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Live Blogging from Google: Launch of Google Buzz

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:11:59 -0800

This morning, Google is announcing some exciting new features for two of its most popular applications.

Team Red, as we affectionately call ourselves, is present at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and we'll be live blogging the event, giving you, dear reader, a fascinating play-by-play. Stay tuned for updates!

The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Just refresh this post to see new content as events unfold.

Additional on-the-fly research and images from RWW journalist Frederic Lardinois.

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11:11: The event is over! Time to chase people down and ask some more pointed questions. Stay tuned to RWW for ongoing analysis.

11:08: Developers, here's the Google Code page for Buzz's APIs.

11:06: Will Buzz results appear high in Google search results? They're not doing anything special to promote those results, but users can search within Buzz. And all posts are indexed in real time.

11:04: Buzz is live.

11:02: Buzz will pull in tweets, will publish to Twitter as a Twitter client in a later version. The team has put a lot of spam controls in place.

10:58: Will Google's social products succeed? Brin says he's seen a lot more productivity from using Google Buzz internally. Horowitz says the approach - creating something useful, not just entertaining - is different from "anything else I've tried."

10:56: Buzz user feeds will be available via PubSubHubBub/XML. Google will be releasing APIs. Google intends to make it as open as possible. They also want to integrate Buzz with other Google products such as the homepage.

10:52: Sergei Brin takes the stage. Fangirl here is very excited. Q&A starts. Buzz could integrate with Wave, a lot of functionality is inspired by Wave.

10:51: Buzz will launch at 11 a.m., when it will begin to roll out to Gmail users. Journos here will get it first. For the rest of Gmail users, they'll get Buzz within a few days.

10:50: Google is launching Buzz as an enterprise product soon, as well. "It will change the way businesses work around the world." Wasn't Wave supposed to do that?

10:45: Mobile Buzz will have a "nearby" setting to see posts/pics from folks around you. Makes the product a bit of a Foursquare/Yelp competitor?

10:42: Buzz allows for mobile posting by voice. The users speaks, and Google transcribes the audio into a geotagged text post.

10:40: You can use Buzz from Google's mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms. These apps will translate lat/long into 'real locations.' Buzz will take its best guess and ask for confirmation. Tied in with Place Pages.

10:39: You can use Buzz from Google's mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms.

10:37: Location is a powerful signal for relevancy. In the digital world we have not yet elevated location as a powerful signal. Computers speak lat/long, but humans have a hard time interpreting this information.

10:35: Mobile: "You are going to love the new product experiences we will launch today." Consume and use Buzz on your mobile. One of Google's great insides was pagerank, which gave websites relevancy. Now, we need to find relevancy in social expressions on Twitter and other social networks. "It's easy to start drowning in this." How do we find relevancy in the real world? What signals do we use?

10:32: Google Buzz will have @replies with auto-complete. Users who are @replied will receive inbox notifications.

10:29: When a user posts to Google Buzz, he can share publicly to followers and his Google profile or privately to his existing Gmail groups or custom groups. Notifications of shares and comments will appear in a user's inbox with a special Buzz icon next to those items. Comments will appear in real time.

10:25: The Buzz tab will be located right below your inbox tab. Gmail will "know" who your friends are. The social stream features Yahoo! Meme-like content previews and will play nicely with Flickr and YouTube. Pictures will open in a lightbox-type UI. Shared links will feature headlines and thumbnails.

10:22: Buzz will surface your social graph by having you auto-follow the people you email and IM with the most. It will have a rich and fast sharing experience for multimedia sharing. Sharing will be public and Google-indexed, or private - just depending on how users choose to share. It'll be integrated with your inbox in a way that goes beyond normal email. Finally, it will filter out the garbage and leave "just the good stuff."

10:20: Google is launching Google Buzz, a Google approach to sharing. Todd Jackson is the product manager, and he reveals that it's built into Gmail.

10:15: Google VP Product Marketing Bradley Horowitz kicks off the event, "I've got something exciting... we're going to talk about sharing." He's talking about finding the right audience for your content, real-time sharing and tools for attention management.

10:13: Wondering how much trouble I'd get in for casually paging through the slide preso on the podium laptop before the event starts... Probably not worth the scoop.

10:00: The event's a wee bit late kicking off, but Dodge is chatting about his work with Google Apps. He says the product range is already quite broad; they're working now to create a deeper set of features.

9:48: The music is pumping and the luminaries are trickling in and getting caffeinated. I'm sitting next to Jeremiah Owyang and Don Dodge.

