Collaboration Cafe

Microsoft Uses Social Software to Talk to Partners

Microsoft has launched Channel 9, a website for third party developers which combines blogs, wikis and discussion forums.

Site rules emphasize courtesy, thoughtfulness and refraining from mercantile behavior. "Channel 9 is all about the conversation," according to the posted rules. "Channel 9 should inspire Microsoft and our customers to talk in an honest and human voice. Channel 9 is not a marketing tool, not a PR tool, not a lead-generation tool."

[Source: CNET]

Executives Blog for Dollars

The top two executives of the Association of National Advertisers now host weblogs to communicate with members. The association represents 340 companies that spend about $100 billion a year in marketing communications.

Says CEO and novice blogger Robert Liodice, "We have our official site and will still send out press releases when we have news. The blogs are a good way to get thoughts, ideas, concepts into the public domain without an 'official' title."

[Source: New York Times]

Return of Coffee House Culture

Last week in Britain, the ancient Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce celebrated its 250th birthday by launching a nationwide series of coffee-house debates in partnership with Starbucks. Penny Egan, the society's executive director, has assigned more than 500 society fellows to lead debates in over a hundred Starbucks and other venues. She says: "We are very excited at the prospect of such a cross-section of people sitting down together over coffee and hopefully coming up with tangible solutions to what concerns communities today." Topics range from waste disposal to multicultural arts or disaffected teenagers.

[Source: The Guardian]

The Meta-Weblog

Kinja is a new online service that automatically compiles digests of weblogs covering specific subject areas like politics, baseball or China. Short excerpts from the blogs are included, with links to the complete entries on the individual blog sites. After signing up for a free account with Kinja, users can enter the addresses of their favorite blogs and generate a digest -- in effect a customized blog of blogs.

[Source: New York Times]

Trading Privacy for Improved Communication

In online networked environments, everything we do can be monitored. Absent the cues that establish social context in the manifest world, social software systems ask us to strike a bargain. If individuals agree to work transparently, they (and their employers) can know more, do more, and sell more.

For many people, the required level of transparency will take some getting used to. “Our customers now include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley, and intelligence agencies,” says David Gilmour, CEO of Tacit Knowledge Systems. “And they all have come to believe this technology that watches and compiles -- for the benefit of the individual -- is going to become a permanent backdrop and the dominant paradigm for enterprise software.”

Tacit’s ActiveNet watches and compiles email messages and documents written by employees, to ensure that no two people whose document trails reveal a mutual interest in making a connection fail to miss one another. “But it’s not our job to force you to work together,” Gilmour says. Users' content remains private; ActiveNet works only with explicit consent.

Can transparency and privacy coexist? Gilmour argues that they can. We have a reasonable expectation that our phones aren’t bugged, he says. If our voice mailboxes fill up and we become unresponsive, though, that becomes an issue that will be noticed and dealt with. The enterprise has a legitimate interest in finding bottlenecks. “Privacy privileges are constructive when applied to who-knows-what and who-knows-whom,” he says. “But we don’t think you’re entitled to privacy about whether you’re available for interaction.”

[Source: John Udell]

Merging Social Networking and Search

Google plans to integrate Orkut, an "invitation only" social networking site, into it's search services. Launched in February, Orkut has already signed up about 150,000 members. Says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "One of the problems with search is you can't find people. We believe that these social networks will have a tremendous amount of information."

[Source: CNET]

Building Reputational Capital

In his new book, Building Reputational Capital, Fordham University professor Kevin Jackson argues that ''integrity and fair play'' have tangible and profitable benefits. In a marketplace increasingly cynical about business after scandals at Enron, WorldCom and the like, Mr. Jackson contends that companies that strengthen, or even just maintain, a good image gain a competitive edge.

Based on his study of companies like Hewlett-Packard, Northrop Grumman and Levi Strauss, he argues that a strong reputation draws repeat business, allows firms to charge higher prices, attracts better job applicants, enhances access to capital markets, attracts investors and functions as a barrier to entry into markets. "Reputation is the primary attribute of commercial relationships," he writes. "If there is no trust, there's no deal, period."

