Posts filed under 'web 2.0'
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August 27th, 2008, 01:51pm
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The combination of Ning and WidgetLaboratory (WL) was a story that had wikinomics written all over it. The former is a platform that enables anyone to create their own social networks focused on anything they want, and they actively encouraged individuals and companies to innovate on top of the platform and make it even better. WL did just that, and in a big way - they sold a number of widgets (for around $30 / month) tied to the Ning platform, supporting somewhere in the range of 2,000 networks and 1,000,000 individuals. WL was the most popular widget creator on the platform.
If I was writing this post a week ago, it probably would have been a feel good story about wikinomics, but the wheels have recently fallen off the proverbial bus. This is a development equally worthy of exploring in relation to the challenges that come with embracing wikinomics principles - and particularly those that emerge when you only embrace a few of them. Of greatest interest to me - if more stories keep popping up like this, it could be a dramatic blow to more open, collaborative innovation processes. That would be a shame.
TechCrunch picked up the story on August 22nd, when Ning suddenly removed all of the WL widgets, without warning to anyone, from their network. This decision which clearly angered the company, as well as the thousands of customers who had spent time and money with WL in order to optimize their offerings. Based on the emails that WL has published on the web, this is the gist of Ning’s complaint:
Over the past few months, WidgetLaboratory’s applications have caused multiple and significant technical degradations to the Ning Platform. In point of fact, your code has broken numerous times and has negatively affected a large number of Networks in addition to the Ning Platform.
Read More »
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August 26th, 2008, 10:23am
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Building on Will’s posts about Obama using text messaging to announce his running mate (which I thought was brilliant), there is a great video on the BBC web site documenting how democracy has become digitized. It’s 10 minutes, but I highly recommend you take a peek.
Web 2.0 and the tools made available have changed the face of American politics. Not only are campaigns finding new ways to reach out to citizens, they’re also finding ways to engage them to become active participants and volunteers. Some people may argue that the ‘old people’ (so to speak), are the ones that vote; but for this election, Obama has mobilized the largest demographic – the children of the baby boom. And coincidentally, many of them are now coming of age and have the power to make a difference. The numbers speak for themselves. As Don Tapscott wrote in a previous post – During the Iowa preliminary, Obama had won by a landslide in millennial votes. His 28,000 vs. Clinton’s 5,400 and Edwards’ 6,900.
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August 15th, 2008, 01:57pm
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I wrote a few months ago about Facebook’s translation initiative launched to get Facebook translated into many, if not all, languages around the world. I was in a meeting with Don Tapscott the other day and he mentioned a talk he had with the top Facebook people who told him a bit more about their experience with the translating application so far.
They started with the Spanish translation which was finished in less than a month by about 1,500 volunteers – since then it’s had around 8,594 translators and 66,274 translations submitted. It has been so popular that Facebook has introduced translations for specific Spanish locales like Spain, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela…The German translation was next and took less than two weeks with around 2,000 contributors. The French translation of Facebook took a few days to complete and involved close to 10,000 people! A total of 67,445 translations have been submitted so far.
There are currently 63 languages open for translation on Facebook and they will be adding translation capability for languages that read from right-to-left such as Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Now that’s pretty impressive, how much money and how much time do you think it would have taken if Facebook had hired a person, or even a team of people to translate their site into French or Spanish (let’s not even start thinking about 63 languages).
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August 13th, 2008, 12:53pm
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An article on CNN.com last week tells about a 25 year old teacher from the Netherlands who identified a whole new class of celestial objects. The amazing thing is that she has no formal training in astronomy or astrophysics. She is simply a member of the large online stargazing community called Galaxy Zoo. Anyone can join this community.
The site gives users instructions on how to identify objects and then lets the community go wild. Members are given access to high-resolution photos of outer-space. Everyone is then allowed to identify the objects, and if enough members concur the classification is accepted. The format is similar to Wikipedia.
This site is a great example of the power of open source communities. There are literally endless amounts of celestial objects to be identified. With the help of everyday people, scientists are able to chart the night’s skies with speed and accuracy that was never before possible.
If you are looking for a new hobby check out Galaxy Zoo, and you can become an astronomer without ever leaving your living room.
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August 13th, 2008, 12:03pm
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For those who have not yet heard, Don and I are working on a sequel to Wikinomics that will lift the lid on a wide range of topics that we did not really get to in wikinomics 1.0. So, for example, we’ll be examining how mass collaboration is changing education, health care, science, government, democracy, international advocacy and national security.
