it helps the organization in achieving its objectives is what matters.

We need to understand that Knowledge Management also helps the business to drive its mission towards success just as other established functions like HR, Sales, Marketing & Communication, and Finance etc. For example the way HR helps an enterprise to hire the right talent for each of the other functions, KM helps the entire enterprise to provide the right information at the right time to the right person in the most swift & efficient means. There are many tools/technology suites that support the HR function to do their job better, but that in no ways indicate that people in that function side-line thoughts of improving aspects like Recruitment, Employee Relations, Employee benefits and compensation, Career development, Motivation, or even Counseling. A tool could help facilitate some or all of the above aspects but cannot take away the prime focus of the thought of improving itself. Similarly, when we talk about Knowledge Management/Enterprise2.0, we need to think beyond the tool and look at aspects like communication, collaboration, behavior, awareness, evangelism, human psychology, society, enterprise culture, and demography to name a few. The focus should be on how we can go about managing these facets and which tool(s) can further facilitate in doing so.

So Enterprise2.0 is like a business function however the difference in this case is the factors that play a role in it are slightly subtle, intangible, human, and social thus making it more difficult to understand its application or realize their benefits. Some of the web2.0 (especially social) tools certainly go a long way when it comes to facilitating the cause when compared to some of the existing or traditional tools. However, enterprises are (and will) find it difficult to formulate an adoption strategy for these tools since they touch upon the factors that I have listed above. Implementing an ERP system is probably a simpler task since the part that is really crucial is setting the right business processes and workflows – input, process, output; but going about with an enterprise-wide 2.0 social collaboration or KM system it may not be the same. Another difference between the usual business functions and KM is the role that each employee plays in completing the scope. Each person is an equal part of the large pie of the enterprise2.0 function, not just as a consumer but as a contributor, connector and catalyst – which makes the whole system extremely complex as it’s no more just about fixed processes. It’s about a free-flow, dynamic situation where people perform an action and processes get created on-the-fly and workflows are not set but are formed in an unstructured route solely by the people involved in it. And these things are dependent on the various aspects we discussed above.

There was a reason why I compared the HR function with that to KM. HR is one of the functions that has made its mark in today’s businesses and more importantly because they deal with humans too! In fact there are a lot of areas in which HR & KM complement each other. In fact one can correlate KM to various other functions as well, such as Innovation/R&D, Sales and few others, but maybe it is something I will try to cover in a follow-up post.

So why am I saying all of this? Is Enterprise2.0 / KM really a business function? It all stems from the fact that, in today’s technology-heavy world, we really need to be reminded that in the end we all still deal with humans in whichever context / business. And the next-gen enterprise will be able to be successful if it can really comprehend this human element and the social constructs that play a crucial role in our businesses. HR as a concept probably started back in 1970/80’s and as we know has evolved a long way to support the organizational objectives. Enterprise2.0 is a similar function that is taking shape; evolving rapidly and will provide benefits that traditional KM had set out to, but it will do it in a fresh avatar and with innovative means.

So if your business is on a journey to 2.0 and want to leverage all the 2.0 tools that companies are trying to sell, be prepared to invest time, effort and money (& a little management support too) in planning, formulating a strategy and executing all things prior and post-deployment, before you even start thinking about any tool.In fact, these thoughts could assist you in your tool selection too; since you’ll know that “one size fits all” is a myth. As I end this post (maybe cliché but) remember KM / Enterprise2.0 is NOT about the tool but about a concept, a philosophy, a set of practices, and more like a business function!

Nikhil Nulkar is a knowledge management consultant within Capgemini and is passionate about web2.0, specifically in enterprise2.0 & social media. Want to know what he is up to? Follow him on Twitter

Posted by Nikhil Nulkar on March 9, 2010

Weekly digest of week 9 2010

This week an explaination about what the difference is between ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, boomers slowly moving to the mobile web, should IT run like a business or a nonprofit and the next generation user interface: skinput.

• Socializing with the Fortune 500 A longitudinal study from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research shows steady uptake of social media marketing activities by Fortune 500 companies, with Twitter a clear winner.
• 5 Reasons Why Chatroulette Is Addictive, and Worth a Try Everyone from the mainstream media to celebrities is obsessing over Chatroulette, the website that randomly connects users through one-on-one videochat with strangers around the world. Why is it so addictive?
• Feature checklist dysfunction The tech press loves checklist comparisons. Let’s evaluate the iPhone to see whether it’s a good product:
• Defining ubiquitous computing vs. augmented reality What’s the difference between Ubiquitous Computing (“ubicomp”) and Augmented Reality (“AR”)?
• Boomers Slowly Warm to Mobile Web Baby boomers are on the verge of adopting smartphones and the mobile Internet, and in the vanguard of this movement are younger boomers.

Light reading:

• 8 Things Your Phone Will (Probably) Replace
• The Strategy Trap: Why focusing too much on strategy could be killing your ability to execute
• Forget Touchscreens, The Future’s Going To Be Skinput
• Should IT run “like a business” or “like a non-profit?
• 7 Social Media Behaviors That Won't Win You Customers

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 8, 2010

Why Facebook and not SharePoint 2010 could become your Intranet for 2010

With the arrival of SharePoint 2010 lots of new and interesting features arrive within most corporate firewalls. Old SharePoint licenses are renewed, new budgets are approved and new features are implemented. However is recreating your new Intranet with new features the best you can do? Should you be renewing your SharePoint license for new features in your Intranet?

Give it some thought, especially since you might already be considering to stop all developments for your Intranet. Every new feature seems to be challenged if it was worth the time, the money and the effort to thrive adoption. Why not use Facebook as your Intranet? It is likely that your colleagues are spending more time on Facebook than on your Intranet already and are having a better experience on Facebook than they ever did on the current Intranet.

Facebook is an immense Juggernaut with more than 400 million users (one out of every 4 people with access to an Internet connection has an account), billions of minutes are spend daily on Facebook and what is even better: your colleagues already adopted it, and even your business partners already have a presence on Facebook.  So why create something new, while you can build your Intranet on an existing platform that is fully adopted by your colleagues? Even better: you don’t have to pay for development nor for hosting, since Facebook is taking care of that. And if you are afraid to make the move towards Facebook as an Intranet, keep in mind that Serena Software already did it a long time ago, with the introduction of Facebook Fridays

So why wait? Create that Facebook group for your company and let your colleagues join. The interface is familiar, almost everybody has got his profile filled in fully and people are already visiting Facebook on a regular basis (unless you are blocking Internet access).

However keep in mind that Facebook is a public platform, and therefore it might not be the best for sharing confidential information, nor there is an app for the integration of your SAP HR system. If that holds you back to go full fledge into Facebook, just use your Facebook group as a portal to get your colleagues to the news on the Intranet (which could be based on SharePoint 2010).

Save money, thrive adoption. Not every successful solution has to start inside your firewall or should be custom build. Use the tools your colleagues already know, use the tools that they already selected as the tools they prefer to use.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 5, 2010

Weekly digest of week 8 2010

This week: what happens to your digital life when you are dead, is Second Life about to enter its second life, You vs My and what social media guidelines say about your company.

• Facebook comes under German law – The Local Since Facebook had opened an office in Hamburg on February 11, Schaar said that the company was now subject to Germany's strict data protection laws, the federal government official told broadcaster Deutschlandradio.
• 12 Undocumented Tricks for Google Buzz So. Google just recently announced Google Buzz. I’m not sure about you, but I didn’t see this coming. Sure, Google was bound to start a social network of some sort at some time; but, I didn’t think it’d be this soon!
• Your vs. My Pattern There are two schools of thought on this. The names of some popular sites hint at this dilemma: MyYahoo, MySpace, YouTube.
• New Study Shows 'Intent' Behind Mobile Internet Use According to a new survey announced today by Ruder Finn, one of the world's largest, independent public relations agencies, Americans are spending an average of 2.7 hours on the mobile Internet – connecting socially, managing their personal finances, and even as a means for advocacy.
• Scott Brown on Managing Your Digital Remains Hamlet, that lucky stiff, only had to worry about being or not being — what a nice, binary Denmark he lived in. We modern mopes, on the other hand, must consider not only our too, too solid flesh but also our online infinitude.

Light reading:

• Microsoft on Google Apps
• Is Second Life about to enter its “second life?”
• Social Technology Buyers Matrix: Broad vs Specialized vs Do It Yourself
• What social media guidelines say about your company
• The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 1, 2010

The Ninth Type Of Deadly Waste

Even with the troubles of product defects at Toyota, the Lean methodology derived from the Toyota Production System is still valid. The simple fact is that Toyota has strayed from their own path and ventured into the world of mass production ways of working. With disastrous effect. The plan that Mr Toyoda has presented basically comes down to a renewed, and more strict, focus on the customer and on quality. And even though many people still view Lean as only applicable to manufacturing, it still moves up in the world of services. And rightfully so.

One of the key features of Lean is eliminating Muda, or waste. The continuous improvement is aimed at finding waste in an organization and remove it. In literature and practice, seven types of deadly waste are identified (unnecessary transportation, excess inventory, unnecessary motion of employees, waiting, over production, over processing, rework), and structurally removed from operations. In some circles, an eighth type of waste is acknowledged, as being the underutilizing of human talent. I think we can identify and remove a ninth type of waste: excess use of resources.

For this ninth type of waste, you just have to look around you to find vivid examples. It ranges from excess use of energy by leaving machines or lights switched on when not necessary, extra long meetings with too many attendees who do not all need to be present, excess use of paper by printing everything you need to read. But the example I want to go into a bit deeper is more hidden, but is relatively easy to eliminate: excess use of data storage space.

Most of us are used to communicating with our colleagues through email. We send important documents, messages and requests by mail to the recipients, meanwhile copying our managers, co-workers and anybody else that we think should be interested. Every time we send an email, what we actually do is create a digital copy that consumes storage space. If it is a short message to one person, it might not seem that much. But just look at the last 25 mails you’ve sent. The average distribution list probably contains at least 4 people, the average message contains the complete mail chain, and 1 out of 4 messages probably contain an attachment. An example calculation of the direct storage space needed could be as follows:
- message size: 50 KB
- attachment size: 1 MB
- storage size needed: 5 times 1.05MB = 5.25 MB.
Then take into account that you probably send/receive about 20 messages like this per day, and just imagine that you work in a company with roughly 80.000 employees world wide. Factor in the datatraffic and backup storage costs, plus the energy used for all of this. I didn’t dare…

But how can we do this different? Imagine a world where we have as centrally hosted messaging platform. And next to that, a centrally hosted document repository. As a cherry on the cake, we also have a system that allows us to talk to eachother directly with information stored only in memory, unless we indicate we want to save the conversation. Doesn’t really sound futuristic, does it? This world exists, and is often referred to as Enterprise2.0. But whatever nametag you put on it: we don’t use it enough. There are platforms that allow centrally hosted group discussion within a closed network. Yammer is an example, but Lotus Connections is as well. And there are many other solutions like that. Next to that, most companies have a document repository at their disposal. Ranging from a shared network drive to fully open source knowledge management systems of the Drupal type. On top of that we have Office communicator, GoogleTalk, FacebookChat, Skype and many other instant messaging solutions, that often support voice over IP as well (say goodbye to a large chunk of your monthly phone bill).

So, in my last post on this platform, as I am leaving Capgemini with a small tear in my eye, I would like to call on you to think before you mail. Please consider to use that internal or external social media platform like Yammer or Twitter more, and centrally store your documents and just communicate links. Either through a microblogging platform or instant messaging. Eliminating the waste of excess resource usage can be so simple. Just do it!

Arjan Tupan is a Transformation Manager at Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or LinkedIn

Posted by Arjan Tupan on February 23, 2010

Weekly digest of week 7 2010

This week: smart people click less, introduction of the social connector in Microsoft Outlook, which is useful since social networkers love email and the BBC news boss is clear: use social media or find a new job.