[Source: New York Times]

The Truth-telling Machine

According to research by Cornell professor Jeffrey Hancock, we fib less frequently when we're online than when we're talking in person. Hancock asked a sampling of his undergraduates to record all of their communications -- and all of their lies -- over the course of a week. When he tallied the results, he found that the students had mishandled the truth in about 25% of all face-to-face conversations, and in a whopping 37% of phone calls. But when they went into cyberspace, they turned into Boy Scouts: only 1 in 5 instant messaging chats contained a lie, and barely 14% of email messages were dishonest. What it is about online life that makes us more truthful? It's simple: We're worried about being busted. In ''real'' life, it's actually pretty easy to get away with spin. If you tell a lie to someone at a cocktail party or on the phone, you can always backtrack later and claim you said no such thing. On the Internet, though, your words often come back to haunt you. The digital age is tough on its liars, as a seemingly endless parade of executives are learning to their chagrin. Today's titans of industry are laid low not by ruthless competitors but by prosecutors gleefully waving transcripts of old e-mail, filled with suggestions of subterfuge.

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[Source: Clive Thompson, via New York Times]

Twenty First Century Ad Agency

Throughout the twentieth century most ad campaigns depended upon the following practices: demographic analyses by marketers, media selection by media planners, ad placement by media buyers, and then analysis of results by agency executives. All told, a campaign and it's assessment took many months.

With the Google AdWords program, an analogous process can take mere days. A shoe marketer like Nike might select 3,000 keywords -- "pro-nation," "distance running," "Michael Jordan," etc. -- and write five messages for each keyword. It's thus not unheard of to have 15,000 pieces of creative for just one product. The messages for each keyword alternate, and the ones that result in the least hits are eliminated. Feedback can be almost instantaneous. "Overnight you can see which ads work best and shut some off," says Tim Armstrong, VP of ad sales at Google. "And there's no penalty for trying every idea, because you only pay for what works." Unless they run out of a product, advertisers have no incentive ever to shut off a campaign.

[Source: David Kirkpatrick, via Fortune]

Corporate Blogging Takes Off

Corporate America is jumping onto the blogwagon, using weblogs both to market products and for knowledge management. Unlike email and instant messaging, blogs let employees post comments in real-time that can be seen by many and mined for information with simple search tools at a later date.

* Robert Scoble, a Microsoft product marketing manager, maintains a weblog about the company that generates regular feedback from tech-savvy customers on how to improve Microsoft products. Though he's just one of hundreds of employee bloggers at the software giant, Scoble is by far the most widely read, with more than 850 blogs and 1,300 sites that link to his blog.

* Some 500 IBM employees in more than 30 countries use blogs to discuss software development projects and business strategies.

* When it released a crop of new software products in 2002, Macromedia saved tens of thousands of dollars in call-center support with blogs that addressed customer questions.

* Verizon's eServices division uses Traction's blogging software to monitor competitive activity.

* Several of DaimlerChrysler U.S. plant managers use blogs to discuss problems and keep a record of their solutions.

* 40 technology managers at Hartford Financial Services use blogs to troubleshoot technology problems for agents in the field.

* Dr. Pepper/Seven Up ran a blogcentric campaign last spring for its new milk-based drink, Raging Cow.

* Random House's Crown Publishing sends books to bloggers for review.

* Nokia sent a small group of bloggers its 3650 model camera phone to test drive.

[Source: Fast Company]

The Mobile Dating Game

Serendipity -- a cell phone service under development at MIT -- is designed to make computerised matchmaking more spontaneous.

The service will require each subscriber to create a personal profile, including photographs and information about their ideal partner. Every time two phones registered with Serendipity get within a few yards of each other, the service will compare their details, likes and dislikes. If there are enough similarities, the phones will automatically exchange personal details and photos.

Serendipity will allow subscribers to restrict access to personal information only to friends of friends. For the more adventurous, the service could be programmed to pass on information only to strangers.