Based on our early conversations, I’m already convinced that we’ll surface a whole new set of meaty themes that shed new light on the emerging wiki world. But If the experience is anything like writing the last book, those themes will probably not be apparent until we’re more than 50% through the writing process! So that’s where you, and the broader the wikinomics community, come in. Read More »
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August 12th, 2008, 11:29am
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For the past 2 years or so there has been much debate in the office about the state of the economy. My colleague Denis Hancock had a great post on the state of the housing market that highlighted this very interesting mash-up of historical US housing prices and Atari RollerCoaster Tycoon(R) 3. Now that we are clearly in the midst of an economic slump, there are many debates about what got us here and how it can be remedied.
During recessions company’s start to hunker down, prepare to weather the storm. We have seen this in our clients in terms of budget cuts, hiring freeze’s and even more aggressive staffing cutbacks. Regardless of the how you spin it, downsizing, streamlining or put more transparently ‘layoffs’, the point is that organization are looking to cut costs and do more (or at least the same) with less.
Personally this seems to be a perfect opportunity for Web 2.0 tools and technologies to further penetrate the enterprise. Collaborative tools are a lightweight, low cost technology designed to drive faster communication, more efficient collaboration and greater transparency in organizations. If you are an organization trying to do more with less this would seem to be the ideal solution.
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August 11th, 2008, 02:41pm
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Nicholas Carr is a well-respected thought leader who we have agreed and disagreed with in the past (see here and here). A few weeks ago, he posted The Cloud’s Not So Silver Lining as a response to Sarah Lacy’s article in BusinessWeek. Once again, Mr. Carr, we respectfully disagree, and hope to have a spirited debate on the topic and we would appreciate the comments and insights from both our readers and yours.
He describes how the software as a service (SaaS) model and on-demand computing is not a gold mine for software vendors.
Anyone who thinks the software-as-a-service business is a gold mine for vendors is wrong. The economics are fundamentally different from those of the traditional software business - and not in a good way. As Lacy writes, the Web is “just as good at displacing revenue as it is in generating sources of it. Just ask the music industry or, ahem, print media. Think Robin Hood, taking riches from the elite and distributing them to everyone else, including the customers who get to keep more of their money and the upstarts that can more easily build competing alternatives.” Web apps remain a hard sell when it comes to big, conservative enterprises, and the capital and marketing costs are daunting, particularly if you’re running your own data centers. This revolution in business software will play out slowly and, for most suppliers, painfully.
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August 11th, 2008, 07:46am
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Very observant readers may note that this post has some striking similarities to what I wrote about three months ago - the collaborative experience economy. What I tried to do then was connect the “four forms of theater” idea from Pine & Gilmore’s “The Experience Economy” with the principles of wikinomics - hence the name of the post. For whatever reason I didn’t get a lot of traction with it, but I’m still intrigued by the underlying ideas, so I wanted to re-frame the idea directly in relation to social media. More to the point, I’d like to hear from wikinomics readers as to whether it’s a useful framework for thinking about the use of social media in relation to creating experiences both for and with customers.
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August 8th, 2008, 04:32pm
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So of course there is now the interesting phenomenon of online dating sites. These communities, like lavalife, have become commonplace and are a great way to connect people looking for love. I have some friends who have used these sites before and have gone out on dates or even found love - but, initial interactions are still online. What if you saw someone on the street, in the mall or on a subway and felt a feeling akin to ‘love at first sight’. What would you do?
Well, when New York web designer Patrick Moberg saw HIS ‘girl of his dreams’ on the 5 train (and let her slip away) he didn’t let that stop him. He turned to his 8 million fellow New Yorkers (not to mention the rest of the world) to help him find this mystery girl.
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August 7th, 2008, 02:11pm
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Last week I spoke with Andrew Mottaz and Blake Johnson, the founders of Portland-based Site9, about their new software as a service offering: ProtoShare. ProtoShare allows web developers to collaboratively create interactive website prototypes, ensuring that everyone is on the same page during the development process. But more importantly, ProtoShare opens the process up to other stakeholder, such as the marketing team, allowing them to follow the project’s progress over time, and provide timely and effective feedback to developers. By improving communication and collaboration within the project team, and between them and their clients, ProtoShare has the potential to revolutionize the process of web design. Rather than write about it myself, I though I’d share the words of Andrew and Blake. With their permission, I have published an edited and abridged transcript of our conversation below.