• Film director says Southwest blogged away his privacy Smith, the director of such movies as "Clerks" and a man who made an appearance at last week's Macworld, was reportedly removed from a Southwest flight Saturday for being a hazard to its stability.
• Social Networkers Still Love E-Mail With reports of young people abandoning e-mail to communicate via social networks, Facebook developing its own full-featured Webmail system and predictions that in a few years even business users will have exchanged traditional e-mail for social sites, it would appear that the success of social networks was hurting e-mail usage.
• Welcome to the Site-less Web Posterous is a new service that radiates a person’s social media activity out to a network of community sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Delicious.
• In the Netherlands, 1 Gbps Broadband Will Soon Be Everywhere Google last week announced Google Fiber, an experimental fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network that the company plans to build and use to connect between 20,000 and 200,000 homes.
• Study: Ages of social network users How old is the average Twitter or Facebook user? What about all the other social network sites, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on?

Light reading:

• The iPad Is Step 1 In The Future Of Computing. This Is Step 2 (Or 3).
• BBC News boss gives staff some career advice: Use social media or find another job
• The Smarter You Are, The Less You Click
• Google Buzz Explodes the Myth of First Mover Advantage. Again
• Microsoft Outlook Is Starting To Look Like A Poor Man’s Xobni

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 22, 2010

Here have something you don't want

Imagine you are invited to a party of one of your best friends and your friend decided there should be a one-size-fits-all solution for the drinks: a Bloody Mary. Everybody who visits the party has to drink it, there is nothing else, not even plain water. Nobody asked you if you’d like it, even worse: the Bloody Mary was decided by the single person who is not at the party, since he managed to get a major discount on it.

If you have only one option, there isn't so much left choosing, is it? However most enterprises think this is the way to implement concepts such as Enterprise2.0. They choose one solution (without consulting the people who will have to use the solution) that is often presented as the solution to everything for everybody. Often the implementation of this one-size-fits-all-solution is top down, just pushing the solution as hard as possible. You can't blame them, since there will not be a groundswell, since nobody really wanted this solution, even worse, most often people are already using a complete other solution (shadow it) that better suits their need.

The weird thing is, that this approach is accepted in a lot of environments, a very few deciding for the majority without consulting at least a few representatives of this majority. As Lee Provoost wrote in his blog post about closing the gap between Enterprise2.0 and Social Media it is important to choose a user centered approach. A user centered approach (bottom-up)  is key in driving adoption together with a good and strong community management (top-down) tremendously raises the quality and success of your community as Lee mentions.

But keep in mind, even when you use an user centered approach, you should not be focusing on one-size-fits-all-solutions. Users are different and they often work in different parts of the enterprise. There’s a good chance that they have different needs, however this is not a license to have as many solutions as possible. Focus on solid solutions for (and with) the users and focus on integration and solutions such as a federated search.  A proper integration with the 'normal' process and other enterprise2.0 solutions, a federated search for your enterprise2.0 solutions and 'old' solutions and, don’t forget, your people are the glue to have a succesful adoption.

Providing choice and involving users will save you more money in implementing Enterprise2.0 concepts in your enterprise than choosing just one solution and trying to push it real hard.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 19, 2010

To search or to find? That is the question

There's more information on the Internet than one could apprehend in a hundred lifetimes, and it's growing too - and (most of the times) kept up-to-date. Different organisations, places and networks holding that information make it hard to get it all together, so how to make that information homogenous, and uniformly accessible?

Can it be done? Should it be done?

Over the last decade we went from data to knowledge.The World Wide Web has linked companies and consumers in the last decade. This inspired the more shy organisations to build intranets, where only company people would find each other
That was about linking data: the same things could be done in a new way
Then web shops came. Forums. Peer to peer networks for sharing ever legal and not so legal delight. All that came and became mainstream so fast that the inter-intra move didn't even have time to "happen".
That was about connecting, and information: more or less new things were done in new ways
In the last few years, social networks conquered the digital earth: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Such a different kind of behaviour, it was absolutely new. It was using the infrastructure already laid out (computers, networks and people using those) to build upon.
That was about sharing information, acquiring knowledge: entirely new means to an entirely new end.

Meanwhile, WikiPedia was born. An unprecedented source of information with more than 14,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages.
Stats in monthly unique visitors for all that: LinkedIn 15 million, Facebook 130 million, Twitter 55 million, WikiPedia 60 million.
That's a lot of data, information and knowledge. And it's all out there. Wait, where?

Yes, it's all out there, pretty much. Google helps us in finding it, almost real-time. We've seen some struggles with Facebook that treated their data as a walled garden, but they're slowly opening up too. With Google starting to index books, video and other content, all knowledge in the world starts to become available online and realtime.
But it is scattered all over the place, in different forms, behind different doors: not uniform or homogenous. It's very diverse

The Integration theme: overcoming diversity

Integrating applications, departments and companies has shown this same theme over the last decades: diversity in form, location and accessibility has to be overcome.
The European Parliament shows how that can be done: introduce an intermediate language (or two, in that case), support different communication channels, and facilitate-by-translation.
That works very well for all: the focus and attention remains on the "stars" themselves, the highly specialised participants. Like business shouldn't be bothered with IT, they aren't bothered by the linguistical barriers and can just move in and out.

There's a big precondition to all that though, which is that the semantics are agreed upon beforehand. In the European Parliament somehow magically, changing semantics are picked up by all parties involved. Now how does all this work in the World Wide Web?

The first WWW problem: different format
Structured versus unstructured versus semi-structured. HTML, text, .doc, .PDF, Facebook updates, Tweets, it's all different. However, search engines make all of that transparent. After all, there are only so many syntaxes around. Of course, visuals like video and images are an entirely different topic, but even those are magically informated by Google
The second WWW problem: different location
Is it on the web, or behind a company firewall? Does it need authorisation? Only what is openly available can be searched. And it doesn't matter whether it is located north, east, south, west, or orbiting around earth. Search engines make all of that transparent too
The third WWW problem: different languages, dialects and typos
It still takes too many rules to perfectly translate a language to another one. English is widely present though, and there are as many typos and spelling errors made by native speakers as by foreigners. All that has to be taken into account as well. Luckily most search engines do. They suggest correct spelling if you search something and misspell it. They'll even include misspelt search results

The real WWW problem: different semantics

The biggest problem is (changing) semantics. Wikipedia spends pages and pages on disambiguation explaining the differences between one word or acronym, and the other. The word web, for instance, can have entirely different meanings in different contexts. Even if, across all different forms, locations and languages, you are looking for the word web, what is the context you want to place it in? Heck, you might not even know that yourself...
The best example of how vivid a semantic discussion can be is the initial discussion around  E2.0 and Social Business Design

The possible solution: autonomous tagging

Tagging is a way of labelling a piece of information with a single word or phrase. Tags are decided upon individually by humans, in relative isolation. There is no central, global tagging system where one can pick their tags from. Although tags now also are a form of language or at least communication. If information were to be tagged, these tags could be translated or related, and form connections across all diversities.

What if there were a tag knowledgebase much like today's Wikipedia? Where tags are maintained, explained, etcetera? This would be the ultimate source of metadata, making it possible for the Single Source of Search to be conducted. Its interface could be defined and plugged into, and it would be the single source of truth for the Semantic Web
Bots could crawl the entire Web tagging information whether it's HTML, PDF, Video or images or whatsoever

In my last post I explained about the position and quality of humans versus machines. This very complex and dynamic terrain is definitely something that needs to be explored and maintained by humans first. When that's succesful, we might be able to automate that, and skip to the next level: wisdom

Thanks to Paolo Saitti for asking a few nasty questions and giving a few nasty answers at the same time; here they are:

Tagging however will require certain semantical and cultural alignment. The level of knowledge also dictates the detailedness of search. SQL Server is too generic if you want to find something about SQL Server 2008 Service Broker - but you need that level of knowledge to be able to know the difference!
At the basis, agreed semantics are needed. Human beings simply call it a dictionary. The traditional dictionary experience is quite enlightening: new words spring up from informal usage, often from jargon language. This is the dynamic and "democratic" evolution of natural languages. As they become (very) common, the compilers of the dictionaries decide to include the new terms in the "official" language. Here an upper authority is required to provide a formal unambiguous definition for the new word.
Distributed, informal, continously evolving tagging (a bottom-up process) is enough for human interactions. On the other hand we'll need a formal, robust and agreed tagging dictionary with a consistent effort to develop and maintain it (a top-down process) in order to build semantic applications exploiting contents over the web.

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can find him on Twitter. Paolo Saitti is Enterprise Software Engineer within Capgemini. You can find him on Twitter

Posted by Martijn Linssen on February 16, 2010

Weekly digest of week 6 2010

In this week’s digest: There is a new younger generation: the iGeneration, schools shouldn’t block social network sites, we all know benefits of SaaS, but are there more benefits than just more low costs. And if you have been buzzing about Google Buzz, take a look at the special edition of the weekly digest about Google Buzz.

• Schools shouldn't block social network sites Why schools should stop blocking social network sites.
• The Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 Experience Continuum Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 efforts need to work in conjunction with one another and that’s what this whole post is about.
• Lurking: a Challenge or a Fruitful Strategy? This study investigates interpersonal, procedural, and technological knowledge sharing barriers.
• Tech-savvy 'iGeneration' kids multi-task, connect Move over, Millennials. You're not the younger generation anymore.
• Cloud Security Using… Social Networks? I've always been drawn to the more forgivably human downsides to the whole SaaS/Cloud concept like this one: How on earth do you prevent password sharing?

Light reading:

• Augmented Reality Coming to Video Conferencing
• Top 3 Business Benefits of (internal) Enterprise 2.0
• Information Management loves Enterprise 2.0
• Cascaad Taps Social Graph for Tailored News
• The benefits of SaaS (beyond low cost)

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 15, 2010

Weekly digest of week 6 2010 (Google Buzz special)

This week a lot of  buzz around Google Buzz. Since there was so much buzz around this product, I create a separate weekly digest about Google Buzz. It seems that you either love this product, or you hate it according to the posts in this digest.

• Thoughts On Buzz Buzz is Google's finest implementation of "social" to date. It is a given in the web/tech circles that "google doesn't get social". So maybe the most important thing about Buzz is that it puts that idea to rest.
• Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0 Google wants the best of the best data. Remember this. They are a data company. They are a data quality company. They are algorithmic in their approaches to solving problems.
• Why did you subscribe me to my landlord on buzz? – Gmail Help You automatically subscribed me to my landlord through Buzz. I can only assume that means he was automatically subscribed to me. You shouldn't do this
• Wrong kind of buzz around Google Buzz The launch of GoogleBuzz has set various parts of the technology blogosphere afire — and for all the right reasons: it does introduce a number of interesting social features that could make our email experience much more social (whether it has to be more social is a different question).
• The Negative Buzz Around Google’s New Social Network Google’s new social networking service, Buzz, has been live for just two days. But it is already drawing fire for what some are describing as a “huge privacy flaw.”

Light reading:

• First impressions of Google Buzz: Smart, useful, long road ahead
• Google Buzz: Is it Project, Product or Platform?
• Google Buzz: Forget Twitter, Microsoft's SharePoint is a bigger target
• Stop Google Buzz From Showing the World Your Contacts
• Microsoft Slams Google Buzz

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 13, 2010

Making flowers bloom

People like to group things, I don't know exactly why, but it seems that it helps us to cope with information. This is in real life, but might occur even more online (you can call this ‘digital packratting’). Most platforms I know, and that are used within enterprises, offer the feature to create groups to put content (discussion, bookmarks, files, etc) in. When introducing these kind of platforms without proper community management I often see two general approaches for groups that are both recipes for failure:

1. 'We know what is good for you'; In this approach an enterprise defines groups upfront. There is no option to create a new group. However one could file a request for creating a new group although new groups are often not created.
2. 'Go ahead, create some groups'; In this approach the users can create any group they want. However there is often nobody who takes into account if groups are duplicated or not used after creation.

In the first approach the users will end up with groups they don't want and need, in the second approach there are so many groups that users will become clueless if there is any group that is already fulfilling their needs and wants. It might be clear that there is need for a different approach than the first two.