[Source: London Telegraph]

Cost of An Online Mating Persona

E-Cyrano is a new service which sells profile makeovers to users of online dating services who need help trumpeting their strong points. Says founder Evan Katz, "It's parallel to job hunting," Katz said. "Most people don't think about spending $300 on a resume that's going to get them a job."

Katz recently authored "I Can't Believe I'm Buying This Book: A Commonsense Guide to Successful Internet Dating", a book offering guidance drawn from e-Cyrano. Bookstores' self-help shelves are bulging with online dating titles, including "Online Dating for Dummies," "The Rules for Online Dating: Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right in CyberSpace," "Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Dating and Relating" and "Date with Your Head, Mate with Your Heart: Five Steps for Finding Love Through Science."

With the exception of pornography, online dating services generate more revenue from ecommerce sales than any other industry. Last year some 40 million Americans spent an estimated $425 million hunting for the perfect date online.

[Source: Reuters]

Social Network for Discounted Consumer Services

Small Planet is a free invitation-only social networking service that plans to profit by letting member-approved marketers sell to its twenty- and thirty-something members. Members can buy products and services from those companies -- such as gym memberships, car insurance, and health insurance -- at a significant discount.

Members vote for goods and services they want, and then Small Planet finds appropriate providers and vendors. Unlike some social networking sites, Small Planet does not accept advertising.

[Source: ClickZ Network]

The Future of Work

In his new book The Future of Work, MIT professor Thomas Malone argues that in the future, high tech and knowledge-based businesses will likely be run as loose hierarchies or self-managed democracies. Skilled workers will organize, disband, and regroup around different assembly projects, much as film and construction workers do today. Even cars will be designed by competing teams of freelancers, giving automakers a choice of, say, fuel cells or solar cells.

Malone writes, "We are on the verge of a new world of work, in which many organizations will no longer have a center at all -- or, more precisely, in which they'll have almost as many 'centers' as they have people." In response, he suggests, managers will need to shift from a command-and-control style to a coordinate-and-cultivate mode.

[Source: Boston Globe]

iWork Cafes

The days of having a grand corner office with your name stencilled on the door are on their way out, as an increasing number of companies ditch desks to cut costs and give workers a greater say over how they want to work.

Sun Microsystems is leading the way with its iWork programme, a mix and match scheme that gives its employees a number of options as to where they can work. Those options range from working from home, to using remote worksites called iWork Cafes, to occupying empty offices for meetings in any of Sun's buildings around the world.

At Sun, each work station has the latest in computer and communications tools as well as traditional items like post-it notes and pens. Says Leila Chucri, Sun's marketing manager for desktop solutions, "I can be here in Menlo Park, I can put my card in, work, take my card out, go to another building anywhere that Sun owns, and put my card in and again my whole services are following me everywhere. Not only from a desktop perspective but from a phone perspective."

So far about 17,000 out of 35,000 of Sun's Santa Clara-based employees have dumped their desk for the roaming office.

[Source: BBC]

Internet-Powered Music Cafes

Starbucks is about to launch a chain of a music-centric cafes, called Hear Music Coffeehouses. Customers will be able to create their own music compilations from a digital library of about 150,000 tracks and burn them to CDs. Hewlett-Packard Tablet PCs will be used in the stores, along with listening stations, where consumers will be able to listen to music before purchasing it. The first five songs -- including a labeled CD and jewelled case -- will cost $6.99. Each additional track thereafter will cost $1.

The first location opens this week in Santa Monica. Later this Spring the service will be made available at 10 of Starbucks existing locations in Seattle, and at 2,500 of other locations nationally in the next couple years.

[Source: CBS News, CNET]

Investment Heats Up for VoIP

Skype, a free Voice over IP company that is unique in using peer-to-peer technology to connect phone callers, has just raised which has just $18.8 million.

To use Skype, callers download software onto their computers and then use their Internet connection for voice conversations with other Skype callers -- who also must use the same software on their computers to connect.

Needless to say, Telecom carriers risk losing a lot of revenue if phone conversations are conducted over the internet rather than via the public switched telephone network. Already, several telecom and technology vendors -- including AT&T, British Telecom and Yahoo -- are testing the VoIP consumer market with new services.