Discuss

Europe's 17 Golden Rules for Keeping Safe on Social Networks

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:05:24 -0800

Are you using your real name on your social network profiles? According to the European Union's Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), that's a big mistake. A new report, published to coincide with Europe's Safer Internet Day, details the dangers of using social networks and lays out 17 "golden rules" for keeping safe on social networks. The report's authors are especially worried about the proliferation of mobile social networks and, among other things, recommend that users turn off all location-based services whenever they are not absolutely needed.

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The report argues that you should always protect your social networking accounts by using a pseudonym. After all, the authors say, your real friends will know who is hiding behind your nickname and will still be able to find you easily. We are not quite sure if this is a very realistic proposition, though some of the ENISA's "Golden Rules" are quite reasonable.

17 Golden Rules

Here are the rules:

Pay Attention to What You Post and Upload:

Consider carefully which images, videos and information you choose to publish
Never post sensitive information
Use a pseudonym

Choose Your Friends with Care:

Do not accept friend requests from people you do not know
Verify all your contacts

Protect Your Work Environment and Avoid Reputation Risk:

When joining a social networking site use your personal e-mail address (not your company e-maill address)
Be careful how you portray your company or organization online
Do not mix your business contacts with your friend contacts
Do not let anyone see your profile or personal information without your consent
Do not leave your mobile phone unattended
Do not save your password on your mobile phone
Use the security features available on your mobile phone

Protect Your Mobile Phone and the Information Saved on It:

Be careful what you publish about someone else

Inform Yourself:

Read carefully and in full the privacy policy and the condition and terms of use of the social network you choose

Protect Your Privacy With the Privacy Settings:

Use privacy-oriented settings (check who can see your pictures, who can contact you and who can add comments)

Report Stolen Phones Immediately:

Be careful when using your mobile phone and pay attention to where you put it

Pay Attention to Location Based Services and Information of Your Mobile Phone:

Deactivate location based services when not using them

What do You Think?

Most of these rules seem quite reasonable, but are you really going to use a nickname for your social network profile? Do you find it hard to keep your private life and work life separate on Facebook? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Flickr Co-Founder Unveils Glitch: "The Greatest Game There Ever Was?"

Mike Melanson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:40:00 -0800

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his company Tiny Speck have come out today with a game they boldly assert could be "the greatest game there ever was". The massively-multiplayer, Web-based Flash game was unveiled this morning and will be opening for private alpha testing soon.

While the game will not be fully open to the public until late in 2010, the current site not only gives us a preview of what Tiny Speck has been working on, but offers a way for you to keep track of what's new and sign up to be one of the game's testers.

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What's Your Glitch

First, let's get the name out of the way:

It's called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the "glitch" -- a grave danger of disemprobablization.

We had a chance to talk with Butterfield this morning about what to look forward to and the game he described was certainly something different. Though he says they haven't determined the pricing structure and are now just halfway through development, the game will primarily be free, with additional features and in-game goods available for purchase.

Glitch, from the looks of the preview video, looks like a standard side-scroller game with a Flash look that will be appropriate for all ages. As the FAQ states, the only thing you'll be killing in this game is your time. Butterfield said that, from the beginning, they were looking at creating an "something that's non-violent, a little bit more absurd and surreal."

In The Minds of Giants

The game, Butterfield told us, "takes place in the minds of these giants that are walking along and singing and humming the world into existence" - a reference to aboriginal myths of the world's creation. This backbone gives the whole game a flexibility that seems to be key, both in the experience of the game as well as the game-play itself.

"If you're in someone's imagination, even the rules can change to a certain extent based on location," Butterfield said, noting that games visual and aural design will change throughout.

Calling the game an "emerging collaborative situation," Butterfield said that the players would really create the game's dynamics as they went along.

"The social, economic and political structures that people evolve will change the direction of the game," he told us. "You can have a supply and demand economy."

But on it's most base level, the game is still a puzzle-based side-scroller, with some interesting new potential.

Where Will It Go?

One of the things we're immediately wondering about is the connections with social media made available by a Web-based platform. Already, the public beta testing sign-up offers a connection with Facebook Connect. The brief FAQ on the site hints at the social nature of the game, reading "We'll make it easy for you to find [your friends]. And since it is all one big world, there are no worries about who is on what server."

This could be a big leap from other MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, where you have to chose a server, only to later find out that half your friends are on this server, while half your friends are on different servers and you can't play together.

In addition to the potential for social interaction, such as tweeting your in-game location - one example offered by Butterfield - Glitch also provides an API that will allow for even more extra-game interaction and expandability.

The game's development in Java and Javascript "means we'll be able to push new content -- new items, new places, new characters -- on a daily basis," states the FAQ. "It also means that we'll have lots of APIs with which the game can be expanded and extended."