A right way

The first two approaches are often the result of not appointing a leader for the platform, you could call him either a community manager, a chief blogger, a patron, a gate keeper or whatever nice role name you'd prefer. Most important is that there is somebody (or several persons) that cares about the platform and its purpose and who is able to guide people in using the platform, while letting users do what they want . He should be helping people in whatever they want to do on the platform, He prevents the cluttering of content due to users creating too many groups (which is quite arbitrary though), he helps people to discover content and people they weren't aware of at first.

Groups are always a potential problem

..and every problem is an opportunity in disguise. When you let users create groups (or others buckets in which they could put content), think upfront what the desired outcome may be. Even more important is to think of what you should do if somebody creates a group that is either duplicate or which isn't viable after a few weeks. What will you tell this user, without offending the user who created this group? The person who created the group seems to think that there is a need for it, so how can the community manager help him? What will you do when somebody creates a group which is very active but about a topic you'd rather not see people talking about (for example about the enormous bonus of your manager...)?

Preparation is key

As you might have noticed preparation is key, just installing a new platform and promoting is a starting point, however most often not the most successful one. You need somebody who takes care of the platform, just like a gardener takes care of a big park. The gardener can help to prevent that things are becoming a mess in the garden, however he can not force a rose to bloom. With the right tools and enough time the one thing he can do is to create the right circumstances to give the rose the opportunity to bloom and that is exactly the thing a community should do: just creating the right circumstances for others to participate and to give the best of themselves.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 12, 2010

Weekly digest of week 5 2010

This week the big news that you can play Tetris on your TV, a demonstration of 3D with CSS, subscriptions are becoming more and more important and social search is about mobile and not about Google.

• Subscriptions are the New BLACK. (+ why Facebook, Google, & Apple will own your wallet by 2015) - The key to success in payment systems is to begin with the foundation of frequent-use products, so that users won't forget their passwords. Whether intentional or not, Facebook has played this game to perfection.
• Pure CSS Coke Can (3D) By a combination of the CSS1 properties background-attachment and background-position, 2D displacement maps could be created and, by scrolling, the displacement map would be applied to different parts of the texture (a background image).
• Now you can play Tetris on your TV Game company Oberon Media has somehow found something in common with both the Tetris Company and the Dish Network.
• Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond “Success in social software and collaboration will be characterized by a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and the business”
• Enterprise 2.0 Adoption – Strategic and Tactical Considerations No conversation about Enterprise 2.0 proceeds very far without coming to the idea of Return on Investment (ROI).

Light reading:

• iPad vs Flash: Developers Choose Wisely
• Why You Should Be Afraid Of Internet Censorship in Australia, Even If You Don’t Live There
• Now more than ever, employers and HR pros are digging into your web presence.
• Innovation Teams Lack Data, Structure
• Forget Google, social search is all about mobile

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 8, 2010

Afterall Social Media is about... being Social

Recently I came across Social Media #FAIL Indian Software Companies from the NASSCOM India Leadership Blog and once again it’s highlighting an extremely important aspect of Social Media – of being social. Of course the article was focusing on the Indian market scenario particularly around Indian IT industry, but having said that, I think we can safely assume that we have seen a similar pattern across industries and geographies.

With the advent of a host of social media sites and the topic shooting to popularity, most people and organizations seem to feel that by having, just a presence on social media sites, one can sit back and reap its benefits. When in reality just by creating a twitter profile or searching for candidate profiles on LinkedIn may not bring them the returns on social technologies. It surely is the first step in the right direction, but assuming that one could see startling results with just that, will be foolish. As we say 'What goes around comes around' - expect very little returns (or responses) from the social technologies if you are not willing to share or participate. It’s time we realize social media is about being social – contribution, conversation, interaction, engagement (and the likes) with your employees, customers, or partners is what will bring benefits and remember the social technologies are only the enablers!

Another point the above article also brings out (and I am glad) is that, it’s not about using the most "hyped" social media site and more so - one size definitely doesn't fit all. Each tool has a specific objective of existence and though they seem user-friendly & popular, understanding their application in real-life business scenarios is equally difficult & important. There is a lot that goes into, before one starts implementing and using these tools. It really isn't another dot-com-bubble-kinds (that will go bust) that we are seeing so many strategy/consulting firms trying to help organizations in understanding how they can leverage from social media. Basics like knowing your pain-points, finding the best fit solution and customizing it to solve your real-life problem is the real deal. We really need to have a methodology / framework that will help in solving the business issues using social technologies, be it internal employee collaboration, interacting with customers or maintaining relationship with business partners. We all know this is still a fairly new playground for most of us (consulting firms & their prospective clients) and that makes it all the more important to have the fundamentals set right because each of us have a role to play. This just re-emphasizes the huge potential and opportunity for social business consulting & strategy practice and particularly the need for a formal approach and framework guiding social business engagements has, in today's world.

So, in conclusion - we just have to get social, in the real sense!

Nikhil Nulkar is a knowledge management consultant within Capgemini and is passionate about web2.0, specifically in enterprise2.0 & social media. Want to know what he is up to? Follow him on Twitter

Posted by Nikhil Nulkar on February 4, 2010

Weekly digest of week 4 2010

This week in the weekly digest: is Google twisting the knife in IE6, what about Constellation (SAP’s answer to Google Wave), and what about HTML5 and video what are the consequences of this? And were you aware that we spend more than 82% more time on social media than we did last year?

• Defining Enterprise 2.0
  Is the technology freeform, frictionless and emergent?
• Social circle and content – Google
  This is the network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results.
• Constellation – SAP’s Answer to Google Wave
  Constellation is SAP’s contribution to the trend known as collaboration software which attempts to transport the advantages of the Web 2.0 into the enterprise environment.
• Led by Facebook, Twitter, Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year | Nielsen Wire
  According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase.
• HTML5 video and codecs
  Recently, Vimeo and YouTube announced that they were moving to support the HTML5 video tag, as DailyMotion did last summer.

Light reading:

• In the Future We’ll All Have Online Reputation Scores
• 7 Reasons Why Developers are Deserting iPhone Apps
• Social Media Upends Super Bowl Advertising Standards
• Facebook Largest Social Network, Twitter Fastest-Growing On The Mobile Web
• Google Twists Knife In IE6, Pulls Support From Docs And Sites

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 1, 2010

Cloud and Social: the tectonic plates of IT 2.0

We're on the verge of a new era in IT. Web 2.0, E2.0, SOA 2.0: anything 2.0, which I combinedly call IT 2.0

My first IT experiences dating back 25 years, I've noticed that it basically provides humans with machines. Or more accurately, human tasks are slowly replaced by machine tasks where possible

It takes time to turn human tasks into machine tasks, so basically they shouldn't change while being built. They also shouldn't change much after being built. That's why building houses on sand was considered foolish millennia ago already.
It's almost exactly like portrait painting. It's a lot easier doing that when the model sits still, and when done the result looks much more alike if the model doesn't change too much after that

Knowing the how, now the question is: which human tasks can be replaced by machines, or automated?

The closer you come to business, the more humans you'll need. The further you move away from business, the more machines you can use. Basically, business needs people, and machine needs infrastructure

That puts humans on top in the IT foodchain, and machines at the bottom. Although arguably both depend on one another and couldn't live without...

Having said that, there are lots of different properties for humans and machines. Here's a quick model:

Machines serve automation. They are (and must be) rigid, because what runs directly on top is simple and static: great for storing business rules, they handle data very well. They sit in the infrastructure layer
Humans serve people. They are (and must be) flexible, because what they support is complex and dynamic: great for handling business exceptions, they handle information very well. They are part of the business layer

If you compare that to the latest trends, machines perfectly translate to Cloud, and humans to Social

IaaS, Paas and Saas all perfectly fit into the infrastructure layer mentioned above thanks to virtualisation and Utility Computing.
What can be xaaS-ed will be done so in the coming years, and albeit a relatively small slice of the enterprise layer, a large part of its current infrastructure will simply move into the cloud.
And in the years after that, a larger part of the enterprise will become infrastructure, and follow along: Invisible Infostructure is becoming an ever-increasing fact
The enterprise will become more standardised and simple at the bottom, and shrink

Social is 100% people-stuff and fits perfectly into the business layer. Communication (Blogs, Microblogging, Social networking) and Collaboration (Wikis, Social bookmarking, Social news) are tools that need to be plugged into the enterprise. Tools will come and go, be added onto, expanded, shrunk, and the people using them will move along. Process-on-the-fly is here to stay
Organisationally, culturally, politically a lot will change and it will keep changing before more than half of that becomes absorbed by the enterprise, and settles down.
The enterprise will become more complex at the top, and expand

Sketching the future, one can see the structure of IT 2.0 being sandwiched: at the bottom, the floor of the building will slowly be Clouded, while at the same time its ceiling will be Socialised. Two giant movements in opposite directions, much like tectonic plates operate on this earth's crust

Where will the twain meet? What will be there? Will that be crushed, or torn apart?
What will the consequences be for Enterprise IT as we know it, but especially for the future we have in mind for it: E2.0, SOA 2.0, SocialCRM?

I'm looking forward to your answers and ideas! I do foresee quite a challenge

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can find him at martijnlinssen.com

Posted by Martijn Linssen on January 31, 2010

If you are not in Google, you don't exist

What will happen if you don't popup in search engine results in about five years? When you’re a consultant, will you still be hired by a company, or will the company have an immediate lack of trust since you are not in the result set, so you might have something to hide. Will you, when you need a loan at a bank, don't get this loan because you aren't traceable online?

Is not having an identity online or leaving traces online the biggest mistake you can make? Privacy matters, not having any presence online could be great for your privacy, however it could be a disaster for the way other people will see you. What if you are not findable in a search engine, than you have done a good job protecting your privacy (nobody sees any data related to you), however you did a poor job at making sure people are able to get to know you. They might even think that you are hiding something, since it seems you don't have a(n online) history.

The Russians knew that Pravda contained state propaganda so they used other sources to get to the bottom of some news. We all know that resumes are also just propaganda, telling the best things about a specific person that are suitable for a specific job. People like to verify that, they want to know more than just the standard lines on a resume. No they don't need to know your social security number, so you don't have to put that online. However they want to know who you are and what you really did. And these might be the same things as you mention in a resume, however people like to check it at a source that is independent (from their perspective). And with everything searchable nowadays, it gives us a weird feeling when you don't show up in the search results. Somebody who isn't findable has something to hide, or could be a secret agent or isn't even a real person.

Leave some digital footprint, make yourself findable, you might need it in the near future when you want to use a service or need a job.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on January 29, 2010

Weekly digest of week 3 2010

This week a fresh collection of ten links about: Social networks breaking security rules, Facebooks knows more about you could imagine. Second Life’s economy has not a real recession and a very important new celeb on Twitter: Alf (okay and Bill Gates joined Twitter as well).

• Heading for Social Disaster
  The rapid growth of these sites and networks is impressive. However, in their pursuit of extending the user base, many social sites break a very important rule of security.
• Picture-driven computing
  New research could enable computer programming based on screen shots, not just code
• 5 Scary Things That Facebook Knows About You
  Amidst the privacy policy debacle that Facebook is facing, another tip off from one of their employee is definitely not helping their current situation. They know who you are stalking and when you do it; this information is stored permanently.
• 20 Fresh JavaScript Data Visualization Libraries
  There are plenty of JavaScript libraries out there for rendering your otherwise plain and boring numerical data into beautiful, interactive, and informative visualizations.
• Second Life’s economy grows 65% to $567M
  Virtual worlds no longer shine as they once did, but Linden Lab, the owner of the Second Life 3-D online virtual world, says that its virtual economy has never been bigger.

Light reading:

• Alf is on Twitter… And He’s Only Following Cats!
• How can we prevent a Social CRM bubble? Lessons from the boom and bust of CRM
• Report: Skype Now Accounts For 12% Of All International Calling Minutes
• Gordon - An open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript lets you use Flash on your iPhone
• Avatars in the Workplace

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on January 25, 2010

Is your community a restaurant or supermarket?