[Source: Reuters]

Commercialization of Blogs

Advertising is on it's way to becoming a standard revenue stream for successful blogs. The timing is ripe, as the internet has been experiencing an uptick in ad revenue of late, with advertisers beginning to open their wallets again for the first time since the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000.

Xerox pitches its printers on Slashdot, a site for technology-industry news, and the ubiquitous scandal mongerer Drudge Report regularly features ads from AOL and CNN. Political blog Daily Kos now generates $4,000 a month in ad revenue. Another popular political blog, TalkingPointsMemo -- brings in more than $5,000 a month, enough for publisher and journalist Joshua Marshall to pay a part-time researcher.

Pressflex is a new agency that connects advertisers with a client list of 200 bloggers, charging 20% commission.

[Source: Wall Street Journal; registration required]

Collect, Organize and Share -- With One Tool

Onfolio is new software that offers simple-to-use tools to collect, annotate and republish text and photos to websites. Web pages, photos, Word and Acrobat documents, spreadsheets and other files types can be posted to an Onfolio.

Users can "copy and paste" or "drag and drop" material from other applications into Onfolio documents, while preserving pre-existing formatting. Material can be annotated with notes to recall its importance later.

Onfolio installs a small, unobtrusive icon on the toolbar of Internet Explorer. When users clicks on the icon, Onfolio opens up in the left frame of the browser, just as a favorites menu does. Microsoft strategy evangelist Robert Scoble -- one fo the most widely read bloggers -- says "it's like a 'favorites' list on steroids." He uses Onfolio to sift through some 1,300 Weblogs a day for useful information to publish on his weblog.

[Source: Reuters]

Analysis of Workplace Instant Messaging

A recent study of workplace instant messaging at AT&T logged thousands of workplace IM conversations and evaluated their conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to previous research, the study found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex work discussions. Only 28% of conversations were simple, single-purpose interactions and only 31% were about scheduling or coordination. Moreover, people did not find IM inadequate for their tasks and rarely switched from IM to another medium when the conversation got complex.

[Source: IT Director]

Convergence of Wi-Fi, VoIP, & Mobile Telephony

Wi-Fi networks and existing cellular networks are being stitched together, which will soon allow cell phone calls to automatically switch between the two. The percentage of cell phones that are Wi-Fi enabled will grow from near 0% last year to 85% by 2007, predicts On World, wireless-market research firm.

This trend will boost the use of Voice over IP (VoIP) use, which has accelerated in recent years. Enabling VoIP with Wi-Fi means users no longer have to be sitting directly in front of their computers when they make calls. Once cell phones understand Wi-Fi signals, callers can enjoy the best of both worlds -- the cheapness of Internet calls and the flexibility of mobile phones.

When dual-mode phones are available that automatically switch between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, callers will be able make and receive all calls on one phone no matter where they are. Forget about dead spots inside office buildings: calls will switch unnoticeably from office Wi-Fi networks to the cell towers lining the highway and finally to in-home Wi-Fi networks.

[Source: MIT Technology Review]

Unsung Heroes of the IT Revolution

U.S. Manufacturing productivity grew at more than 5% through the 2nd half 2003. From the 1970s into the 1990s, productivity grew by barely 1.4% a year. It takes 50 years for living standards to double if productivity grows at 1.4% per year, but only 18 years to double at 4% growth.

The unsung heroes of the current productivity boom have not been the microchip and the Web browser, but rather the creative and diligent work done by those who have been rethinking supply chains, customer service, incentive systems, product lines, and 1,001 other processes and practices affected by computers. Most successful enterprises recognize this, and their spending priorites offer proof. 90% of IT investment in Corporate America goes into creating new organizational and human capital. Less than 10% is spent on the actual hardware and software.

[Source: Erik Brynjolfsson, via MIT Technology Review]

Thirty- and Fortysomethings Rule the Web

If you think the Web belongs to a young cult of song-swapping, virus-writing, instant-messaging, cell phone-using, blog-writing video game players, that idea just got Ctrl+Alt+Deleted by a recently released study.

