BBC NEWS | Technology | Bluetooth helps Facebook friends Annotated
The ambition for the Facebook tool is to have mobile phones alert each other when in the proximity of another Facebook user who shares common interests or common friends.
A team of UK researchers is combining the power of social network Facebook with communications tool Bluetooth to learn more about human interactions.
This opens up a can of worms, among them being privacy. We always thought that big brother was going to be the head of state. It increasingly looks like he will be the CEO of some large information-based enterprise. Historically legislation has focused on containing the government. Are we coming to a day when government will be seen as the agent acting on behalf of society?
API of the Year: Facebook Platform
The statistics are impressive – nearly 12,000 applications produced on the Facebook Platform since its launch on May 24th of this year and according to Adonomics those applications were used over 36 million times in the last 24 hours.
Intranets: A Reflection on your Corporate DNA Annotated
The intranet is a direct reflection of the ethos, soul, and culture of a company.
You can tell a lot from the intranet, the way it’s designed, displayed, organized, the content all reflect how the corporation is run.
The analogy to DNA is quite apt. Monkeys and humans share some 93% of the same DNA, yet they are so different. The difficulty is in assessing the meaning of the differences and the evaluation of “good or bad” highly subject to the industry context. It may be less about the DNA building blocks and more about what they are able to do with them or conversely not do with them. For that assessment more traditional measure likely remain essential.
Cisco’s Social Networking Strategy Comes Into Focus – ReadWriteWebAnnotated
Last February Cisco, the venerable provider of Internet backbone hardware, got its hands wet in the social networking scene by acquiring Five Across, a provider of enterprise social networking software. A little under a month later, the acquisition bug struck again as Cisco purchased the assets of social community site Tribe.net. The acquisitions seemed a little odd to some folks at the time. Matt Marshall of VentureBeat started off a post about the Five Across acquisition by asking, “What has the world come to?”
Ultimately, as Marshall concluded, Cisco saw social networking as a wider trend that will drive a lot of Internet traffic — over their routers, if they played their cards right.
Is Cisco’s move a marketing ploy (to legitimize the use of buzz-words) or are they developing new markets? Seems a bit of a stretch to say that social networking will drive traffic and therefore Cisco should buy in to make sure it is their routers that are bought.
Master of 500 Hats: Facebook Opens Up, Licenses Platform: Social Graph Platform Wars are ON! Annotated
Doc Searls Weblog · The only real social networks are personal ones Annotated.The point of this article is whether one can create social networks through the corporate marketing department. The author makes the following points
First, I’m not sure a “brand” can get social at all.
Second, the notion of “brands” either “building” or “joining” social networks strikes me as inherently promotional in either case, and therefore compromised as a “social” effort.
Third, I’m not sure social networks are “built” in any case. Seems to me they’re more organic than structural.
Fourth, the thing companies need to do most is stop being all “strategic” about how their people communicate. Stop running all speech through official orifices.
Bottom line: companies aren’t people. If you like talking about your work, and doing that helps your company, the “social network” mission is accomplished.
The first point “I’m not sure ‘brand’ can get social at all” seems to highlight a distinction between the “social” and “business” networks. First it suggests there are two (at least) and they are different. The difference lies in their purpose, how they evolve, their structure, participation and relationship among the participants.
However, it is possible that many of the underlying technologies can be shared and no doubt that will incur some level of confusion.
It’s probably worth keeping in mind that people are social beings and we don’t need tooling to be social or drive us to create social networks. However, tooling can help over come challenges of location/physical proximity; time, etc. in general the things that often inhibit a network from forming.
“A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.”It’s not a stretch to see that these profiles are the perfect host for your activity streams and your public activities could become a part of the profile (uploading photos to a public album, bookmarking web pages, posting a new blog post).
Certainly these profiles are simple in concept, but wide-reaching in application. The full scope of implications will take time to understand, especially given the potential scope of one’s relationship with Google it’s potentially a pretty key [central] source of personal information.
Innovation at LinkedIn: From Business Utility to Platform Annotated
Already a business networking utility with minor community features, LinkedIn launches improved homepage with aggregated news and customized features. In addition, LinkedIn’s launching an API (so third party developers can create applications) starting with Business Week’s “social bookmarks” feature.
I see this as a success as this becomes less of a part-time utility to more of a full-time business platform.LinkedIn already boasts some community features, such as LinkedIn answers, network like sharing tools, all lead by the official LinkedIn blog. I expect to see calendar, event, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and profile matching type of widgets and applications on LinkedIn’s community platform.
For any such tool to become a full-time business platform it has to transition seamlessly across the internal and external [social] networks. The boundaries between the two are becoming purely physical and thus a hindrance in a location-independent society. There is clearly a move to extend beyond hosting the social graph and doing something with it.