Before you start a community, think of its audience and think of its purpose. It is like starting a location to provide people with something to eat: are you building a restaurant or a supermarket? Both facilitate the option of providing something to eat, however they do it in very different ways. The same goes for communities: some are just supermarkets and some are restaurants.

A restaurant is a place where people most often spend time, not only to eat, but also to have a good time. Visitors of a restaurant are often known by name, especially when they reserved a table. To manage a restaurant properly you'll have to focus on ensuring that people are having a good time: they should have a good experience. People don't mind to pay for a visit, especially when they already know they will have a good experience. Sometimes eating even becomes secondary to the good experience.

On the other hand, people don't go to a supermarket for a good experience, nor will they spend hours on end in it. Most often people won't sit down in a supermarket, most supermarkets won't even offer a place to sit down. One of the reasons that people go to a supermarket is to get out of it as soon as possible with their groceries. Task-completion is key.

When you are the facilitator of a comunity in which people pop-in regurlarly to get their knowledge or to get the things they need, do not manage it like a restaurant. People will get annoyed, since they don't want to stay for hours, they just want task completion. The same goes the other way around: if you manage a community focussing on task completion, while people would rather have a chat with their friends or colleagues, they will easily get the feeling that they are not welcome.

Be aware of what kind of community you are managing. It doesn't matter if it is a restaurant like or a supermarket like community. Both models add a lot of value to its members as long as you manage it the right way.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on January 22, 2010

Weekly digest of week 2 2010

This week information about a more readable Javascript syntax, Google threatening to shutdown their operations in China. Microsoft has a plan to save Windows Mobile (again?) and it has just become easier to find experts on Twitter.

• Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both (free ebook download) Scrum and Kanban are two flavours of Agile software development – two deceptively simple but surprisingly powerful approaches to software development. So how do they relate to each other?
• Assessing Google's showdown with China: Does it make sense? On the surface, Google’s threat to shut down its China operations after a cyberattack on its infrastructure looks like sheer business lunacy. How can the search giant give up on the world’s biggest growth market? It’s easier than you’d think.
• Web Site User Experience Anatomy – Applying Psychology to Understand How People Think, Work, and Relate Just like human anatomy, the anatomy of a web site is composed of different user experience parts that must all work together seamlessly.
• A More Readable (Pythonic) Javascript Syntax? While I’ve come to love Javascript, I miss the syntactic beauty of Python. The stark modern minimalism of the language causes the meaning of code to float on the syntax like a feather on water.
• Marketers: Grok Up on Structured Data Search engines are on board with the slow but steady march to leverage structured data in delivering query results. Are marketing departments across industries marshalling their resources to take advantage of all the opportunities that are enabled by structuring data?

Light reading:

• Finding Experts on Twitter Just Got Easy with Twendly
• Microsoft's Plan to Save Windows Mobile
• 7 Social Media Roles You Haven’t Considered
• Social Media and Mobile Texting a Major Source of Info and Aid for Earthquake in Haiti
• Businesses Need to Formalize Their Social Media Policies

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on January 18, 2010

Social integration: I = (NC)2

Social media integration is getting bigger and better these days.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, they're all interconnected somehow
From within Twitter, for example, you can update other social networks by using socalled hashtags. For instance, #fb will trigger Facebook, #in will update LinkedIn, and #yam will go into Yammer

The other day I saw a Tweet from @armano who was updating Twitter and LinkedIn at the same time: "Want to join Edelman?". A very clever move actually, as David was letting know his 23+K Twitter followers as well as his 500+ LinkedIn connections at the same time that his new company is looking for new people
(It was Michael Krempasky who started the tweet, but David was the first to spread it to LinkedIn simultaneously)

His Tweet was seen. And retweeted. With the #in hashtag in most cases, causing the people who did that, to update their own LinkedIn status at the same time
Tweetreach is a fantastic tool to see the impression a certain tweet made. Here's this particular tweet's reach: 94,355 people via 50 tweets. Which is awesome of course! But not counting the LinkedIn or Facebook reach...
8 People retweeted David's tweet with the #in hashtag, one decided to even change it to the Facebook #fb hashtag, making that 2 in total. Jeff Shuey, Mark Evertz and Sameer Patel are good for way over a thousand connections on LinkedIn together. Given the relatively static aspect of LinkedIn updates, this message might still be on their LinkedIn status, making it impossible to know how many people got -and still will get- this message in the very, very end.

This is what I call I = NC². Influence = (Networks * Constituents)²

In a social network, the more value you add, the more people willingly and actively connect to you. The more people connected to you, the more influence you have. If you are in multiple networks, the same principle applies there.
But thanks to integration, a single effort on one network will lead to multiple others on other networks. And every single one of those might do the same. Einstein would be amazed, and very pleased.

Note: this people-influence correlation was perceived by others, and at some point cause and effect, means and goal, were swapped. Tweeps started collecting connections aka the numbers game to become as valued as their idols. This is frowned upon, at least by me. A connections collector will look impressive on the outside, but be hollow and shallow on the inside. People will find out, and they will end up #failing

I call it the botox of social media: pumping up yourself will cost and impact you dearly, and not last very long
And beware: initially a lot cheaper than plastic surgery IRL, it will brand people forever as a smore. And cost more than a fortune in the end

With the current integration of social media networks, Peter Dizikes might have to rewrite his article on the butterfly effect
One tweet might very well reach -and -influence- hundreds of millions of people within a matter of seconds...
And, very soon, we'll have to deal with the Reply-to-All effect as networks are becoming mutually connected: LinkedIn connecting back to Twitter is already a fact, and others will quickly follow

Beware the global social out-of-office auto-reply-to-all!

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect and Cloudbuster within Capgemini. You can find him at martijnlinssen.com

Posted by Martijn Linssen on January 12, 2010

Weekly digest of week 1 2010

This week live tracking of flights on Google Maps, the browser becoming a first class RIA citizen, four ways for augmented reality to get past the hype and a strong statement about embracing the Web: if you don’t embrace the Web, it shows you don’t care.

• Three Enterprise 2.0 Themes to Watch in 2010
  Enterprise 2.0 continued its growth and maturation in 2009 and based on what can be gleaned from vendors, more enterprises are deploying social software.
• Inside HTML5: The Browser becomes a first class RIA citizen
  Over the last decade HTML has been trying to be a better RIA solution. First came CSS, then came AJAX and Web 2.0; but, it is not until now with the rapid adoption of HTML5 that the lines are blurring between Adobe Flash, Microsoft SilverLight, and HTML.
• If You Don't Embrace The Web, It Shows You Don't Care
  The next generation (and every generation thereafter) will spend a majority of their time using web-powered media compared to other media. If other forms of media even continue to exist.
• Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do – Smashing Magazine
  Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation.
• How Google collects data about you and the Internet
  Google has, perhaps more than any other company, realized that information is power. Information about the Internet, information about innumerable trends, and information about its users, YOU. So how much does Google know about you and your online habits?

Light reading:

• Live Flight Tracking on Google Maps
• Hey, Apple, Wake Up -- It's Happening Again
• UnGoogled: A Week of Discovering Alternatives For Google’s Services
• 4 Ways for Augmented Reality to Get Past the Hype
• Updated: 10 principles for Enterprise 2.0 implementations

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on January 11, 2010

Playing Together is Sharing Together (Part 1)

How to mix Business Intelligence and Social Media to enable decision making

Children are constantly learning. First they crawl than they learn how to walk. And the same happens with playing. At first they start out doing this alone and they find it difficult to share toys with others. They want to keep those fun things themselves. But in time the children learn that playing together is more fun. And that playing together also means that you have to share your toys with others. This increases the fun and before you know it you have a new best friend. We have an expression in the Netherlands which goes like this: “Playing together is sharing together”. This Dutch rime helps children share their toys with other children while playing. As an adult the world looks pretty much the same. We also find it difficult to share our toys, let alone enterprise data or corporate analyses. However sharing can create enormous advantages and will increase your Return-On-Information. In this article we look at the role of corporate information (or business intelligence) and how social networks (or internet social media like twitter) can help decision making. Perhaps in the near future a manager will publish his or hers corporate data on the net with a $50 reward for the person that comes up with the best solution.

Read more

Posted by Jorgen Heizenberg on January 4, 2010

Weekly digest of week 53 2009 / 2010

A happy 2010 for you all! This week an ode to web 2009, should employers ban Facebook (I think they shouldn’t), is the de-latinisation of the web a bad thing and some practical advice for 2010 on 2.0 adoption.

• Inside India's CAPTCHA solving economy
  No CAPTCHA can survive a human that’s receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-waged India CAPTCHA breakers human.
• Ode to web 2009
  Web 3.0 is all about recommendations, free services, intelligent (semantic) searches, and information that’s no longer random data, but tailored, highly intuitive and delivered in real time.
• 2010: Community vs. Ideas. Relationships vs. Causes
  An idea can spring you into motion. A community provides support but does not imply neither intrinsic value nor deep knowledge.
• de-latinisation of the web (a bad thing?)
  Unwise decision by ICANN? Non-latin domain names lead to name collisions, phishing opportunities
• Should Employers Ban Facebook? New Report Suggests Annual Productivity Loss Costs Billions
  While Facebook generates less than a billion a year in revenue, it’s impressive just how much use of the service costs employers each year.

Light reading:

• Top 7 Disruptions of the Year
• Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
• Practical Advice for 2010 on 2.0 Adoption
• Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide
• The Top 5 Web Technologies of the Decade

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on January 4, 2010

Weekly digest of week 52 2009

In the last digest of 2009: A look ahead in 2010 on browser trends, flexible packages, technology trends and the Groundswell. The Economist is getting social, Napster was a good thing for the music industry and Enterprise Microblogging has more practical use than Twitter.

• Making The Economist social
  The Economist newspaper plans to acquire 500,000 fans on Facebook and 750,000 followers on Twitter within six months, says the FT, calling it another sign that traditional publishers are looking to social media as a substantial source of web traffic and new readers
• 10 Cloud and SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010
  Keep In Mind Basic Rules Still Apply Regardless Of Deployment Option
• Napster: The File-Sharing Service That Started It All?
  Unfortunately, Garland doesn't think iTunes or streaming services like Pandora will save the music industry. He says that a decade from now, industry executives may be longing for the days of Napster — when they could blame piracy for all of their problems.
• Why Enterprise Microblogging Has More Practical Use for Everyday People Than Twitter
  Microblogging, integrated with other social software, will be more useful for the general populace as a technology at work than it ever will in their consumer life.
• The Decade in Design
  Ten years of Apple, starchitects, and design for change.

Light reading:

• Exciting web browser trends in 2010
• 2010 the year of flexible packages
• Predictions for the Groundswell in 2010 — Twitter gets serious or gets bought
• Forbes: A Year In Review: 2009 Social Marketing Trends
• Five technology trends to watch in 2010

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on December 28, 2009

In 2010, Twitter will be the pulse of the planet

It's the end of year, a time of looking back, and ahead. A fun time to make predictions, and look back at predictions made earlier - although that usually is much less fun

I predict that:

• everyone will have a Twitter account in 2010


• Every company will also have one, and use it too


• There will be Twitter boards in public places, public ones as well as private ones, some of which will be censored to a degree, much like the delay already present on US radio- and TV shows


• The private Tweet boards will also monitor Foursquare and BrightKite in order to see what the world is thinking about that particular place

Companies will have a Twitter identity just as they are supposed to have websites

• Companies will actually buy back Twitter identities already claimed just like they bought back URL's 10 years ago

Doing so, companies can prevent public outrage like this weekend's Channel tunnel drama
The real disaster there was not knowing anything. It took Eurostar on Twitter 20 hours to respond, and that amount of Tweets is still almost nothing compared to the buzz going on

• A business case for Social Business Design? Not needed

Given the fact that the initial investment is almost zero, and the fact that an online presence is a requirement already. You do need a plan though, as for everything. And don't try to push old marketing failures down this new channel

Of course the effect of all that will be measured. No better way to visualise, than a great visualisation I say

• I predict Mentionmap and Where Do You Go to become great tools for 2010 and onwards

With all that, and even without some:

• Twitter will become the source of news
• Either making it, or spreading it like crazy
• Old-fashioned news networks will take a beating from this
• And if they move in the opposite direction, they might not even survive

I wish you all a great new year!