In terms of sweat equity, the Net belongs to the thirty- and fortysomethings who are building blogs, posting photographs and sharing ideas on bulletin boards. Those are the findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which reports that 44% of Internet users have created content for the whole online world. And of those 44% of content creators, nearly 50% are college-educated men and women ages 30 to 49.

[Source: Chicago Tribune]

Knowing Who's Where NOW

Instant messaging brought the buddy list to the desktop, a visual signal on the periphery of your attention that lets you know when your friends, colleagues, teammates are online. The ability to know when a friend anywhere in the world is online, joined with the ability to exchange short text messages in real time, helped transform an information-rich but people-empty Internet into a complex social cyberspace: a database became a hangout.

Nowadays, who doesn't open an IM back channel to colleagues on a conference call with a client? Which global teams don't use buddy lists to know whether colleagues in another hemisphere are awake? In the desktop world, "pushed presence" has become part of the toolset, just as word processing and email did in previous eras. Untethered presence that gets up and accompanies you everywhere you take your phone, however, is probably going to evolve into a different kind of creature than the deskbound kind.

Applied to cell phones, presence means knowing where your buddies are by looking at your phone – an act that is complicated behind the scenes by the necessity of integrating user-controlled social network information (who you want to be available or invisible to), location information via GPS and/or other locative media, wireless data transport infrastructure and a user interface that makes subtle social decision making easy or at least possible on a small screen.

[Source: Howard Rheingold, via The Feature]

Taking Tests to Find the Right Date

Tickle differentiates itself from other online networking services by offering a range of tests on personality, careers and sex. Some are modeled after standard measures like an I.Q. test, the Myers-Briggs test and even a Rorschach-style inkblot test. Others are just for fun, like a quiz that purports to say what breed of dog you are or what the theme song of your life should be.

Personality tests may not be the best way to pick a mate, but they have helped Tickle establish a leading position in the online dating services market. The company is vying with FriendFinder and Matchnet for the No. 3 rank in the market -- behind Match.com which claims 974,000 paying members, and Yahoo Personals.

As on other sites, Tickle's dating service, which costs $19.95 a month to join, allows users to create a public profile with their vital statistics, likes and dislikes. But with Tickle, they can also show off their I.Q.'s and the results of other Tickle tests they have taken. Those results -- and Tickle's matchmaking test, which has 18 questions -- are used to produce a compatibility score between a prospective couple.

[Source: New York Times]

VOIP Now a Retail Commodity

Circuit City, the consumer electronics chain, is the first national U.S. retailer to sell Internet phone service (Voice over IP) -- at all 600 of its stores and online. Vonage will provide the hardware and telephone service.

Vonage, which already has over 100,000 customers, allows users to hook up a telephone handset into their high-speed Internet connection. For a small monthly fee, calls are free or incur minimal charges. Offering rates that undercut traditional phone companies, Vonage faces challenges from some U.S. regulators who argue it should lose its Internet exemption and meet the regulatory demands of traditional phone service providers.

AT&T and Verizon have begun testing there own VoIP services.

[Source: CNET]

Hunting Bin Laden with Network Analysis

Using Analyst's Notebook, software which helps to piece together data on criminal and terror networks, U.S. military and intelligence officials are confident they are narrowing bin Laden's whereabouts.

Key to the search is accumulated humint, or human intelligence. Officials say that an increasing number of data points -- reports of sightings -- have created an ever-clearer picture of bin Laden's area of operation as he appears to shuttle between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now they've focused that picture to the point where they have been able to send in Predator unmanned aerial vehicles to search for him.

[Source: Newsweek]

Taking Cell Phone Calls in Flight

While on board with a number of US airlines, Verizon Wireless subscribers can now have calls to their cell phones instantly rerouted to the nearest in-flight phone. To make the connection, subscribers simply log on with their wireless numbers, a PIN, and their seat number.

[Source: The Feature]

Reading Web Tea Leaves

IBM recently launched WebFountain, an ambitious commercial service that mines valuable information from about half of the web's content, including informal communication from weblogs, newsgroups, and chat rooms.