Facebook: Innovative yet Conceited
Having betrayed the trust of it’s users twice, a third time is going to result in mutiny, and users will start leaving, it wont be hard for some users to organize and move.
Where does the community team belong in a commercial organization? « Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy Annotated
The responsibility for Online Community in many organizations is distributed among several teams, including:
– Marketing,
– Product Support,
– Product Development,
– Events,
– Web Team,
– IT.The responsibility for Online Community in many organizations is distributed among several teams, including:- Marketing, which typically owns blogging, blogging outreach and any sort of affy community, and has some skin in the game on strategy.
– Product Support, which typically owns Discussion Groups
– Product Development, which may or may not own Discussion Groups, a Beta site, and potentially a “Labs” community, as well as potentially product development communities and user groups.
– Events, which owns “live” events like conference and any online component
– Web Team, (who’s reporting structure is usually a whole different ball of wax) which typically owns some technology and user experience
– IT, if you are REALLY lucky, your IT department is somehow involved with infrastructure.
If an organization exists within a society then presumably it will want to ensure that its role in that society is well managed. This infers some co-ordination. While the exposure may be different through marketing vs. support a lack of co-ordination can have some negative effects.
Are Social Networks Just a Feature? – GigaOM Annotated
It is time to rethink the whole notion of social networking, and start thinking of it as a feature for other online activities.
“The conversion ratio is pretty low, about 1 percent,” says Nouzareth. “Our model is basically free games, but you can add boosts to the game experience.” That is it wants to sell avatars and other such stuff to casual gamers for a few pennies. The model has worked for Habbo Hotel, and a bunch of other online virtual worlds. “Conversion is higher because the entry price is pretty low,” he says. “It is more attractive than a try-buy model.”
The social networking is simply embedding itself into services.
Social networking sites, such as FaceBook, MySpace, exist upon their own merit, albeit often within some context such as social group (e.g., University students). The question posited here is whether the social network should be embedded as part of fuller services or “experiences” with the intent to supplement those services/experiences?
Possibly. While social network may exist on their own merit, networking does evolve from some common or shared experience and may exist solely within that scope. FaceBook, for example, may support the needs of the former. It is unclear what specifically supports the latter.
The alternative is a network arranged around a single event or a recurring series of events intended to augment the experience itself in some fashion, either by extending the original experience or supporting how it may evolve.
IBM Launches Tool to Help Businesses Visualize Social Networks | HuliqAnnotated
IBM announced the availability of IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections, a corporate social networking visualization and analysis tool.
Atlas has four Web 2.0-based components — My Net, Find, Reach and Net. These components help users spot the important connections and the relationships between various groups and navigate their personal and corporate networks.
Atlas offers a number of tools that enable one to explore the nature of their corporate network and tools to leverage it. The danger of course is to move the focus away from the social network itself towards the data around it. A fine balance.
The tool seems to be focused internally to the enterprise. As [social] network complexity in smaller firms is relatively simple, does this mean that Atlas is only for the large enterprise? Can it work if it is contained to within a corporate network or to be more widely usable does it need to included people outside the corporate boundaries.
If so, that suggests a material value proposition for the standardization efforts underway.
» WorkLight secures Facebook for enterprises | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com Annotated
Social networks are growing like weeds. This creates a difficult weeding problem for enterprises, who fear adverse impact from employees spending time and sharing company info in Facebook groups, which aren’t protected by corporate firewalls.
“When you log into Facebook there is a WorkBook application you install, just like FunWall or SuperPoke or other Facebook applications. It appears in your apps list and when you click on it, you go to an area where you are authenticated through your organization’s identity services,” David Lavenda, vice president and marketing strategy at WorkLight, told me. “It uses the Facebook social graph, and you can have the Facebook profile augmented with company information, but it is only visible in the WorkBook application.”
The use of Facebook as a social networking tool within the enterprise potentially exposes confidential information to the public. “WorkBook” is an application that enables the creation of secured / controlled access areas limited to those with [corporae] credentials. This keeps confidential information within the secured area of the social network. Or, that’s the theory.
More broadly this demonstrates the distinction between the boundaries of the physical intranet and logical [enterprise] social network. As such the physical constraints implemented for an intranet such as identity management, access control to resources and fire walls don’t align with the needs of the social network.
Drugs to build up that mental muscle – Los Angeles Times
Academics, musicians, even poker champs use pills to sharpen their minds, legally. Labs race to develop even more.
Sort of leads one to wonder if our mental abilities are designed to match our environment? They must meet the minimum, otherwise we would not survive. Do they exceed? Quite possibly as we seem to be very successful as a species. Or are we in balance with something unspecified, which actually may be of our own making? Ourselves?
» Best picture quality with 6 megapixels! Annotated
The best compromise for a compact camera is a sensor with 6 million pixels or better a sensor with a pixel size of 3µm.
Represents the best balance between pixel size and resolution (reducing pixel size increases noise)
Leave a Reply