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can follow him via Twitter or join him on LinkedIn

Posted by Martijn Linssen on December 21, 2009

Weekly digest of week 51 2009

This week about the impact of social computing on public services, and the EU information society and economy, amazing mashups thanks to the BBC, cheap webcams being turned in an instant 3D scanner and iPhone users are delusional.

• iPhone users are delusional, consultants say
  Many people I know are frightfully attached to their iPhones. They treat them as if they were a peculiar and exotic lover, one they can hardly believe they have managed to seduce.
• The three clicks myth
  When designing intranets or websites, it is helpful to have some rules of thumb to follow when making decisions…
• Public Services 2.0: The Impact of Social Computing on Public Services
  The report gives an overview of the main trends of Social Computing, in the wider context of an evolving public sector, and in relation to relevant government trends and normative policy visions within and across EU Member States on future public services.
• The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy
  This report provides a systematic empirical assessment of the creation, use and adoption of specific social computing applications and its impact on industry, personal identity, learning, social inclusion, healthcare and public health, and government services and public governance.
• Social Media in India Wiki
  The Social Media in India wiki is a resource created by 2020 Social to help Indian business executives and practitioners adopt social technologies to achieve business objectives.

Light reading:

• The Right and Left Brains of Enterprise 2.0
  
• Amazing stop motion video mashup - thanks to the BBC
  
• Stop Giving Your Customers Too Many Choices — They Don’t Want Them!
  
• Report: The Most Active Online Are The Most Educated
  
• Amazing Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3D Scanner
  

Posted by Rick Mans on December 21, 2009

Weekly digest of week 50 2009

This week John Cleese with interesting insights on how he puts his mind to work while he sleeps, Americans consuming 34 Gigabytes per day, a study of 600.000 Facebook fan pages and Google showing us the future..

• 12 Adoption Strategies for Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 in 2010
  The signs are pointing to next year being a banner one when it comes to mainstream adoption of the latest digital business models.
• The Evolution of A New Trust Economy
  Social Media is rooted in relationships, the dynamic interaction and collaboration between real people. We learned and continue to learn how to communicate in public forums, evolving our personal views on privacy and uncertainty as we transform from digital introverts to social extroverts.
• A study of 600,000 Facebook fan pages
  Sysomos analyzed nearly 600,000 Facebook Pages to investigate usage patterns. This is the first large-scale study of Facebook Pages, reporting on different aspects of pages including popularity, amount of content posted, number of fans, and categories.
• Study: Americans Consume 34 Gigabytes of Information Per Day
  The report says that Americans consume information for an average of 12 hours per day. And this may be a dagger through some of your hearts, but “old media” (TV and radio) make up 60 percent of all consumed hours.
• Text Messages: Digital Lipstick on the Collar
  There is a question that has crossed the mind recently of anyone who has sent a cellphone text message while cheating on a spouse: What was I thinking?

Light reading:

• Hyperlocal Goes Mainstream: CNN teams up with Outside.in
• Google Shows Us The Future
• John Cleese: Put your mind to work while you sleep
• So what is metadata, anyway?
• Jacob Innovations Designs First Class Comfort for Economy and Business Class

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on December 14, 2009

Weekly digest of week 49 2009

This week insight on how HTML5 will change the way you use the web, Google offering DNS services, Open APIs and Reputation-based security.

• What Does it Mean to “Buy” an E-book?
  About what one actually purchases when one buys and e-book. The same, of course, applies to mp3s and any other property which can be reproduced by a third party at very low (often no) marginal costs.
• 35 social media KPIs to help measure engagement
  Social media measurement is something that I think should be undertaken with a sense of perspective, by standing back and looking at the big picture.
• Guaranteed Audience Buys: What's Promised Isn't Always What's Delivered
  One of the promises of the Internet is the ability to target an exact individual. After all, unlike radio or TV, where messages are simultaneously broadcast to a broad audience, online advertising is served one impression at a time.
• Reputation-based security – the next step
  The Information Communication Technology (ICT) security threat landscape has gone through significant changes in the last few years, which in turn have altered the distribution profile for new malware. In stark contrast to the past, where typically one strain would infect millions of machines, today the opposite is taking place; millions of malware strains are each targeting only a handful of machines which in turn makes fighting them more complex.
• Open APIs Mature Into a Next-Generation Business Model
  Internet technology has made this possible for for a decade or more, but it's taken a while for awareness to grow on both the provider and consumption side about how fundamentally valuable APIs are to the modern businesses today.

Light Reading:

• When Real Time Is *Not* Fast Enough: The Intention Web
  
• Smart cities, sensors and their potential side effects
  
• Second Life Gets A Life 2.0 At Sundance
  
• How HTML5 Will Change the Way You Use the Web [Web Browsing]
  
• Introducing Google Public DNS
  

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on December 7, 2009

Weekly digest of week 48 2009

This week a look at due diligence for SaaS and cloud computing, Salesforce.com releasing Chatter, did Wikipedia already hit its max and Pearltrees: bookmarks with a social twist (see also Capgemini’s review of Pearltrees which was published in April).

• Law may limit boss' access to social media
  Employers' use of Facebook, MySpace and other online social networks could be limited under a new antidiscrimination law.  The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bans employers from asking employees or job candidates to take genetic tests or disclose the results of genetic tests already completed. It also considers a family's medical history to be protected genetic information. For instance, if a manager who overhears an employee say that her mother is being treated for breast cancer could not use the information against the worker in hiring decisions because they believe the person could require time away from work or have expensive medical costs if she develops the disease.
• MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?
  Sharepoint is the big giant in the enterprise collaboration space. Salesforce.com is now in the market with Salesforce Chatter, a service that embraces Facebook, Twitter and the applications within Force.com.  MindTouch has the potential to compete with the large market players. Today they are announcing MindTouch Cloud, an open-source, SaaS service that integrates business data from any number of sources, including Oracle, Sugar CRM and Salesforce.com.
• What are Google’s real motivations behind Chrome OS?
  Chrome OS is Google’s latest entry into the consumer space. It is designed to be an operating system that runs on customized hardware and provides the user with only a state-of-the art browser running HTML-5 and some plugins. The tech (and mainstream) media has seen no shortage of opinions about its meaning and future impact on the industry. Unfortunately, I think most people have missed some of the key implications of Chrome OS.
• The dark side of the internet | Technology
  Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.
• The Future Has No Log In Button
  It all centers around identity. The idea comes with a technology called Information Cards, and a term called the “Selector”. With these technologies, websites will rely on the client to automatically provide the experience you want without need for you to log in ever again. It relies on OpenID, doesn’t really need oAuth (since all the authorization ought to happen on the client), but the best part is you, the user, don’t ever have to know what those technologies are. It “just works”.
• SAP Joins PowerPoint and Twitter – Does This Work?
  As we approach 2010, a number of new efforts are underway to make documents more social. One consultant told us how recently a client tried to turn Sharepoint into a Twitter client. That's a monster! But we have to give SAP credit for developing a more innovative way to add social elements to PowerPoint presentations.
• SaaS and cloud computing: A look at the due diligence
  Cloud computing, software as a service, outsourcing… to me, these are all synonymous terms. While “cloud computing” as a concept has gained tremendous traction and mindshare, the fact remains that this sector of computing is nothing more than today’s de jour term for outsourcing and the decisions around and challenges regarding outsourcing should remain front and center all the way through the process.
• The 'social enterprise' comes of age
  Salesforce.com’s flamboyant announcement of Chatter has catapulted social computing to the forefront of discussion among enterprise thought leaders.
• Meet Pearltrees: Bookmarks with a social twist
  A French Web site, called Pearltrees, is developing a Web service that is trying to bring a social networking element to bookmarking – but with the connections based on content instead of people. Think Facebook and Twitter mixed with one Amazon’s recommendation system.
• Is Wikipedia maxed out?
  Wikipedia may have reached the upper limits of what can be done with crowdsourcing, according to a researcher in Spain.  Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, notes that Wikipedia is at risk because its core editors can’t continue to keep up their current pace. And if Wikipedia doesn’t recruit more volunteers its content could suffer.

Light reading:

• Bing Tries To Buy The News
  
• Why Big Media's Anti-Google Counter-Revolution Will Fail
  
• Google Turning Times Square Into A Giant Voice Search Experiment On Black Friday
  
• The Definition of Evil: Microsoft's Search Wars Hurt Us All [Search]
  
• Why Music Is Broken – The Artist To Consumer Connection
  

Posted by Rick Mans on November 30, 2009

Weekly digest of week 47 2009

This week the release of Google’s Chrome OS, Chatter from Salesforce.com, Mozilla about speeding up the web and contact lenses with built-in virtual graphics.

• Social Media ROI Examples & Video
  A big question out there these days is: What is the ROI of Social Media? Or the ever popular how do I measure the ROI of social media? Often when I get this question it’s appropriate for me to retort: “What’s the ROI of your phone?” Other times it’s not appropriate to respond with this answer, which, if done in the wrong tone, or place, can win you a free punch in the face. Then there are the naysayers that adamantly proclaim, “We aren’t doing social media because there isn’t any ROI.”
• Understanding Enterprise 2.0 Tolerances & Scale
  Small and medium business needs are typically very different to ‘enterprise’, which in general business usage tends to refer to companies with over one hundred million in revenue. This can also be misleading however since many ‘enterprises’ are in fact federations of autonomous smaller business units.
• The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process
  The industrial influence in business management and theory is profound. In essence, for the past hundred years business has been objectified as a machine, divided into various components, like a clock or an electric generator. Components are composed of subcomponents, and so on, until you get down to nuts, bolts, and flywheels. People are — in the industrial scheme of things — gears in the machine, and their purpose is to perform a defined role in the assemblage.
• Salesforce.com Unveils Salesforce Chatter – Enterprise Collaboration
  Salesforce Chatter application allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their enterprise
• Twitter Doesn’t Create Influence, it Reveals it
  You can’t read more than a handful of tweets before someone mentions influence. You also won’t find a Twitter measurement tool out there that doesn’t mention influence. Some may ask how Twitter made so many people influential. It didn’t. I’d agree that it has made some people *more* influential if only because it gave people greater reach, but they had to posses some level of influence potential. (hmm, Influence Potential, a new buzz phrase?)
• Is Facebook Getting Uncool for 18-24s?
  Others aren't so sure. "That [usage decline] could be for a small percentage of the age group, but I would want to see more evidence to show that that audience is running away from Facebook," said James Kiernan, svp and group client director at MediaVest USA.  Kiernan believes much of the decline in the comScore numbers is due to younger people accessing the site via iPhones, BlackBerrys and other portable devices and applications. That skews the numbers, as there isn't a single source that tabulates usage from all available platforms.
• Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics
  A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.  Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens. One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. "Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away," says Parviz.
• A faster web with Resource Packages – Mozilla suggestion to have just one HTTP request
  One of the most common problem on the web is slow web sites, wasting the time of end users. Now, perhaps, Mozilla has come up with a solution for this, which will be applicable for all web browser vendors.
• Google Wave for Project Management
  If you are wondering what Google Wave brings to the Project Management world you may want to first start by reading a Wave that has been ongoing now for quite a while (I have been following & contributing to it for at least the last 6 weeks) titled Google Wave for Project Management.
• About Half in U.S. Would Pay for Online News, Study Finds
  Americans, it turns out, are less willing than people in many other Western countries to pay for their online news, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group. Among regular Internet users in the United States, 48 percent said in the survey, conducted in October, that they would pay to read news online, including on mobile devices. That result tied with Britain for the lowest figure among nine countries where Boston Consulting commissioned surveys. In several Western European countries, more than 60 percent said they would pay.

Light reading:

• Chrome OS Virtual Machine Build Ready for Your Testing [Downloads]
  
• Google's Chrome OS revealed — with video!
  