IBM's supercomputer can process about 14,000 web pages per second. The system reads each page, extracts its content, then automatically annotates the material. The tagged pages, often many times the length of the originals, go into a huge data storage array. About 3 billion pages are already in the system.

All this painstakingly labeled information is then available to anyone interested in looking for trends or other valuable insights into what's going on. Users can deploy various software tools, including their own, to analyze the data and dig out relevant patterns and relationships.

[Source: Science News]

Extra! Extra! HP Labs Has a Eureka Moment

After indepth analysis and untold sums of shareholder cash, researchers at HP have determined that the most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas.

According to Wired, researchers at HP, using "newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs .... have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution."

Wow! You have to wonder if these guys read newspapers or watch TV news. Since when have journalists ever given attribution for leads on stories? Why would weblog publishers behave any differently?

[Source: Wired]

Get Instant Messages by Phone

Applying Social Network Analysis to Email

Most people are more dependent upon a handwritten shortlist of the key people they work with and talk to than they are to their electronic address books, according to Lili Cheng, group manager of the social-computing group within Microsoft Research.

To translate this idea into digital terms, Cheng and her team have come up with a concept called Inner Circle, which automatically maintains and updates a list of about 20 people with whom one is emailing and instant messaging the most. Inner Circle is not really a breakthrough in computer science as much as it is an exercise in cultural anthropology. Many people have folders today for their most important contacts, but they often drag emails in one by one. "That's just kind of silly for a human to constantly be managing," Cheng said.

[Source: CNET]

Building Social Networks with Instant Messaging

AOL has launched ICQ Universe, a social networking service enabled by ICQ -- AOL's instant messaging solution. ICQ is already used daily by more than 8 million members, and has 175 million registered users worldwide.

ICQ Universe allows members to view their friends' ICQ buddy lists and examine the relationships and profiles of these new individuals before contacting them. Membership in the ICQ Universe is "by invitation only." Before someone from an existing buddy list can be added to the community, he or she must sign up to be an ICQ Universe member. People who wish to join the ICQ Universe but haven't been invited by a friend can register as "guest users" and join in the service's virtual "lobby." There, they can browse member profiles and quickly submit a request to join the ICQ Universe.

[Source: CNET]

Using Social Networks for Retail Marketing

Consumer membership services company MemberWorks has purchased online dating site Lavalife for $115 million. Lavalife charged users pennies per minute to help singles communicate and search for a date on the Internet.

MemberWorks, which works with retailers to offer discounts to its members, hopes the deal can broaden its online marketing presence and give it entry into the large and rapidly growing online social networking market. With the acquisition, MemberWorks said it will offer its 6 million U.S. retail members online networking services and promote its retail membership services to Lavalife's 700,000 customers.

[Source: Reuters]

Convergence of Text, Audio & Video

Companies embracing instant messaging (IM) technology are quickly forcing the convergence of text, audio, and video -- and that's opening up new business opportunities. Instant messaging, email, voice over IP (VoIP), and videoconferencing are blurring together -- and in many cases IM is the hub.

Skype uses VoIP to provide a free internet-based phone service which allows up to five people to talk with each other simultaneously, regardless of their locations. The software includes a user-built global directory, instant messaging, call tracking and alert options.

IBM's NotesBuddy allows users to store IM dialogues in email inboxes, where they can be searched for by subject or other classifications. Notesbuddy also automatically determines whether to send a note as a message or email, based on the availability of the recipient. Phone calls can be launched from within an IM exchange.

[Source: Motley Fool, ZDNet]

Building New Boy Networks

Rather than creating simple electronic Rolodexes, business-networking tools like Spoke and Visible Path go deeper. They aim to help companies make faster sales by identifying and mining electronic "new-boy networks" of personal contacts. They help professionals get introductions to people they don't know, relying on mathematical formulas to analyze data crumbs left by people's electronic communications.

[Source: Washington Post]

Networking with Intelligent ID Badges

Rather than using the Internet to expand your relationships, nTAG uses interactive name badges to facilitate introductions and conversations at business conferences and conventions. An nTAG badge is a PDA-like device, equipped with a black-and-white LCD display and an infrared port.