WILL: To start off, why don’t you give us a bit of background about yourselves, your company, and both the process and motivation behind the development of ProtoShare?
ANDREW: Sure. We started Site9 back in 1998 as a web development company. We were always building tools to make ourselves more efficient, and we saw that a much bigger opportunity for us was to develop those tools into a platform we could sell. Our first product was Launch, which is an end–to-end web development solution. One of the aspects of Launch that customers really responded to was that it gave them the ability to create prototypes of websites: visual and interactive mock-ups that allowed the entire development team and their clients to have a common understanding of what the final product was going to be. And what we started to realize was that by taking that functionality, and enabling a greater level of collaboration within the development team and between developers and their clients—including those without technical experience—we could make something really powerful.
BLAKE: And with the advent of Web 2.0 technology and the whole architecture of collaboration and people working together online, we started thinking, “That’s how we enable collaboration.” You don’t just run your program on a server in someone’s company; you run it on the Internet where people anywhere in the world can participate in the project. You can have a team with people from all over the world working together.
WILL: What’s the advantage of a prototyping tool?
BLAKE: Everybody in web development should be prototyping. You want to move in an inverse pyramid, from abstract to concrete, working your way up. But a lot of people don’t prototype. And those that do, they often use things like Visio or Photoshop. So it’s flat. When you take that to a client—along with your big spec document—and say, “Here’s how it’s going to work. You’re going to go here. You’re going to here. You’re going to have this,” they all say, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” And then, when the project is close to being done, they say, “I don’t like this.” And then you’ve got all this rework that could have been avoided if there had been more communication earlier on. So the advantage of a prototyping tool like ProtoShare is that it makes prototyping easier for developers, and provides the interactive and collaborative capabilities that get clients to engage with a prototype.
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August 6th, 2008, 06:01pm
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If your dog doesn’t already have a Doggyspace account it may be missing out. This site was launched in mid July and already has a big following. According to the site “Doggyspace is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who love dogs. People use Doggyspace to keep up with friends, upload funny dog videos, and to give their dogs their own cyber place.”
It’s a novel idea… A place for dogs and their owners to connect and interact. I checked out the site, and to be honest it seemed very sparse. I’m a dog lover and I’m not opposed to getting JD (best dog ever) his own page, but the site didn’t seem to offer much. There are very few features or networking tools to speak of. There are a few pics and videos: They were all about as exciting as Tylenol PM.
The idea isn’t bad but it is likely that they are just trying to capitalize off the success Myspace and Facebook have achieved.
Take a look at the site and let me know what you think. Does your best pal spike need his own page?
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August 4th, 2008, 09:52am
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Don’t ask me how it happened. I was just planning to check my email last night, but for some reason I ended up on the United Nations website. I spent a couple hours searching through the information. It was amazing how much it contains. Dan Herman actually wrote a blog post about it a few months back.
The website is filled with research papers, news, and reports highlighting what innovative governments, businesses, and educators can do to empower the people. It also breaks them down into a variety of case studies like Debate Europe where European citizens can share their opinions, concerns and ideas on the future of the European Union. The French National Commission of Public Debate (CNDP) has an innovative site that allows citizens to debate on infrastructure projects in France. Chunceon, Korea citizens have direct web access to the Mayor’s office to submit ideas and then receive feedback on them. Seeing case studies like these can really help allowing people to interpret and to better understand the opportunities available to their countries, states, provinces, and small towns. They even have some of our own Anthony Williams’ stuff in there. Read More »
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July 24th, 2008, 05:04pm
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Last night I left my red knapsack, with my white MacBook inside, in the back of a taxi cab. Needless to say, I’m a little upset. But the thing that is so frustrating about it isn’t the possibility that it might have been stolen (by another passenger, the driver, someone at the taxi cab company), its the possibility that it is, even now, in the hands of some kind soul who wants nothing more than to give it back to me, but has no way of knowing who I am. (I’ve been phoning the cab companies, but I’m not sure what company’s cab I was in.)
Of course, I knew there must be a web 2.0 solution to this problem. So I went surfing around. It turns out that 416-TAXICAB (a company that charges users to connect them to the first available cab company so they don’t have to put up with busy signals) runs the Toronto Taxi Lost-and-Found online notice board. Great idea. But from the looks of it, its only being used by people who have lost things, not those who have found them.