• Google Is Keeping Chrome OS Simple. Maybe Too Simple.
  
• Chrome OS Still A Year Away – Screenshots and First Overview
  
• What ChromeOS Means For Netbooks And Why Microsoft Needs To Be Scared
  

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on November 23, 2009

Weekly digest of week 46 2009

This week items about The feature of the Web by Kevin Kelly, Google and others, color as a limited resource and return on investment in social media.

• Microsoft releases SDK for Facebook
  Microsoft on Monday released a software development kit for Facebook that allows developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This should expand the reach of Facebook in third-party applications as well as make Silverlight and WPF more viable platforms for developers looking to build social applications.
• Social Media Influencers are not Traditional Influencers
  As more and more brands are moving all of their ad spend online, defining how influence affects their return on investment is necessary and must be done as soon as possible. While some are making inroads to define these calculations many are overlooking the fact that influence affects everything. Without factoring in the real issue of different types of influence you run into a number of problems, for instance focusing on one group of influencers over another or getting broad sweeping numbers instead of knowing exactly how effective your time and money has been spent on the proper target. One thing that usually doesn’t sync up here is that these online influencers with large followings are not the offline influencers.
• Social Media ROI Examples & Video
  A big question out there these days is: What is the ROI of Social Media? Or the ever popular how do I measure the ROI of social media? Often when I get this question it’s appropriate for me to retort: “What’s the ROI of your phone?” Other times it’s not appropriate to respond with this answer, which, if done in the wrong tone, or place, can win you a free punch in the face. Then there are the naysayers that adamantly proclaim, “We aren’t doing social media because there isn’t any ROI.”
• Understanding Enterprise 2.0 Tolerances & Scale
  Small and medium business needs are typically very different to ‘enterprise’, which in general business usage tends to refer to companies with over one hundred million in revenue. This can also be misleading however since many ‘enterprises’ are in fact federations of autonomous smaller business units.
• Your Personal Brand Is Not Scalable
  How are you going to outsource or pass-on some of the conversations and opportunities that will come your way as more and more people follow, friend and connect to you?
• The Über-Connected Organization: A Mandate for 2010
  However, there are a growing number of firms such as IBM, Toshiba, and Cerner Corporation that are becoming über-connected workplaces. Using social media tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogs and corporate social networks, they are connecting employees globally and are fostering mass collaboration. As a result, these companies are seeing improvements in communication, cross-functional collaboration and creative approaches to problem solving. More companies are discovering that an über-connected workplace is not just about implementing a new set of tools — it is also about embracing a cultural shift to create an open environment where employees are encouraged to share, innovate and collaborate virtually.
• Video Hosting vs. Video Posting with YouTube
  When implementing video online, at any point in time, marketers face a decision: to host or post video? Short for: should we host video on our own servers (or use a propietary video platform) or post the content to video sharing sites? Although such a decision primarily depends on the chosen content strategy (generating views versus traffic), there are several factors to take into consideration.
• Google: Is there anyone who doesn't have an opinion?
  Google is evil. It’s not evil. Perhaps it’s the George Washington of the Internet. Or maybe it’s just one huge dominant company trying to stay out of antitrust trouble.
• Color: The Next Limited Resource?
  As a designer, it is important to be aware of the trending colors, and how they are being applied in products and work produced today. What really isn’t being discussed by the design world at large though are the limitations being set on color. Color is as free for us to use as the air we breathe… or is it?

Light reading:

• Kevin Kelly On The Next 5,000 Days Of The Web: Bridging The Gap Between Virtual and Real.
  
• Augmented Reality Is Both a Fad and the Future — Here's Why
  
• How the web will look in five years according to Google
  
• SPDY: The Web, Only Faster
  
• The Death of Taxonomies, revisited
  

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on November 16, 2009

SMILE within and outside

We all are now fairly convinced that there exist two major streams of Social Business that flow around an enterprise. One is the Social Media Marketing which focuses primarily on how an enterprise participates, interacts, and benefits from the social media tools available on the internet to enhance their marketing efforts, align more closely with their customers, and form stronger alliance with their partners. The other stream is Enterprise2.0 which organizations need to evangelize internally allowing its employees to easily share & collaborate, improve efficiency, work as one team, and promote an open & transparent culture.

My colleague and good friend Rick Mans, in his recent blog, has published a framework for social media marketing. He suggests that talking & listening to your people (customers, partners or employees) can really go a long way when it comes to building trust & transparency, improve efficiency, and enhance collaboration. And I totally second that!

Right away I started wondering how this framework would apply internally in an enterprise and what would be the key basic activities that one would need to address while going in for Enterprise2.0. So in the figure below, I have attempted to add a few points to it. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

So if you are an enterprise looking to leverage from social business, then SMILE within and outside.

Nikhil Nulkar is a knowledge management consultant within Capgemini and is passionate about web2.0, specifically in enterprise2.0 & social media. Want to know what he is up to? Follow him on Twitter

Posted by Nikhil Nulkar on November 12, 2009

SMILE, it's social media marketing

If you start with thinking of using social media to connect with your customers, please first think of the goals you would like to accomplish. At first it seems like that goals are numerous, however there are really only five goals that can be accomplished with the support of social media.

Social media marketing is using social media for activities such as public relations, customer service, marketing, sales and crowdsourcing. Or as I put it into the diagram below:

• Supporting
• Meshing
• Interacting
• Listening
• Evangelizing

If you start using social media for the first time, you probably won't go for all five of the goals. You might just want to listen at first to get to know what people are telling about your products and brands. If you want customers to evangelize your products, you probably first have to listen to them, support them and interact with them before you have reached the phase that they want / will be able to evangelize your product.

So keep in mind that most goals aren't single objectives. Sometimes you have to set up some other goals first, before you can accomplish your final goal.

This image is also available as a powerpoint slide. Please email me at rick.mans@capgemini.com if you would like the powerpoint version.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on November 11, 2009

Weekly digest of week 44 2009

This week items about peace on Facebook, social media is not only helping social activists but also authoritarian regimes and a growing digital divide between those who are not connected to the Internet and for those who are and between those who share their information online and those who are not sharing it online.

• How Addicting is Social Media?
  Do you tweet while driving? How about on vacation, or at work? Ever wonder how much time others are spending tapping away on their mobile phone, texting a friend, checking in on Facebook, posting a tweet on Twitter, or using any of the many social media services? A recent Gadgetology study by consumer electronics shopping site, Retrevo.com went looking for answers on how much control social media has on peoples’ lives. We weren’t entirely surprised to learn how addictive social media has become especially among the 35 and younger crowd. We're no social psychologists but it looks like a whole generation (or two) is at risk of spending so much time texting, checking Facebook, using Twitter and other mobile social media services as to risk becoming addicted.
• Who's not using the internet?
  A decade ago most of us had never used the internet – now we can't imagine life without it. Actually, some of us can: there are 10 million people in the UK still without a connection. Are they, Tim Adams asks, losing out economically and culturally? Below, we ask four web refuseniks to go online to see how their lives would change
• 5 New Technologies That Will Change Everything
  3D TV, HTML5, video over Wi-Fi, superfast USB, and mobile "augmented reality" will emerge as breakthrough technologies in the next few years. Here's a preview of what they do and how they work.
• 100 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook in Your Classroom
  Facebook isn’t just a great way for you to find old friends or learn about what’s happening this weekend, it is also an incredible learning tool. Teachers can utilize Facebook for class projects, for enhancing communication, and for engaging students in a manner that might not be entirely possible in traditional classroom settings. Read on to learn how you can be using Facebook in your classroom, no matter if you are a professor, student, working online, or showing up in person for class.
• Tweeting Tyrants: Authoritarian Regimes and New Media
  In Authoritarian Regimes, Social Media Doesn't Only Help Social Activists
• Privacy is dead, and social media hold smoking gun
  Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Fitbit and the SenseCam give us a simple choice: participate or fade into a lonely obscurity.
• Peace on Facebook
  Facebook is proud to play a part in promoting peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other. By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.
• Social networking and reputational risk in the workplace (PDF)
  Deloitte LLP 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey results
• Google’s Wave Might Find Its Real Home Inside Company Servers
  The roll-out will mean one significant thing: You can construct and run your own Wave servers on your own hardware, and have them link up to the greater Web should your Wave conversations need to include people from the outside world. And that means companies can use private Waves as a tool for intra-office conversation and, more in keeping with how Wave is being promoted by Google, as a collaboration tool. In particularly high-tech outfits, you could even imagine that company developers could put together specialist Wave Apps to help with specific tasks or to tailor Wave to the local modus operandi.
• Reocities , rising from the ashes – RIP Geocities…
  Here lies what we could salvage from the ashes of GeoCities.  Yahoo! has done an amazing thing by keeping GeoCities alive for as long as they did, but we feel that it is a waste to leave the Internet with a hole of this magnitude. At a minimum, Yahoo! could have simply left GeoCities as a monument to the early days. Maybe close it off from editing and simply make it static after getting rid of the spam pages once and for all. Behind this minimalistic page stretches a wealth of Internet history. If any of it was yours and we have successfully recovered it, then we hope it makes you happy to see it restored. We've rebuilt the walls to the Cities and the streets where a large part of the early settlers of the World Wide Web used to live in. You can still find them where they were before, but not all of the houses have been rebuilt yet.

 Light reading:

• Reading the Telegraph costs the British economy £1.38bn
• Salesforce And Adobe Partner To Offer Flash-Based Applications In The Cloud
• Enterprise Mash-Ups Defined
• Is Google Navigation the death of Garmin, Magellan and TomTom?
• How Will ‘Augmented Reality’ Affect Your Business?

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on November 2, 2009

The empty restaurant

Did you ever walk down a street looking for a good place to eat and end up in an empty restaurant? No you probably didn’t, why? Nobody will go and eat in an empty restaurant, because people think there is something wrong and that there is a reason nobody is eating there. If you end up in an empty restaurant you either like to take a risk (will the food be really good, will it be worth my time) or you know the place and you’ll know what to expect and you’ll know how much value you will get for your money.

Same goes for your high-end-enterprise-like-software-product you bought to enable collaboration in your enterprise. If there are no discussions present and no other activities. Why should people join? Why should put their effort in it? Some will do it, but many more will not.

How to overcome this?

It is simple, it is just like the restaurant: start exclusively for your friends. Only invite the people you know and of who you know they are willing to invest some time to create value. Let those people create content, let them invite other people (for example 5 at the time) and let the community grow member by member. Listen to their feedback and make changes that they need to have a better experience. Create enough buzz that people are longing for invites to participate. After time enough people can participate and you’ll have plenty of content. This might be the moment to open up for all others that did not have an invite. They are more likely to participate since there is already an active community.

So if you want a successful internal community, you should not open it up for everybody at first, but start with just a small selection of people. Grow it one member at the time and before you’ll know it people are stalking you to get an invite for the community.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 30, 2009

Weekly digest of week 43 2009

This week a virtual workforce found in Kenyan refugee camp, email will not be replaced by social media , youth cannot live without the Internet and how to protect your intellectual property.

