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Posts from the ‘social computing’ Category

Jul 21

1 Comment

Google+ is +Google

Since the Google+ announcement and the subsequent discussion about whether it’ll be Twitter or Facebook or both that will suffer and die as a result, Google+ is emerging as much more than just a social networking site. It is really about integrating Google’s offering across the board into a single, consistent platform – probably the biggest gap in Google’s offerings.

Google has always been about getting the job done, and I think Google’s interpretation of a social networking site is about productivity and collaboration (one of the key features of Google Docs). In contrast, Facebook is mainly about keeping up with your ‘friends’ and playing a game or two – a virtual version of playing the games console at home while chatting with your friends (and watching a bunch of ads). Google’s strength in the social networking market will be their ability to turn the social networking experience into a useful experience for yourself and your friends; rather than being a time waster. Read more

Apr 10

social networks
2 Comments

The Social Enterprise – what problem are we trying to solve?

Social Computing along with Cloud Computing is one of the hot IT buzz words – i.e., the Social Cloud must then be the ultimate in buzz word compliance. This is in fact what Andrew McAfee from MIT’s Management school and Mike Gotta from Cisco are discussing.

Andrew presents his Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way in a recent blog post. He describes a project done internally at Tata Consulting Services, where they build a social collaboration tool to rate and share the broad collection of project derived knowledge. It sounds deceptively simple, but on the other hand, I have seen the results from a number of similar projects deploying a very structured, formal approach to knowledge sharing – and none of those worked very well – so why not? The real trick at TCS didn’t seem to be so much about the tool, but what motivated the TCS consultants to engage. You could call it a bottom up approach to the Social Enterprise.

The opposite example is presented by Mike Gotta in his presentation: Build an Architecture of Participation. I have to warn you, it is heavy on models, slides etc. Although he is discussing the same thing, it is probably more of what you’d call a top down approach to the Social Enterprise.

What’s missing from both the blog post Read more

Jan 6

5 Comments

Top 11 technologies of the decade

To celebrate the turn of a decade, IEEE Spectrum Magazine has compiled the list of top 11 technologies of the previous decade. Apart from being an interesting read, the newsworthy part is the fact that technology 1 (Smartphones), 2 (Social Networking), 3 (Voice over IP) 4 (LED), 6 (Cloud Computing), 10 (digital photography), and 11 (Class D audio) are all closely related. Read more

Jun 7

Another case of poor Google privacy?

A while ago I signed up with Aardvark (vark.com – owned by Google) – a site where you can ask all sorts of questions and get answers from whoever is (or feels) able to answer your question. Great idea, but I haven’t found it particularly useful. So today I decided to login and see if I was able to delete my account.

I found that I am able to deactivate my account, but that just meant that I can’t access my account, until I login again at which point the account will be re-activated. Huh? Then why (a series of swear words) bother?

I’ve seen similar ‘deactivate account’ functionality with other social network sites, but it is truly beyond belief that companies think that type of function should somehow satisfy anyone’s requirements – it’s a joke.

Sure, companies can probably try to get away with claiming copyright for anything hosted on their site, but surely the line is draw with ‘personal identifiable information’ – my name and email address is mine regardless. Please stop pretending and let’s have a proper delete account function (even Facebook provides one, although it is hard to find).

Update: I tried to contact Aardvark support and the dedicated privacy email address (privacy@themechanicalzoo.com found on this page: http://vark.com/privacy), which produced this response (and yes, I use Gmail):

From: Mail Delivery Subsystem 
To: john@johnbrondum.com
X-Failed-Recipients: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-
Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:29:02 +0000

Hello john@johnbrondum.com,

We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact
(privacy) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post
messages to the group. A few more details on why you weren't able
to post:

 * You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly.
 * The owner of the group may have removed this group.
 * You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post.
 * This group may not be open to posting.

If you have questions related to this or any other Google Group,
visit the Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/a/google.
com/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=groups.cs.

Thanks,

google.com admins

This is actually getting funny – in a tragic kind of way :)

May 20

1 Comment

Collaboration integration problem for Google?

I was keen to try out Google Wave now that it had been launched for Google Apps. My domain is registered with Google Apps as I didn’t want the gmail.com extension and Google has so far appeared a bit more conservative regarding the degree of testing expected of their end users (i.e., Google Buzz is not available yet).

But it is becoming clear that Google is slowly creating an integration problem for their collaboration tools. Consider this:

  • All the Google services are hosted in a Google Apps and a ‘normal’ Google Account version. I use a mix of services from both sets and my browser regularly gets confused due to two sets of incompatible login sessions – i.e., it takes me to the “wrong” service with no way of merging or sharing data.
  • Google Calendar doesn’t appear integrated with Google Wave’s todo, meeting etc functionality – why not?
  • Google Docs can be embedded inside a Google Wave, but why can’t a wave be stored as a Google Doc?
  • The Google Doc and Wave collaboration features appear to be an almost complete overlap, yet they are not even remotely compatible.

Google Wave is very very clever concept, but unfortunately the world is using email – to lure people across, I think a much better integration between those two worlds is required (e.g., Gmail and Wave).