In other areas, however, the internet greatly improving on our traditional methods of lost and found. A few examples:
- When Matt Preprost found a lost camera, he decided to post the photos on the net. Within days he had not only returned the camera to its rightful owner, people from around the world were sending him photos from lost cameras they had found. IFoundYourCamera.net reunites people with their lost photographs, sometimes decades after they were taken.
- TheLostPets.com runs databases for lost dogs (FidoFinder.com) and lost cats (TabbyTracker.com). Those who have lost or found missing pets can post information (including a reward), and search through other entries.
- Pet Harbor allows users to search US and Canadian animal shelters for lost dogs and adoptable dogs, as well as post information about found dogs. This service is used by local governments, including the City of Toronto’s Animal Services Department and Sutter County, California.
Anyone got their own examples (or any info on my laptop!)?
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July 24th, 2008, 02:38pm
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A few weeks ago, my colleague Ben Letalik wrote about the MLB in his weekly Wikinomics Report Card. This Tuesday, the MLB announced that it began installing IBM software “to exploit the next generation of the Internet.”
“The IBM WebSphere Portal software architecture allows us to consolidate information from a variety of sources. It enables collaboration within our user community and provides a strong platform for future growth and development,” said Mike Morris, Vice President of Application Development and Program Management for MLB.
The immediate use of the software will help umpires officiate the game better by providing insights on player behaviors, weather conditions, statistics, and other key information.
“Major League Baseball has vaulted into the Web 2.0 era with powerful collaboration technology that puts the power of the World Wide Web and technology specialists into the hands of the baseball experts,” said Bob Picciano, General Manager, IBM Lotus Software.
I am hoping that, with the introduction of IBM’s software, the MLB becomes more transparent on issues concerning the game such as steroids and the idea of having instant replay. I can see how umpires will benefit from having player statistics and behavior tendencies instantly given to them. Maybe later when the software is integrated into the MLB culture, the umpires well have the opportunity to receive instant replay on a screen, so that human error can be reduced. It’s good to see that such a large part of American culture is beginning to understand the need to collaborate, especially such a large multi-billion dollar business.
I am interested to see if the NFL, MLS, NBA, or NHL decides to follow baseball’s footsteps.
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July 23rd, 2008, 03:09pm
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A CNN article yesterday announced that MySpace will now be cooperating with OpenID. OpenID is a service that allows you to sign in to a variety of web accounts with one user name, password, and registration. Wordpress, AOL, Yahoo, and Google are just a few examples of participating websites. I haven’t used OpenID yet, but it seems like a great service. I am always forgetting the different user names and passwords I have created for different sites. I try to use the same or similar information at every site, but there are always some sites that have to be difficult by forcing weird syntax for your login credentials. OpenID eliminates all of that confusion. Another great benefit is that you don’t need to fill out new registration information when joining participating sites.
This service is a great example of the collaboration which is taking place between rival internet companies. MySpace also collaborates with Ebay and Yahoo by allowing users to have one set of profile information that is shared by all 3 sites. These companies consider each other to be competitors, yet they are working together to create an easier, more efficient customer experience.
This is refreshing to see, and I for one would be happy to never fill out another pesky website registration ever again!
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July 21st, 2008, 10:39pm
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In the age of always on technology, which “allows” us to be connected to the office 24/7, it is getting harder and harder to determine when a personal and private activity is actually just as it’s described - personal and private. Just ask Colin Wrightman, Lara Logan, Max Mosley or Larry Craig, each mentioned in a thought-provoking article in this morning’s Globe and Mail newspaper. Each of these individuals has been involved in highly-publicized and (morally-questionnable to some) activities, that even though carried out while “off the clock,” have had potentially marked effects on their professional careers.
A particular section of the article piqued my interest and really got me thinking:
Quoting the author: It is a strange new world for employers, who must be ready to protect their own image when embarrassing details of their employees’ lives become known.
Quoting an assistant professor from the Ivey Business School, Claus Rerup: We’re living in a more media-crazy world, where what your employees do can potentially have very bad implications for you…But people have not put two and two together that this could happen.
This brings me to a few questions: In such a time when Web 2.0 tools enable powerful mass collaboration and ever-decreasing barriers to communication and transparency, should employees’ private activities (legality assumed) be subject to review and possible reprimand at the hands of an employer? What is the employer’s role and what should be within their power when an employee’s damaging private activity suddenly becomes public? What is the role of the HR team and the boardroom when it comes time to “protect the company’s image?”
On top of the email handcuffs, has Web 2.0 helped create moral restraints as well?