For now, get there quick and sign up for private alpha testing, which starts soon. Public beta testing will begin this summer.

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After Success in Boulder, Open Angel Forum Marches Onward to San Francisco and New York

Chris Cameron — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:10:00 -0800

The talk of the venture capital and entrepreneurial towns these days is the Open Angel Forum which after its second event in Boulder, Colorado is now announcing two more events in New York and San Francisco. Brainchild of Jason Calacanis, the Open Angel Forum (OAF) is an opportunity for startups to get face-time with active big-time venture capitalists and angel investors - all for the low, low price of free.

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As we mentioned back in January following the debut event in Los Angeles, the OAF was formed out of frustration over events and investors which charge startups to present their companies - the so called "pay to pitch" debate. In a true example of making the best of a bad situation, the OAF has created a place where the both the best startups with the most potential can meet the top VCs and angels who are looking to invest.

At last week's Boulder event, six startups from over 100 applicants were chosen to meet with twenty hand-picked VCs, and all seemed to walk away from the event satisfied and thrilled by the event. In fact, all six companies - FaceFile, Grogger, TeamSnap, Odojo, Decasun and Kijubi - have all since blogged about their experiences.

"This fairness to us and others presenting plus the rule to only allow active investors makes OAF the best event we've attended since we started two years ago," writes Beckie Mostello of FaceFile. "The couple of hours we just spent with the OAF Forum tonight in Boulder, Colorado was the most valuable investment-oriented experience we have yet to be involved in," echoes Dave DuPont of TeamSnap.

The Open Angel Forum will keep its current momentum at full-speed-ahead as it rolls into San Francisco in March with a little help from local hosts Kevin Rose and Chris Sacca. The following month, Calacanis and Co. will travel to the east-coast for OAF New York, hosted by Brian Alvey and Charlie O'Donnell.

Mark Solon, an investor with Highway 12 Ventures and one of the selected VCs at last week's event in Boulder, believes the OAF is a further example of the changing landscape in the venture capital industry. As Solon notes on Highway 12's blog, Calacanis and OAF Boulder hosts Brad Feld and David Cohen represent a "groundswell of young investors" that are dedicating their lives to improving the entrepreneurial community across the country.

"These guys didn't go through a ton of effort recruiting 30 qualified investors from near and far, getting sponsors for the evening, securing a meeting place, and going through about 100 applicants for personal gain," writes Solon. "They did it because it was the right thing to do; to set an example for angel organizations everywhere that it's about the entrepreneur."

In an interview with Colorado Tech TV (embedded below), Calacanis expressed his satisfaction with the reception of the OAF, as well as his thoughts on the event's impact on the evolving venture funding ecosystem.

"We're not trying to replace other events like Open Coffee or the Tech Meetup -- those are great events for networking," said Calacanis. "[But] there is definitely a market need for a legitimate angel forum. The other forums out there were not really filled with angel investors, [...] and people were paying to pitch to a room of a hundred people with maybe two or three possible investors."

For those considering applying for the San Francisco and New York events, Boulder participant Mike Stemple of Odojo says that submitting a video application is not only a good way to stand out from the crowd, but it also helps you rehearse your pitch in a short form before the event. While he considers himself and his company extremely lucky to have been able to attend the OAF event, he encourages other startups to not count themselves out before applying.

"I believe for any given event ANYONE with a well thought out idea that solves a real world problem, can articulate it, has gotten beyond the idea stage and has actually built a company around the idea, could make it to present," writes Stemple on his blog.

The Open Angel Forum is now accepting applications for New York and San Francisco, so don't hesitate to get your application in early because there is bound to be hundreds. What cities would you like to see the Open Angel Forum come to next? Let us know in the comments!

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Amazon Simple Storage Service - Not So Simple Anymore

Tim Hastings — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:02:56 -0800

Today Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a new feature of their Simple Storage Service (S3).

Object Versioning now joins the ever growing list of features supported by S3. This proves once again that Amazon Web Services are listening to their customers and putting plenty of distance between them and their competition.

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They Grow Up So Fast

In March 2006 Amazon publicly launched S3, the first of their web services. In doing so, they also unveiled their new Web Services division of their business.

The service will soon celebrate its 4th birthday; at its 3rd birthday over 59 billion objects had already been stored. That is approximately 10 objects for each person on the planet! By anyone's standard, the service is successful.

Amazon S3 provides storage buckets that allow users to PUT files in and then GET them back later. Simple right?

Taking things beyond the simple GET and PUT might have a lot to do with S3's success. Amazon has added many features making S3 suitable for many different use cases.