• Youth 'cannot live' without web
  A survey of 16 to 24 year olds has found that 75% of them feel they "couldn't live" without the internet.
• Software ahead of the curve: Google Wave
  Google Wave, is the hottest thing on the web at this current moment. And to be frank marks the start of Google's rise in my estimations and their commitment to the web as the platform. When I first saw the Google IO video was impressed and seeked out my wave invite I would have got if I had gone to the London event. So I've been using/on Google wave for a while now, but since the public beta I've started to really use it for conversations.
• The pocket spy: Will your smartphone rat you out?
  There are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card – but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten – here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen.
• Creating A Google Wave Extension In 5 Steps
  This is a simple to follow tutorial on how to create an extension that other Google Wave users can install and use in their waves. We will create a simple gadget extension that will list some blog names and when the user clicks on a name, the latest posts from the blog selected will be displayed in the wave. Yes, we will create a feed reader to use in Google’s waves
• How to . . . protect your intellectual property
  Intellectual assets are central to many businesses and relevant to all, even if it is only a matter of the corporate logo.
• The Myth of Usability Testing
  In 1998, usability expert Rolf Molich (co-inventor with Jakob Nielsen of the heuristic evaluation method) gave nine teams three weeks to evaluate the webmail application www.hotmail.com. The experiment was part of his series of Comparative Usability Evaluations (CUEs), through which he began to identify a set of standards and best practices for usability tests. In each segment of the series, Molich asked several usability teams to evaluate a single design using the method of their choice.
• Is TV a Stronger Force for Social Change than Facebook and Twitter?
  The power and influence of television and radio is undoubtedly extraordinary, which often makes the possibilities of new media seem limitless. Especially regarding developing countries without much television penetration, several questions come to mind: Will new media “leapfrog” a generation? Will countries without significant TV penetration adopt new media faster than television can spread? Will television sets become eclipsed by TV streamed through mobile phones? Will the availability of more content and more choices for TV viewers make television more or less influential? Comment and tell us what you think.
• Social Media Float in Thin Air
  Two stories gripped the social media last week unlike any other in the past few months. An article questioning the theory of global warming dominated the conversation on blogs while the saga of the six-year-old who came to be known as "balloon boy" did the same for Twitter users.
• Virtual workforce found in Kenyan refugee camp
  The very poorest people on the planet have benefited little from the digital economy, but a pilot project in African refugee camps has hinted at how that might change. Refugees at the Dadaab camps in Kenya have been able to dramatically increase their income by tapping into a global demand for unskilled digital labour.
• 20 Reasons Why Social Media Won’t Replace Email
  The rise in popularity of social media only enhances email. The two can work powerfully together. Two excellent articles, Chris Crums, writer for WebPro News, “10 Reasons Social Media isn’t Replacing Email“ and VerticalResponse CEO Janine Popick, “10 More Reasons Why Social Media Won’t Replace Email. Chris always has great marketing insights. Janine also provides some insightful resources and practices what she preaches for both email marketing and social media. I recommend them both.

Light reading:

• Augmented Reality to become more about cash than hype
  
• Why Online Ratings Don’t Work
  
• Augmented Reality in Flash 10
  
• Pick a Winner: How to Choose the Right Wiki for Your Business
  
• Colonizing the Outer Rings
  

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 26, 2009

Weekly digest of week 42 2009

This week again claims on why email is dead (or not dead yet), Sir Berners-Lee says the // in the URLs was a mistake and the complete history of Lemmings.

• Email is Dead? Oh Really?
  The WSJ is making the call—email on its way out. Dying. Dead. It's an interesting conclusion, derived from the fact that both growth and absolute numbers are on the side of social networking this year. But we disagree.
• Twitter has lift-off: now you can tweet from 20,000 feet
  Even if you're 20,000 feet above sea level there's still no escaping the presence of social media, with the launch of a Lufthansa tool that automatically updates Twitter or Facebook with flight position updates.
  GE, enterprise 2.0 since….1989
  One of the most frequently mentioned enterprise 2.0 successful project is General Electric’s Support Central. It’s true that their numbers are really impressive even for those who usually criticize anything that’s about 2.0. So, inevitably, people wonder how they did it.
• Facebook fatigue sets in as growth slows
  Facebook's growth slowed this summer, according to one report, suggesting that despite reaching the 300 million members milestone in September, the site's growth may have hit a saturation point in some markets for the time being.
• The Complete History of Lemmings
  Lemmings started life as a simple animation back in August 1989 when DMA Design had just moved into their first office (which only consited of 2 small rooms), and were begining a new game called Walker (based on the walker that was used in Blood Money).
• Study: Firms still invest in social media
  Despite the recession, most companies are continuing to invest in social media tools and online communities, according to a new survey by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research.
• Twitter and Facebook aid small firms
  Companies that have jumped on the Twitter and Facebook bandwagon are reporting a surge in customers while others struggle. With minimal marketing budgets available to many small businesses, social networking sites offer a quick and, more importantly, free means of promoting their wares to a global audience. In the face of stiff competition and a global economic downturn, it is a route more and more companies are going down.
• Web 3.0: The Building Block Web
  Some talk about the “real-time web” being Web 3.0, or the 2010 Web, but when you look at it “real-time” is just using the web as a platform, making it real-time.  The web still hasn’t really changed in essence to something else beyond the web becoming “the platform”.  The web needs to shift to something else for that to happen. I think that shift is happening in a form I call “the building block web”.
• The “//” in URLs was a Mistake, Says Sir Berners-Lee
  Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, modest creator of the internet, has a confession to make. When confronted with the question, “if you could go back in time and change anything along the way to inventing the internet, what would you change,” Sir Timothy hedged.
• Finland becomes the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right.
  According to YLE.fi, starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

 Light reading:

• Why Desktop Touch Screens Don’t Really Work Well For Humans
• User interfaces for AR
• Comment Form Styling: Examples and Best Practices
• An introduction to HTML5
• From Social Tools to Social Business Design

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 19, 2009

4 Myths about blocking Internet access in the enterprise

Some enterprises think that blocking Internet access for their employees is the solution to many of their issues. They think that productivity will be increased, costs can be saved, less security and legal issues will occur and, since the rise of Web2.0 and social media in particular: less damage to their reputation can be done. So if you are ever confronted with one of these four reasons for blocking the Internet access for your employees (or if somebody is using this argument to explain to you why your access to the Internet is blocked), you will know the answer.

Read more

Posted by Rick Mans on October 16, 2009

Weekly digest of week 41 2009

This weekly digest is created to keep you informed about the latest developments concerning the topics of our community of practice. This week nice tools for PowerPoint to integrate Twitter in your presentations, top 10 web collaboration tools and a five minute presentation on how you can effectively visualize information.

• Intranets – stop benchmarking, start leading
  For a while now, of all the big analyst firms, Forrester has continued to output some well thought out research and analysis on the information management space. Along with this piece on workforce technology adoption (summarised on ReadWrite Enterprise) and also another on barriers to intranet use (discussed by Bill Ives on the Fast Forward blog).
• Social media gains importance to packagers and suppliers
  Emerging forms of communication prove valuable for packaging professionals worldwide
• Apple Tablet To Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks and Magazines
  Several years ago, a modified version of OS X was presented to Steve Jobs, running on a multitouch tablet. When the question "what would people do with this?" couldn't be answered, they shelved it. Long having established music, movie and TV content, Apple is working hard to load up iTunes with print content from several major publishing houses across several media.
• Facebook Cracks Down on Devs, Suspends Apps Over Bad Ads
  In its first big move to implement the stricter ad guidelines it introduced this summer, Facebook recently suspended applications that served advertisements with deceptive content within them. The apps were suspended without warning, leaving developers confused as to why Facebook took this action and didn’t give them a chance to handle the offending ads first, according to Nick O’Neill over at AllFacebook, who first reported the story over the weekend. This confusion is likely a result of a problem we discussed earlier: Facebook’s vagueness about how its ad approval process actually works.
• Podcasting Just Might Be the Tool to Revolutionize Education
  Schools all over the country have flocked to podcasting as a new medium to assist the teaching profession. Professors are using podcasts to instruct students and get their messages out. Podcasting is not restricted to one educational sector, professors at prestigious colleges from Bentley to Purdue have flocked to this medium.
• Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience
  From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues.
• Top 10 Web Collaboration Tools (That Aren't Google Wave) – Collaboration – Lifehacker
  You've probably heard about a hard-to-get, hugely new service called Google Wave. Lest ye forget, there are plenty of web-based collaboration tools that don't require learning a new way of speaking. Here are a few of our (mostly free) favorites.
• FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools | Based on SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius technology
  A beta version of PowerPoint Twitter Tools is now available for testing. Based on SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius technology, the twitter tools allow PowerPoint presenters to see and react to tweets in real-time, embedded directly within their presentations, either as a ticker or refreshable comment page.
• Ident Engine – A JavaScript library that retrieves and aggregates profiles from across the web
  Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We've filled in profiles, uploaded photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. The Ident Engine uses semantic web API’s to bring together these web footprints.
• » Would You Please Block? Bud the Teacher
  Ever since we opened up lots more of the Internet in our school district earlier this year, the district has received several requests from teachers and other staff to block resources that are distractions in the classroom. I’ve written a stock response to those requests that I thought might be worth sharing. It’s my hope that their requests and the conversations that come from this response lead to changes in classroom practice.

Light reading:

• UX: An art in search of a methodology
• Social Business Design
• Preparing for Multi-touch in Flash – A Primer
• Effective Information Visualization: How to Visualize Meaning
• 23 Brilliant Web Apps To Simplify Designer’s Work Life

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 12, 2009

Three thoughts to guide your first social business steps

Again a piece on Social Media in the business since there are increasing signs that mainstream business is steadily starting to pick up on this. More and more I get the question, what should we do and where should we begin? Well, I believe three is still the magic number, even in the realms of new technology. So ponder this…

1. Select a small area in your business where you can start with social media; how does it fit in your strategy and what new insights can the advances in (business) technology bring you in this phase of strategic decision making. 
2. Make sure you architect and integrate your endeavor according to SOA principles with existing landscapes to ensure you get the maximum effect out of your old and new investments. Use your current systems, but be sure they are in order and able to do so. I.e. make sure you have a stable zen-garden to plant your new seeds in.
3. Take your experimentation to the cloud, it’s safe, it’s scalable and it’s cheap… and it allows you to start experimenting  with cloud in your organization.

In my work at Capgemini as a Business Technologist, I apply new business concepts enabled through new technologies for (new) clients through an approach which has recently been labeled innoversion by Frank Wammes (contact him for more info). The pivotal idea here is that technology should be involved in Business strategy from the onset due to the inherent beneficial nature of new technologies to the business in creating new markets, new channels or new services or products. After all, where would a concept such as co-creation be without the recent advances in online technologies. There is nothing really new in this approach except the notion that technology should be involved in the earliest beginnings of strategic decision making. The advances of technology are too fast, too widespread and have too much revenue generating potential to be ignored or, as is still far too often the case, ignored until a later stage in the process. Technology, expecially under the notion of Business Technology has strategic value-adding potential and should be considered as such.

 The second vital notion we are operating under is that new technologies should and in reality will be combined with existing ERP landscapes. Currently we’re investigating the value of SAP Business Suite 7 to this respect. Social media, especially in its combination with Multi-channel retail, co-creation concepts and progression of CRM should allow for companies to renew their focus on generating more transactions on their current platform by enabling new forms of interaction. This should be the focus of platform vendors which in essence have been focusing on the efficient "management” of these transactions.  Here lies, in my opinion, the key to the success of any Social Media endeavor: integration! Integrating your CRM systems to allow for maximum utilization of customer intelligence. Integration of purchase to pay systems to allow for the efficient management of the (micro) payments you are aiming to incur. Integration of Social Enterprise software such as Salesforce is currently pushing to the market under its Service Cloud 2.

Experimentation with Social Business can be facilitated by cloud computing. Cloud would be the perfect opportunity for experimentation in this area due to its inherent nature, lack of vendor locking, and minimal impact in capital expenditure and thus budgets. A no-brainer really…

So there you have it; three easy notions to help you incorporate Social Media in your organization.

Niels van der Zeyst is a Business Technologist at Capgemini. You can follow Niels on Twitter http://twitter.com/zeyst or contact him directly via Niels.vander.zeyst@capgemini.com.

Posted by Niels van der Zeyst on October 7, 2009

Weekly digest of week 40 2009

This week IBM is going after Google Apps Premier, employers should be social media savvy, mixed feeling about Google Wave and women, teens and seniors fuel the mobile web spike.