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July 17th, 2008, 10:37am
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In the last 20 some odd years corporate security has made some headway. Companies are now at the point where they are reasonably efficient at keeping ‘hackers’ out and letting employees in. The problem is that to get to this point the enterprise has had to put up walls in the name of safety and security, but at the cost of functionality and logic.
The current Jericho model of security (fitting name) is great a putting up impermeable walls to keep to dangers outside at bay, but not so at quickly adapting and reconfiguring them. Even inside the walls of the enterprise security has largely been based on group permission. Which is just a step up from the one size fits all XXXL t-shirts that get blasted out of an air gun at sporting events.
The problem is that organizations today need to be agile, reconfigurable, be able to leverage partners and third party expertise. Unfortunately to operate in this new environment security and permissions need to be dynamic and flexible both internally and externally. To become a next generation enterprise it will be increasingly important to both empower and trust employees when it comes to information and security decisions. Read More »
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July 14th, 2008, 12:05pm
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We’ve all heard it before. The nay-sayers doubting the benefits of social technology. However, Jive Software CMO Sam Lawrence has posted a series of 10 charts on his blog Go Big Always illustrating many of the unsaid (or unexpressed) truths of organizations’ views regarding Web 2.0 tools.
Although comedic in nature, these diagrams give you something to think about. How much of the criticsms of Enterprise 2.0 out there are well-founded? Argued by people who have actually tried to use the technology, and how much of it is just ‘hot air‘ based on peoples’ perceptions.
Three of my favourites:
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July 12th, 2008, 05:14pm
Most of us use popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter for staying in touch with friends and meeting new people, but have you ever heard of someone using one of these sites to free someone from jail?
That’s exactly what happened here. A photographer, James Karl Buck, and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were jailed in Egypt back in April. Buck used his cell phone to post the message “Arrested” on Twitter. Within a day, his school hired an attourney, and Buck was released. However, his translator was detained for an additional 3 months. Buck again went to his Twitter network, now with over 570 followers, for help in getting his translator freed. Over 900 signed an online petition which was used to free Maree.
Whoever thought the power of Web 2.0 could have an impact like this? Web 2.0 enables people to get the word out about a certain issue or topic that needs exposure. My colleague Komail Mithani wrote an entry earlier this week on how Web 2.0 enables people to have their voices heard in regards to customer service issues.
Freeing people from jail via a social networking site or other Web 2.0 technology may not be something one can expect to increase in occurrence in the future but I do foresee more and more interesting and unique uses of Web 2.0. What are some ways you’ve used a Web 2.0 technology for a unique purpose or goal?
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July 9th, 2008, 03:39pm
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A few days ago, an article written in the Boston.com business column told a story about Comcast responding to a complaint by C.C. Chapman about his service. While watching his HDTV, the reception starting becoming very poor so Chapman quickly started expressing his anger on Twitter and “within 24 hours, a technician was at Chapman’s house in Milford to fix the problem.”
“Chapman’s experience is one example of the ways customer service is changing in an age when a single disgruntled consumer with a broadband connection can ignite a crisis,” from Carolyn Y. Johnson, the author of the article.
The article shows the power of ordinary people fighting against large corporations. For fun, in Google, I searched “Comcast complaints” and found over 1,870 listings and without quotations around the phrase Google brings up over a million listings.
“Comcast’s customer service was rated “poor” by 30% of respondents” and it had a strong hit after this video, which showed a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch. It was viewed over 1.2 million times with over 700 comments. Also, a website named ComcastmustDie.com was created for users to tell their stories of their experience and grievances with Comcast.
It seems like Comcast finally got the message. With the emergence of Web 2.0 ordinary people can have their voice heard and create a terror of a public relations problem for companies. “Listening and acting upon what [customers] are hearing and being very proactive is different than waiting for a customer to pick up the phone and call us. We can nip it in the bud,” said Karen Hartzell, division vice president of customer care for Comcast’s NorthCentral division.
In the new business environment, companies need to implement a team of individuals to help combat the conversations about their company. By combat, I am not referring to a retaliation, but providing a solution to the problem. Working with customers to generate a satisfying customer experience is essential to thriving in business today. Customer service is just one of the departments shifted by Wikinomics.
I’m interesting to hearing your thoughts on customer service. Is their a company that you will absolutely never use because of their horrible customer service, or is their a certain company that has a level of customer service that brings you back? It may or may not have to deal with Comcast, but please share.
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