Pick and Mix Features

The different S3 features can be switched on and off for individual buckets allowing users to pick different features depending on what they want to do.

For example:

Backups - buckets can be private and because they are securely hosted by Amazon far away in the cloud, they are an ideal "other place" to store a copy of important files.

File Sharing - access controls can be used to white-list other users to have access to your buckets.

Content Distribution - buckets can be made publically available via HTTP. This makes it perfect for websites to offload the serving of static content such as images. The CloudFront feature takes this one step further and makes your content available to users via their nearest Amazon Internet presence; so a user in Japan or Europe would not have to download your content from servers in the USA.

Versioning (today's announced feature) provides primitive version control of objects. When an existing file is uploaded to S3 it will create a new revision instead of overwriting the original. If you have ever accidentally deleted your backups you will appreciate the benefits of this feature! This simplifies the use of S3 for backups where you want to avoid overwriting a good backup with a corrupt one.

Many cloud storage companies support versioning (like DropBox and GitHub) and S3's support should not be seen as a threat. It's a required part of a mature storage offering, so it makes a lot of sense that S3 should support this too. Not in a "me too" kind of way, it genuinely plugs a gap in the Amazon Web Services storage offering and will undoubtedly be very useful for its users.

Is Time to Drop the "Simple"?

Unlike the beta label that some web services wear with pride, the "Simple" in S3 is telling of its humble beginnings. The simple days of just GET/PUT are definitely gone. Given the fun packed feature list, it must be time to drop the 'simple.' Or should S3 be re-branded altogether?

Let's crowdsource some suggestions:

Amazon Fully-Featured Storage Service (F2S2)
Amazon Storage Service Now All Grown Up (S2NAGU)

Can you think of any better ones?

Discuss

Google Wave Coming to Google Apps this Year

Sarah Perez — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:00:37 -0800

Google Wave, the maddeningly confusing yet highly innovative real-time collaboration tool, will become a member of Google's online office suite Google Apps later this year. The service, still in closed beta, is meant to be a modern-day revamp of email - what email would be if it was invented in 2009 instead of the 1960's. Yet the interface, a mashup of email, chat, and collaborative document editing, left many early adopters with mixed feelings about the product...at least in its current form. Called "unproductive," "complex," and "overwhelming" by the same people who usually embrace new technologies, it seems an odd choice to add the still-developing Wave service to the Google Apps line-up at this time. But Google has confirmed they will do exactly that.

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As mentioned in a blog post late last year, Google is now preparing to roll out Wave to Google Apps customers along with the VoIP service Google Voice and 200 other improvements and updates to their current suite of office tools.

Google Wave: Innovative, Confusing

The technologies at the core of Google Wave are impressive. With an HTML5-enabled interface and real-time protocols for instant interaction, Wave was highly anticipated among tech enthusiasts prior to its launch. However, once beta testers gained access to the redesigned inbox experience delivered by Wave, the results were those of confusion, feelings of being overwhelmed and apparently, eventual abandonment.

That's not to say Google Wave is a failure. The service is just a little too raw right now for everyday use by a majority of internet users. The problem with Wave stems from its overcrowded inbox of "waves" - threads of conversation updated in real-time. Within a wave, users can have IM-like chats, share and edit documents, and even "replay" a wave to see a history of the changes made. At launch time, anyone using the service could add any other user to a wave - even if that other user had no interest in participating. This led to an inbox filled with waves, only some of which may have been relevant or interesting. In addition, communicating in real-time, while nice for IM, may not be as productive when attempting to share the sort of longer thoughts and instructions typically sent out via email.

There are ways Wave could be streamlined for better ease-of-use, though. Whitelisting and blacklisting tools could lock down waves to invited participants only and better filtering mechanisms could help high-priority waves rank higher than others. Not all of these tools are available yet in the current version of the product, though, and some may never be.

Google Apps Users to Become Beta Testers?

Google is also investigating how to integrate some of Wave's features into their other products. According to Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard, the company is "trying to learn and see what sort of use cases evolve from it and how it changes." Yet even he admitted that Wave is "not nearly at the level of understanding and readiness of the core Google Apps services."

So why is Google rushing to roll it out this year? The answer may be that Google simply wants a larger test bed to help them generate ideas for improving the service. Although we've highlighted several use cases for Wave in the past, a good many people still say they don't see the need for it. But all the effort and development that went into building a product like Wave isn't likely something Google wants to abandon so soon.