• Online Recruitment – Employers must be social media savvy to attract graduate talent
  Employers risk going under the radar of the best graduates if they don’t adopt robust and consistent social networking strategies according to research by TMP Worldwide and TARGETjobs.
• Fads vs Business Value: Knowledge Management & Enterprise 2.0
  Anyone with a computer and access to stock photos can put together a slide presentation and upload it to sites such as slideshare, and sometimes it seems like everyone and his brother is doing just that on social media, enterprise 2.0 and other 2.0-ish subjects.
• Do you trust your social networking site?
  What these sites are supposed to bring you is a sense of being closer connected to your friends, family and peers. Noone can argue that this goal has not been reached, but i keep asking myself, at what cost?
• Geeks Try Google Wave, Have Mixed Feelings
  Google Wave is one of the most-hyped new product launches in recent memory, but now that thousands of lucky people are getting to try it out – early reactions are mixed. If the hard-core geeks aren't sure if they like it, that could spell serious trouble for mainstream adoption.
• Women, Teens, and Seniors Help Fuel 34% Mobile Web Spike | Nielsen Wire
  Web visitors using a mobile device increased 34 percent year-over-year, from 42.5 million mobile Web visitors in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009 according to The Nielsen Company. Overall, year-over-year growth among the 13-17 and 65+ age groups outpaced the growth of the total mobile Web audience, with a youth increase of 45 percent and seniors surging upwards 67 percent in July. While men continue to make up a larger portion of mobile Web users versus women, comprising 53 percent of the audience in July, the growth of female visitors outpaced the growth of male visitors during the month, with women increasing 43 percent YOY as compared to a 26 percent growth among men.
• Social Network Statistics
  Social Networks are among the most powerful examples of socialized media. They create a dynamic ecosystem that incubates and nurtures relationships between people and the content they create and share.
  As these communities permeate and reshape our lifestyle and how we communicate with one another, we’re involuntarily forcing advertisers and marketers to rapidly evolve how they vie for our attention.
• Showcase of Designs Optimized for iPhone « Smashing Magazine
  Over the last couple of years, mobile devices have managed to gain mainstream popularity. With iPhone, making mobile Web applications finally usable by broad masses, web design can now be applied to mobile applications as well. In this post we are focusing on designs that are specifically optimized for mobile devices, in particular iPhone.
• P2P legislation is smart next step in piracy education
  One of the things that has always bothered me about the Recording Industry Association of America and its file-sharing lawsuits is that, for many of those people, their biggest crime is being uninformed.
• Crowdsourcing coming to iPhone apps, big time
  If you've ever been driving down the highway and looked at the Google Maps application on an iPhone to see what traffic is like ahead, you may have wondered where the data behind the green, yellow, and red lines indicating real-time vehicle flow come from.  In fact, the data are coming from people just like you: users of smartphones with GPS who, by the very act of driving down the highway, are feeding back information about how fast they're going to Google, which in turn is sending it back to users of its mobile map apps
• IBM targets Google Apps for business, undercuts pricing and touts reliability
  IBM is going after Google Apps Premier hard and has the pricing to show it’s serious. Big Blue is announcing the general availability of LotusLive iNotes, a cloud email, calendar and contact management service, for $36 a year per user. Google Apps Premier runs $50 per user a year.

Light reading

• 16 Augmented Reality Business Models
• 40+ Desert Island Web Development Tools
• Managing Identities, and Data – whose responsibility?
• Online Database of Social Media Policies
• More on how web performance impacts revenue…

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 5, 2009

Weekly digest of week 39 2009

This week (again) a lot of Google news (Sidewiki, Chrome Frame and the styleguide), Vodafone going social, Augmented Reality Markup Language and Generation V.

• Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.
• Corporations in swimsuits: Are you faking social media?
  Digital strategist Jordan Julien got us thinking about "synthetic authenticity," the risk large corporations face as they try to engage customers in social media. The problem, Jordan says, is social media tools were built for individual people to interact with each other, but suddenly faceless entities — big brands with big names — are entering the space.
• Multiple Online Personas: The Choice of a New Generation – Intelligence
  Is your business ready for Generation V? Baseline looks at how learning the personal, behavioral traits of multiple, online personas will be important to the future of business-to-consumer strategies and practices.
• Sidewiki: Google colonial sideswipe
  Not only do our friends at Google want to own all of our brains, but now they also want to own all of the comments on our websites. With a new downloadable feature called Sidewiki announced yesterday, Google is adding a feature that allows anyone to comment on a webpage and for that information to be openly available on the Internet.
• Introducing Google Chrome Frame
  Today, we're releasing an early version of Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer.
• Why Windows Mobile as a Business Platform?
  So why is Windows Mobile right for your business compared to all these other guys?
• Measurement tool tackles social media challenge
  The thorny issue of how to measure web traffic and social media activity effectively is being tackled head on by a new tool which claims to analyse both simultaneously.
• Google styleguide
  “Style” covers a lot of ground, from “use camelCase for variable names” to “never use global variables” to “never use exceptions.” This project holds the style guidelines we use for Google code. If you are modifying a project that originated at Google, you may be pointed to this page to see the style guides that apply to that project.
• Vodafone links phone contacts to social media
  Vodafone has unveiled a range of internet services which centre around connecting a phone’s address book with social media.
• Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML)
  With this surge in AR development the potential arises for the multiplication of proprietary methods for aggregating and displaying geographic annotation and location-specific data. Mobilizy proposes creating an augmented reality mark-up language specification based on the OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML) with extensions. The impetus for proposing the creation of an open Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) specification to The AR Consortium is to help establish and shape a long-term, sustainable framework for displaying geographic annotation and location-specific data within Augmented Reality browsers.

Light reading

• Enhancing User Interaction With First Person User Interface
  
• Foursquare Beats Twitter to Local Advertising Goldmine
  
• Video: Symantec Shows The Danger Of Shortened Twitter Links
  
• The More Affluent and More Urban are More Likely to use Social Networks
  
• How to Make Data Visualization Useful for Color Blind Users
  

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on September 28, 2009

Forty-two Twitter Use Cases and the ultimate answer to the question: "Why do we tweet?"

This is my final post to this blog because all good things must come to an end. Coincidentally, this is also my 42nd post to this blog. Forty-two, a significant number in its own right. It is a number that stirred some Deep Thoughts inside my mind. Thoughts about the ultimate answer to the question "why do we tweet?". So, for a few months or so, I have observed how people use Twitter and what their motivations for tweeting could be. Of course, I have also put google to work and also picked some use cases from here, here and here. The result of all this is a list of 42 Twitter use cases. which are listed in the table below.

But, before you jump to my list, I should explain that I have rather simplified the notion of "Use Case" for my purpose. You will see no pre- and postconditions for example, let alone actors. You could argue that the "intended result(s)" are the postconditions, so feel free. This post isn't about the nits and grits of writing use cases (you should jump to Alistair Cockburn's website for that in stead).

#	description	intended result(s)
1	assess a new follower: check bio, check activity, read some of that user's latest updates, check who else is following this user	knowing whether this user is worth following back
2	reply to another twitter user's update	have that user follow you (back), strengthen your connection with that user, increase the level of interaction you get on twitter
3	acknowledge another twitter user's update (retweet)	strengthen your current connections, gain some more followers
4	comment on another user's blog post (modern blogging systems allow you to tweet comments you leave behind)	strengthen your current connections, gain some more followers
5	share a link to your latest blog post	have people visit your blog
6	share a link to an interesting article you came accross	strengthen your current connections, gain some more followers
7	tag an update (using a hashtag)	reach people outside your current group of followers, gain some more followers
8	share conference impressions (live conference feedback tweets, usually tagged with the hashtag for that conference)	have people know you are at the conference, gain more followers
9	submit live comment while watching a talk (or webinar)	let other people who couldn't attend about the talk know what they are missing (or not)
10	share pointless babble such as "going to walk the dog" or "good night"	An sense of enormous well being (citation from "Park Life" by Blur). Supposedly, people love to read snack-sized content so you will entertain lots of people.
11	share your impressions and experiences with a gadget you recently purchased	other people buying the same gadget, get interaction with people who also bought that gadget, gain more followers
12	report news you are witnessing (e.g. tweet about a plane you see crashing with a link to a picture or video  you shot on the spot)	feel like a news reporter, get people to retweet the news, gain more followers
13	take polls (e.g. what mobile twitter client do you use most often?)	whatever results/answers/stats you are aiming for
14	store a thought so you won't forget it	an online memory of your thoughts for later recovery and use, provoke thoughts in other people's heads, start interaction
15	post your resume (using http://www.twitres.com)	get job offers
16	get live feedback throughout a conference (often now, live conference feedback tweets are projected on a wall encouraging more people to tweet their impressions)	see early feedback allowing you to change/adjust things while the conference is taking place, potentially have lots of people promote the conference  through their follower network
17	report a problem you are having with an application you are using	get support, either directly from the vendor, or from other users
18	wish for a feature in your favorite twitter client	get a response telling you the feature you are wishing for is a splendid idea and that it will be implemented in the next release, or that the feature is already implemented but you simply didn't look for it (duh)
19	publish news updates around your open source project	have people know the existence of your project, have people download/try the latest binaries, get feedback for the latest release
20	ask people to join your open source project	more project participants, ultimately improved project activity and productivity
21	inform your followers about a talk you are going to do on a certain conference/symposium	get a larger audience, gain more followers
22	post job/career oportunities at your company	job candidates
23	share details of your presidential election campaign	increased popularity, votes, become president of the US
24	find free beer (simply by searching twitter for those two words)	get drunk at someone else's expense
25	share your current whereabouts through services like brightkite (this a very popular use of Twitter and led to this popular online game: http://playfoursquare.com	get into contact with people that are  in your vicinity, become the mayor (FourSquare) of a location
26	track someone's whereabouts and status	knowing where someone is and if he/she is okay
27	Submit status ("come on rockets!!!!") of the Mars lander of the Mars Phoenix project (NASA, May 2008)	share a very cool thing with the world in a very cool way
28	thank a new follower for following you using a direct message	interaction, based on a response decide whether to follow back
29	semi-urgently reach someone (twitter users often respond quicker to direct messages than to e-mails: "d mnankman check your e-mail, I sent you something important")	almost guaranteed and quick delivery of semi-urgent messages or requests
30	find out what people are saying right now about something you are thinking to purchase	reassurance about the purchase, or advice against the purchase, advice on alternative products
31	find out what other people's experience are with a certain new technology you are thinking to adopt	reassurance about using the technology, hints on the use of and problems with the technology, or advice against using it, suggestions for alternative technologies
32	find names for your unborn child	suggestions for names, interaction with other (to be) parents
33	search for a topic of your interest (such as the safety of flying with a certain airline company)	real-time news about that topic, reassurance (or not) of your plans,
34	solve Ajax programming problems	tips and suggestions on how to solve the problem
35	submit the next step in the washing program (your washing machine being the actor that initiates this use case)	set an interesting example on how Twitter could be used. Many innovations  begin at a crazy starting point.
36	submit the state - open or closed - of a bridge (@towerbridge)	set an interesting example on how Twitter could be used. Many innovations  begin at a crazy starting point.
37	sell your twittername (via http://tweexchange.com/)	a comfortable sum of money
38	Recommend nice people to follow (using the #NPF hashtag)	gain more followers
39	Promote obscure sites that promise you loads of followers within weeks	get people to visit a site that is stuffed with ads, ergo: earn money through people's gullability
40	Promote supposedly easy ways to become rich	get people to visit a site that is stuffed with ads, ergo: earn money through people's gullability
41	Contribute to an opera (Twitterdammerung)	Being part of a crazy but amazing project, hearing lines you contributed actually sung at the performance of the opera
42	Fight a mobster (http://playmobsterworld.com)	Virtual respect, gain more members in your own mob, joy

My personal favorites are number 27 and 41. The latter especially for its collaborative nature. I also found that for roughly a quarter of the above use cases, gaining more followers is one of the intended results. Based on that I can only conclude that the ultimate answer to the question "why do we tweet?", is "mostly out of vanity, but we like the interaction too". Myself, I tweet because I hope to get interaction with interesting people and use Twitter as a tool to know what is going on right now in my fields of interest and my network (and don't dare to pollute it!).
---

Mark Nankman is no longer a UX Architect and Web 2.0 thought leader at Capgemini, but his public brain waves can still be followed on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mnankman

Posted by Mark Nankman on September 22, 2009