When you attend an event using nTAG technology, you're given a badge preloaded with information about who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. You hang the roughly 6-ounce device around your neck, and whenever you approach someone new, your badges communicate, quickly determining what the you have in common.

nTAG badges let you instantly exchange digital business cards with others, and they can notify you if the person you're talking to knows anyone else of particular interest. After an nTAG event, you're emailed a link to a personal Web site where you can easily download all the information collected by your badge.

[Source: ABC News]

Open Source Networking

The economy of the commons can be so efficient and creative that it sometimes outperforms the market. The Linux operating system, now in use on one-third of the nation's servers, is perhaps the best proof of this fact, along with hundreds of other open source software communities. Countless Web communities achieve valuable types of coordination and collaboration that a market regime, with its expensive legal, marketing and payment apparatus, could not easily match.

This is a key reason online enterprises based on social networking -- including open source software, friend-of-a-friend communities, peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging, viral marketing -- are thriving, while conventional enterprises that seek to manipulate and control online consumers are less successful.

Online sharing and collaboration is cheap, easy and socially convivial -- a reality that does not necessarily compute in the neoclassical economic model.

[Source: David Bollier via In These Times]

Ubiquitous Internet Voice

Broadband is now in 50 million U.S. households and is spreading at a 50% annual clip, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. On the job, 75% of U.S. workers have a broadband connection. At the same time, VoIP technology has improved enough to entice every major U.S. cable-TV company to offer some sort of phone service to their customers.

Nearly 8 million Web surfers have downloaded software from Skype, a free Internet calling network. Skype has built a peer-to-peer community around a high-quality VoIP application that's easy to use. The latest version even works well over fast dial-up connections.

All of the major instant-messenger software programs including America Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger now boast voice capabilities. And software companies that are building more secure corporate versions of instant messaging have also rolled audio communications into their products.

[Source: Business Week]

Enterprise Pattern Recognition

Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea for 2004:

Managers manage what they can see, but until now they've never been able to "see" into the informal social networks that have always driven business. Better data and new research are finally giving companies a chance to leverage real people's interactions, for everything from trend spotting to identifying internal experts within a department.

[Source: Clay Shirky via Harvard Business Review]

Half of Internet Users are Writers

Nearly 44% of U.S. Internet users have built Web pages, posted photos, written comments or otherwise added to the enormous variety of material available online, according to a report published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Posting photos and allowing others to download music or video files were the most popular activities. Other users said they posted written material on Web sites or newsgroups, created their own Web sites, or set up "Web cams" to allow others to see live pictures.

While only 2% of U.S. Internet users said they had created weblogs, 11% said they read the weblogs of others.

[Source: Reuters]

Massive Distributed Workspace

The Department of Homeland Security has launced The Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN), a massive online network powered by Groove Workspace. The Service allows government agencies to exchange photos, maps and video feeds to respond to crises or threats.

Eventually, HSIN will be used by agencies in 50 states, five territories, tribal governments and 50 major urban areas, as well as by organizations in the private sector. [Source: Boston Business Journal]

Interactive Corp Buys Zero Degrees

InterActiveCorp (IAC) -- owner of Expedia, Hotels.com, Ticketmaster, LendingTree, and Match.com -- has purchased Zero Degrees, a social networking service that helps business people network to recruit staff, arrange financing and get sales leads.

Dan Marriott, senior VP with IAC, says the company is looking at other dating and social-connection sites, and might make an acquisition if the business can be tied to a classified advertising model, as Tribe Networks is attempting.

[Source: Business Week]

CRM Workspaces

Knowledge Agent Centers are CRM virtual workspaces which enable customer service agents to convene in real-time with the most appropriate person in a company for addressing a customer inquiry.

Seimen's new ProCenter Agile is perhaps the first integrated Knowledge Agent Centers. The suite lodges a "Team List" window onto user desktops that allow agents to visually monitor the real-time availability of other agents, managers and subject-matter experts across the enterprise. When other know-how is needed, agents can engage available experts in customer issues with drop and click call handling.