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Google Exiting China? Not Just Yet

Sarah Perez — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:55:22 -0800

Last month, Google received high praise from human rights supporters after threatening to exit the Chinese search market, claiming it was no longer comfortable with censoring search results per government demands. But here it is a month later and Google has made no move to withdrawal its Chinese search operations, with censored results still appearing on Google's Chinese portal, Google.cn. In addition, the company may now be investing in a Chinese digital media company, as well. According to reports, the Internet giant is said to be a member of a Disney-led consortium looking to invest in a Chinese media and advertising company called Bus Online.

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Google's decision to exit the Chinese search business was alluded to in their January blog post detailing what appeared to be state-led cyber attacks which hit the Internet giant and other Silicon Valley companies in mid-December. As a result, Google announced it would review the feasibility of its business operations in China. The company claimed it would engage in discussions with the Chinese government to see if there was any way for it to remain in China, but few expected positive results from those discussions.

Because the attacks were focused on gaining access to the email accounts of human rights activists, Google received a lot of praise for taking a stand against the Chinese government, the alleged perpetrators of the hacking attempts. However, only nine days later, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt took a softer tone during the company's fourth quarter earnings call. "We wish to remain in China," he said. "We like the Chinese people, we like our Chinese employees, we like the business opportunities there."

Google to Invest in Chinese Media Company

Google does like the businesses there, apparently. It's a month later and the company seems to be no closer to shutting down their Chinese search operations business than they were back in January. In addition, sources say Google is planning to invest in China's largest in-bus digital media and advertising company, an outfit called Bus Online whose revenue was about 314.5 million yuan ($46.07 million) last year. A consortium led by Walt Disney Co. is reportedly in advanced talks with the Chinese company and has plans to buy a 30%-40% stake for more than $100 million in shares, both public and private. Google is said to be among the investors.

This move leads credence to the argument put forth in January which had cynics claiming that Google's withdrawal from China had less to do with their so-called "moral high grounds" propped up by the company motto "don't be evil," and had more to do with the fact that Google's Chinese search business simply couldn't compete with the more popular Chinese engine baidu.com.

Hacker Crack Down Could Help

The reality of the situation may be a bit more murky than a simple case of "good" versus "evil," though. Of course Google couldn't sit idly by as the Chinese government directed attacks on its infrastructure, but it also would be bad business to ignore the massive potential of the Chinese Internet market.

Yesterday, new reports from Chinaview.cn stated that the Chinese government had shut down the nation's largest website responsible for training hackers. The implication of this news - and especially its timing, given the actual shut down occurred in November - is that the Chinese government wants to appear as if they're "playing nice" with regards to Western interests. That move may be precisely the sort of thing Google needs in order to maintain an appearance of concern regarding the cyber attack situation while also not making a regrettable, revenue-impacting business decision by ceasing Chinese operations altogether. The only question now is whether or not the public will forgive Google for doing so.

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ViralHeat: Social Media Analysis for the Budget-Minded Soul

Mike Melanson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:00:00 -0800

These days, the words "social media campaign" are on the lips of everyone around, from media professionals to small business owners to college students in coffee shops. While the idea of a social media campaign is becoming widespread, the tools to manage one are often left for the former, while the latter look in awe at the price.

ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.

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The Basics

ViralHeat has been around for just over six months, providing a low-price but full-featured social media analysis for the budget minded. We had a chance to chat with CEO Raj Kadam and founder Vishal Sankhla today before the relaunch, which is unveiling support for Facebook monitoring, a new user interface and API support.

The fully Web-based app gives full analytics by monitoring an array of blogs, over 200 video sites, Twitter and now Facebook for mentions of your brand, which is set up as a profile. Each profile exists as a simple logic search, wherein you can keep track of your brand by searching for phrases, domains and hashtags, all in the syntax we've become accustomed to from using from sites like Google.

Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget?

While ViralHeat compares itself on price to services like Radian6, there is a primary difference between the two services. ViralHeat offers a full set of analytics features, from standard mention monitoring to sentiment analysis using a natural language algorithm, but this is where it stays. It does not venture over to the content creation side, where we find the more expensive and extensive services like Radian6. Other services might offer workflow management, scheduled content delivery and other conversational tools, but this would be overkill for the users we imagine at this app's usability sweetspot.

We see that as an additional merit: ViralHeat has both the price point and the feature set fit for the company that wants to get on top of its image and perception on the social Web but can't afford to bring a social media expert on board - and on salary. The learning curve is suitable for the DIY set and the analytics it provides are self explanatory, not riddled with indecipherable, industry jargon.

For those of you that like the pricing but want to do a little more with the data, the service also allows you to export data into Excel format and access your data using the API.

