Fragmentation of Social Sharing Environments

Progress requires innovation, success spawns imitation, competition requires differentiation - and after 7+ years of “Web 2.0”, there are multiple sharing environments vying for our attention (and participation). Content Creation Blogging has morphed beyond it’s “personal diary” origins; Blogger, Wordpress, and the various CMS platforms have moved to become a long-format publishing platforms that continue to evolve. My own experience with this blog (cazh1) and internal blogs at work has shown that “posts” are more essays, articles, documentation on what…

Read More ...

Twitter and the First Amendment

Apparently, 2011 is the year when Twitter, Facebook, and smartphone videos are graduating from Social Networking toys to evolutionary, revolutionary Sociology tools. Can they be controlled by governments or big business? It's been argued that any such controls might run afoul of Amendment No. 1 from our Bill of Rights ... how amazing for a clever hack that originated in a daylong brainstorming session. Freedom of Speech, Assembly, and the Press What is a tweet? 140 characters - one or…

Read More ...

Gartner Symposium 2010

Last week, I was able to attend this annual Gartner event - something akin to SAPPHIRE, the SAP uber-users group meeting, without the vendor specific rah-rah. An interesting event - 7400 attendees, over four days. A typical conference - multiple sessions along major tracks, and I bounced between sessions dealing with these issues: Master Data - Continuing to look for the latest information - this is still a fast growing software market, and ideas around things like "data governance" (people…

Read More ...

More Amazing Social Media Statistics

A follow-on from my last post; speaking of interesting Social Media statistics ... would you believe ... If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's 4th largest 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices 25% of search results for the world's Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content Pretty amazing stuff…

Read More ...

eMail is Dead, Long Live Social Networking: Don’t Get Left Behind

via Fred Wilson - a stunning slide from Morgan Stanley's recent Internet Trends report: The primary topic of the report is the growth and future prospects of the mobile internet - reason enough read through all 87 slides. However, I am slightly amazed by the fact that eMail runs second to the relatively new phenomenon of Social Networking, driven primarily by consumer behavior and Generation Y. Admit it - more than once, YouTube and Twitter have made the water-cooler talk…

Read More ...

Underwhelming experiences with Google Wave

Took some time today to work with the new communication meme - Google Wave. I wouldn't call it a fundamentally new way to communicate - well, not yet. I think Google is safe to continue with a "preview" label - clearly not even "beta" yet. No horrible bugs - at least on the Windows platform - but some obviously missing features. And, I am not all that impressed with the basic idea - it's just a mashup of Google Docs,…

Read More ...

Notes from SAPPHIRE 09

Yesterday at work was "catch-up day" from a week at SAPPHIRE 2009, the annual user conference for SAP. As with the JDA/Manugistics conference earlier this year, there were concerns that attendance was going to be low, because so many companies are limiting travel expense. At the conference, I did hear that attendance was only was 60% lower than last year. Conferences like this are great opportunities for IT to do a ton of learning - about the specific technology, of…

Read More ...

Five Stages of Twitter Relevance

I'm already fielding internal (as well as external) questions about the application of Twitter in a manufacturing company, and I'm developing a reasonably good model, I think - one that will apply to the hard-core, salt-of-the-earth, manufacturing business leader that I've worked with at many organizations. This "maturity model" approach has been used before; back in December of 2008, Bhagarva sketched out the Five Stages of Twitter Acceptance - but that model only helps existing bloggers and social networkers understand…

Read More ...

Practical Applications of Twitter in Manufacturing?

Over the past few weeks I've had a couple of interesting discussions about the introduction of Twitter to Manufacturing. When someone poses a question like this to me, it throws me for a minor loop, because for very basic, practical reasons, it just doesn't seem to apply. More keyboards & data entry on the floor? Not likely. However, a few months ago I wrote this rather breathless item, expounding on a brainstorm regarding the use of YouTube and Twitter in…

Read More ...