[Source: CommWeb]

Online Social Network for Muslims

Naseeb is like a Muslim version of Friendster, allowing people to network with friends of friends. Users create online profiles that includes links to their friends' profiles, and so on, for up to four degrees of separation.

In Naseeb young Muslims have found a culturally sensitive middle ground that lies somewhere between dating -- which is discouraged by Islamic law -- and the practice of marriages brokered by parents. Geillan Aly, a 27-year-old New York City graduate student, turned to Naseeb as an alternative to the prospective spouses her mother invites to tea. She says "I can see who I'm talking to without having to sit there and waste two hours of getting-to-know-you chitchat."

More than 45,000 Muslims have joined Naseeb since it went online Autumn 2003. About 84% live in North America and the UK.

Naseeb means destiny in Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Turkish and Hindi.

[Source: Oakland Tribune]

Social Networking for Work Groups

The most successful social networking services, predicts Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone, "will be those that are integrated into a CRM application and not necessarily controlled at the user base."

The next wave of social-networking applications will have to incorporate some kind of tangible value-add to the company -- and most likely that will be in CRM, specifically sales and lead generation. Case in point: Spoke Software has just announced its technology for work groups, a complement to its Spoke Network for individual professionals. The work group module integrates into Web-based sales-force automation and CRM applications. There are 20 work groups lined up to implement its Spoke for work groups, including the Atlanta Braves, Citibank and MetLife.

[Source: CRM Daily]

Multi-cultural Communities Suffer From Lack of Trust

A recent ongoing survey of American communities conducted by Harvard professor Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) shows that levels of trust and co-operation are highest in the most homogenous neighbourhoods. People living in diverse areas are not just more suspicious of people who don't look like them; they are also more suspicious of their own kind. Because of that, they suffer socially, economically and politically.

[Source: Economist]

Social Networking Service for Lawyers

Washington-based law firm Miller & Chevalier has been working with Interface, a social networking software vendor, to aggregate in one place information siloed in 120 lawyers' Microsoft Outlook contact folders. Now all members of the firm can view identical information about clients, which ensures one view of the truth when working through cases and prospecting new business.

"In the past year, we've had a couple of instances where the software identified an existing relationship we'd never have been aware of otherwise," says Sturgis Sobin, chairman of the firm's international department. "One of those engagements generated more than a million dollars in new business."

Miller & Chevalier also uses Interface for a targeted client alert system. In the past, the firm would send out client alerts (warning, for example, of the impact of certain legal decisions) in a generic mailing that might not be applicable to all the clients who got it. With Interface, Miller & Chevalier now mails out roughly 50 customized alerts to targeted clients.

[Source: Line56]

Social Networks and Multiplayer Gaming

Multiplayer gaming IS social software. A fascinating development in this genre is the emergence of location-based cellphone games like BotFighters and Undercover. In these games, cellphone-toting urban warriors take to the streets of their city to search for clues, complete missions, and engage in battle (and conversation) with fellow players. Each game overlays a virtual grid onto the physical layout of the city, and tracks the players’ location within that grid using the GPS in their cellphones. Mogi, Item Hunt is a Tokyo-based game where the core game dynamic is collecting and trading. Using a live map as a guide, players move through the streets and "pick up" virtual items with their cellphone interface. The goal is to amass points by completing collections -- and in addition to collecting items on the streets, players can trade items amongst themselves to complete their collections. Mogi also includes a buddy-based messaging service, and a mechanism for messaging any player who’s online using the gaming grid. [Source: Amy Kim]

Weblogging Tool for Project Management

Basecamp is a new hosted project management tool aimed at designers, consultants and freelancers. Using a blog-like format for the entry and presentation of content, it consolidates disparate communications like emails, chats, presentations, links, and feedback -- and supports the publication of RSS newsfeeds.

Customers log in and set up a project site, where they can then post updates, make contact info available, link to files on their own servers and design reviews, post milestones, to do lists and other kinds of content. Clients in turn can comment on posts or create their own posts.

[Source: MacCentral]