The Price is Right

Speaking of pricing, this is a point that really brings it home for ViralHeat. With today's relaunch of the site, ViralHeat offers a three tiered pricing system, starting with a basic package for $9.99, a professional package for $29.99 and a business package for $89.99. The Basic package offers standard mentions analysis for 5 profiles, while the other packages offer sentiment analysis and API access for 20 and 40 profiles, respectively.

If we haven't drilled it in enough quite yet, here's the bottom line: ViralHeat looks like a solid social media analysis tool that is priced and designed for the more casual user, while offering simple features like export and API interaction that keep it flexible enough for the more serious user.

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How The Godfather Would Pick Enterprise 2.0 Champions

Alex Williams — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:03:21 -0800

From time to time, we look at how Enterprise 2.0 practices are reaching into companies.

A recent post by Michael Idinopulos demonstrates how the premises for finding Enterprise 2.0 champions is often flawed. Too often the search is for the right personality. Instead, the focus of the search should really be for the people who are "exchanging knowledge, information, and ideas across large parts of the organization."

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Idinopulos compares it to how The Godfather's Don Corleone would approach the issue when choosing the right people for the job: "It's nothing personal. It's just business." In other words, people are chosen for their role in the organization not for who they are as people.

Let's just say the "Godfather," process is still not widely used. Often, managers look for the "it" factor. Here are a few of the more common things Idinopulos has heard managers say they are looking for:

The Young and Hip: "Jimmy's only 28. He grew up on Facebook!"
The Tech-Savvy: "Mary's always got the latest gadget. She's a natural for this!"
The Connectors: "Martin knows everybody. He's the ideal social networker!"
The Visionaries: "Isabel is so visionary. She'll totally get what we're trying to do!"

Idinopulos makes the point that these psychological attributes don't work for a few reasons:

The premise that just a few have such talents is repudiated by the fact that it gets adopted by any number of people who don't fit into any one category
They re not actionable. How can you scale this across an organization of 5,000 to 10,000 employees?
The signal does not transmit. Do you know the lonely social media evangelist? The one who finally just gives up and says people "just don't get it." The enthusiasm has to transfer to the organization.

It's evident a methodology is emerging for how to make Enterprise 2.0 a deep institutional focus. Companies like the Dachis Group and Pragmatic Enterprise are pioneering new methods to help clients institute technologies and practices that fit with the social enterprise.

Dion Hinchcliffe and Michael Krigsman of Pragmatic Enterprise take a holistic approach. They look at the political, technical and business issues that come with any social Web initiative. They look for executive champions who want to use social technologies to solve a business problem. Once the problem is identified, a process begins that seeks out the spectrum of opinions about the
project and the use of Enterprise 2.0 practices for the group.

The business world is developing its own methods for how it makes social technologies a part of the business process. At times it may be surprising how the technologies get adopted. Idinopulos points to a marketing manager who turned out to be responsible for attracting thousands to a Socialtext environment that Idinopulos and his group had implemented for the company:

"Because the Marketing Manager's commitment to social media wasn't a personal thing, it transferred quickly to other parts of the business. Other Marketing groups got wind of the project, and started posting their own content, creating their own workspaces, starting their own conversations. Then it started to spread beyond Marketing, to Sales and Product groups that had initially participated as consumers of Marketing content. Marketing's cross-silo reach positioned them to involve different parts of the organization, which then went on to do their own thing. That would not have happened if Marketing's success had been a function of one person's passion."

The example is proof that the enthusiasm comes from how the social technologies help people in their work so the business can prosper. As the Godfather would say:

"It's not personal. It's just business."

Discuss

The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:15:35 -0800

Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

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This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana, a play on "mail analysis" since he was initially focused on email social graph analysis.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

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When Negotiation Becomes Dishonesty

Dana Oshiro — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:35:00 -0800

If you've been a geek your whole life then you understand the term "Canadian girlfriend." The Canadian (or sometimes British) love interest is the person you talk about when a member of the opposite sex inquires about your dating status. The story is that you met online, you've formed a solid bond and you'll probably break up with your online girlfriend when a girl in your vicinity decides she likes you. The idea is to drive up the value of your perceived social stock. In the startup world, the same principle is used in "ham and egging."

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As pointed out in a recent blog post by university professor Scott Shane, "ham and egging" was first coined by Columbia's professor Amar Bhide and Harvard Business School's Howard Stevenson. The term refers to the technique of convincing multiple stakeholders that others are working with you despite the fact that you're only in talks. The only problem is that most early partners only want to work with you if other reputable partners have already signed on.

Explains Bhide and Stevenson,"the ultimate ham and egging solution is for the entrepreneur to simultaneously convince each participant that everyone else is on board, or almost on board."

However, when ReadWriteWeb spoke to MobiTV CEO Paul Scanlan about forging deals between telecom and television companies, he suggested a different tact. Although Scanlan found himself caught between partners who were skittish to sign on without the initial validation of others, he decided that rather than ham and egging, he'd build contingency clauses into contracts. Scanlan's contracts stated that all partnerships were contingent on a set number of large-scale partners to launch. While this may not be the ideal method of closing deals, it seems like an ethical alternative to engaging in deals that begin with dishonesty.

Have you ever engaged in ham and egging and if so, was your deal a success?

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Green Goose: Save Money Using Sensors

Richard MacManus — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:17:52 -0800

Green Goose is a new financial management service that launched today, which connects sensor activity to your savings account. At first Green Goose sounded a little gimmicky. Using green Internet-connected eggs, it measures how much energy you expend on your bike or how much water you use in your shower - and transfers amounts from your checking account to your savings account based on the 'savings' you made doing those activities.

What's interesting though is that the savings are calculated based on the actions measured by small battery-powered, wireless sensors. You stick these sensors on your bike, thermostat, showerhead "and even your keychain."

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Green Goose is a web-based service, along with "a very low-cost set of Savings sensors." - these are literally green eggs (see picture to the right). The web site tracks specific actions and behaviors from users - then computes that into dollars saved.

Co-Founder Brian Krejcarek told ReadWriteWeb that's "like a Twitter feed of personal green savings."

Here's how the sensor part works: the sensors communicate with a "Green Gateway" that then sends messages to the web site. The Green Gateway - which is also "egg-like" - has an Ethernet port that connects to your network hub via a router. The bike sensor measures miles ridden. Green Goose also plans to offer sensors for your automobile, shower (hot water), and thermostat (heating and cooling).

In the future, Green Goose might also be able to pull savings data in "from open APIs like that proposed by Google Power Meter for savings earned by using less electricity." It also plans to eventually move beyond energy to capture savings earned from making "other lifestyle decisions."

You can get started today with a "Green Goose Bike Sensor Kit," which retails for $49 plus $10 for postage. The Portland and San Francisco-based company is currently in talks with the BTA (Bicycle Transportation Alliance) in Portland and they're already installed "in a number of coffee shops."

As well as consumers, the service is targeting employers with a "a unique sustainable savings benefit" offering for their staff. One of the features for employers is managing and auditing details for the IRS bike commute tax credit.

Green Goose is currently in pre-production and running beta trials. Right now it's offering 100 Savings Kits for bicycle owners.

Eventually this type of connection, between sensors and mainstream services like banking, will be commonplace and probably won't need to rely on gimmicks such as green eggs. But for now, Green Goose seems like a cute, interesting Internet of Things service for green conscious early adopters to try out.

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Where is Entrepreneurship Really Taught?

Dana Oshiro — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:30:00 -0800

Between Y Combinator's Startup School, the influx of seed fund incubators, the list of legendary mentors and investors and the dotcom bust's school of hard knocks, is there really any reason to go to grad school? At ReadWriteWeb we're supportive of lifelong learning and universities that coach entrepreneurs, but a recent post by Venture Hacks founder Naval Ravikant has us wondering, "What is the value in grad school?"

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Ravikant suggests that incubators and accelerators like YCombinator and Techstars are the new grad school.

He writes, "In some ways, it's better," and that unlike business schools, YCombinator pays entrepreneurs, which allows founders to be their own boss and encourages original work.

In addition to Ravikant's points, the fact that every incubator participant is connected to advisors through a financial agreement means the group may be motivated to maintain their network and share contacts. Nevertheless, before dismissing the idea of grad school altogether, it's good to remember many of the top entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley are MIT, Harvard and CalTech grads (including some of the Venture Hacks team). Perhaps the argument here is not so much about incubators over traditional institutions, but in the value of good mentors that have a stake in your success and do not rest on the laurels of a tenured position.

As a startup entrepreneur, what is the best lesson you've ever been taught and who taught it to you?

Photo Credit: Duncan Hull

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What's Next For Geolocation? Apps, Apps, Apps

Guest Author — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:00:00 -0800

Geolocation social networks are set to be in 2010 what microblogging was in 2008 - the next big thing. Currently the space is being dominated by Foursquare, with others like Gowalla, MyTown and Loopt trailing in its wake.

While Gowalla has secured a large amount of funding, some $8.5 million, and My Town claims more check-ins than the other services, Foursquare is happily ticking along on the seed money provided by its founders (after they sold their original effort, Dodgeball, to Google), and creating a community of developers who are eager to build secondary applications. There are two reasons Foursquare is gaining so much ground over its competitors.

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This is a guest post by Simon Salt, the founder and CEO of IncSlingers. He is a writer and blogger whose work has appeared in a wide variety of places, including Chris Brogan's Dad-O-Matic.com, American Marketing Association News and the Austin Realtor. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal on social media and is a recognized national speaker on that topic as well.

Firstly, it is available on all phone platforms. While this is also true of Loopt, the game play element of Foursquare makes it more attractive to many users. Secondly, it took the very sensible step of opening its API early on. This has generated a wave of new secondary applications.

In addition to this, it set up a developer community forum and is extremely active there, providing support, information and assistance to developers that are creating these secondary apps. Just as with Twitter, it is not just the service itself that will create demand, but the applications that run from that service.

There are hundreds of applications that run on the Twitter API now (most of which are listed at oneforty.com). It is very likely that by the end of 2010 we will see similar numbers of applications for Foursquare, and, should Gowalla and the rest open their APIs, for those services too.

The reason geolocation social networking is so popular is quite simply its ease of use. Arrive at a destination, be that your work, the gym, a coffee shop or even the grocery store, fire up the application on your phone, "check-in", and get points, badges and even increased status in the game for doing so.

As with Twitter, early adopters are the ones using the sites the most at the moment, but the services are rapidly spreading beyond the hard core. Unlike micro-blogging, you need no talent to be entertaining, informative or stylish - you simply check-in as you go about your day. You attract "friends" by doing this, or by connecting with people you already know, either online or in real life.

The Next Step: User- and Location-Focused

As with so many other early-stage social network platforms, extending the service with secondary applications is what makes the service truly useful.

At present, the secondary applications that are being developed fall into two main categories: user-focused and location-focused. A good example of a user-focused app is wheredoyougo. This service provides a heat map visual of all of a user's check-ins. Another, foursqpic allows users to upload pictures as part of the Foursquare Venue Tips section, supplementing simple text tips with visuals as well. These are great apps and certainly add to the fun and extend the functionality of the service. However, the real gains are coming in the location-focused apps. So far, the most developed of these is placewidget, which allows owners of a location to promote, via a website widget, the "Mayor" of their location on their website. Until now, any real marketing revolving around Foursquare was offline, and had to be location-specific. By bringing the ability to market both their involvement in the Foursquare community and promote a loyal customer, this widget gives a lot more power to businesses looking to leverage this type of social networking.

Foursquare recently announced it had signed two deals with media outlets. The first is an agreement with Metro, Canada's number one free daily newspaper, to have content for venues provided by the newspaper. The second is with Bravo TV, which will include Bravo Celebrity Tips and Bravo-branded badges for over 500 locations. A game is great, but a content-rich social network is something a lot more valuable.

Photo credit: Agata Urbaniak Discuss

VMware Partner Exchange 2010: What happens in Vegas Comes to your Enterprise

Mike Kirkwood — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:00:00 -0800

If you're releasing products integrated into the VMware ecosystem, you're likely enjoying enjoying the Las Vegas Strip this week. VMware Partner Exchange 2010 kicked off at the Mandalay Bay hotel today, and it is the place to learn about the current state of affairs and how to quantify tangible benefits of virtualization for partners and customers.

We've found that the virtualization layer is becoming a key place to launch enterprise products. All of this momentum is being translated in how to more effectively sell virtualization into the enterprise - and VMware isn't holding back in building the relationships to sell into the channel.

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So, we ask, is the virtual layer the new platform for delivering value to the enterprise? If so, what tangible benefits are being offered today?

First an analysis of the momentum. According to this release from VMware , despite the down economy there has been 60% increase in participants this week from counties all around the world. What happens when we crunch the language in that release? We find that "partners", "exchange", "customers", "network", "cloud", and "desktop" are the most important subjects.

Using those ideas, let's condense that statement into our own words: Virtualization partners are exchanging information on how to win customers by leveraging the network and cloud to reach the desktop.

At the partner exchange, there are early previews of next-generation products and programs as well as in-depth technical training. The conference agenda is packed with sessions including practical training and a host of supported discussions from over 50 sponsors, including HP, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Netapp and EMC.

Looking through the sessions, several things stand out. First, networking and storage are merging together. Second, security is catching up - quickly - to support and define how virtualization and cloud applications are deployed and managed for business-critical applications. VMware is being baked into partner go-to-market strategies and product releases. There is more partner surface area and more angles for sales. All of this bodes well for virtualization.

Are VMware partners building an ecosystem that makes you want to move faster with your deployment of business-critical applications? What is missing?

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