Quote
"I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign nature of the self better than a blog.” - Doc Searls
About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
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Monthly Archives
May 31, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
 I was sitting in a Starbucks in Oakland last week with Sam Wick from Meca (the IM company) with hours on our hands because of meetings falling through. Sam and I were chatting about social networking, and Sam mentioned Dogster, saying that the site was a great example of a very targetted, niche social networking offering that was likely to survive any market changes. Sam is a smart guy.
I mentioned that I 'knew' Ted Rheingold, the guy behind Dogster, and that he lived in San Francisco. I called Ted up, and he met us for lunch around the corner from the offices of his design firm: One Match Fire.
Ted turned out to be a great guy (despite his looks, see cell pic above), and Cafe Stella Luna was great too. Best of all, we learned a lot about Dogster (see my writeup: Social Networking Goes To The Dogs), whose membership has grown to over 20,000 and which has grown to something much, much more successful than Ted had ever imagined.
Best of all: Catster is coming!
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May 28, 2004
Posted by Gregory Narain
The larger search engines are also now starting to look more deeply into differentiating their algorithms - this time the focus is on the emerging content types of the web (images, audio, and video). News.com reports on the rising challenges for multimedia content producers as they seek representation in search engine listings. This snippet sums up the dilemma:
Stefanie Olsen [from News.com, Search engines try to find their sound]
"Our site is primarily full of rich audio, and we want people to find it when it's relevant," Thomas said. "The big search engines' technologies don't have the ability to get inside the audio or video. With the little bit of text we have on NPR, it's not always good enough to find our content, and reference the page."
Consumers armed with broadband connections at home are driving new demand for multimedia content and setting off a new wave of technology development among search engine companies eager to extend their empires from the static world of text to the dynamic realm of video and audio.
The result of this demand has been a growth in specialty search systems, much like SpeechBot, that fill the gap. These upstart projects/companies may serve as serious competition for the leading search engines in the years to come. However, the majors are not standing still. Lycos and Altavista have already had systems in place and Google is already working with NPR and others on their multimedia indexing.
One interesting find was StreamSage, an audio and video technology provider. They have released a site, CampaignSearch.com, that allows users to search the political speeches of the upcoming US Presidential candidates. It's a great preview of how valuable this form of search will be.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
eHarmony has reduced it all to a few equations, or at least a 'method and system' so I guess all the umptyump millions being invested in social networking and dating companies are being thrown away.
Rachel Konrad [from The Seattle Times]
This month eHarmony.com received U.S. Patent No. 6,735,568, which describes a "method and system for identifying people who are likely to have a successful relationship."
Not surprisingly, critics and competitors trash eHarmony's process as overly scientific -- some dismissing the so-called "love patent" as gimmicky.
Oh no, no gimmicks. But patenting successful online relationships? I will have to readt the patent, I suppose, but this is too much.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
 2Entwine has released the Gush 1.1 Beta2 (see 2Entwine | Introducing Gush).
Most important addition (from my perspective), is the ability to type in each IM window instead of the "message center", which is a separate window. The "messgae center' approach led me to constantly be sending an IM conmversational stroke to the wrong person when I had multiple IMs going at once.
Secondly, Gush now supports exporting of conversations. Gush has always had a time-ordered archive of all conversations, which is great. But there was no way to export -- which I found out only a few weeks ago when I tried to do so. Even better, Gush supports embedding conversations direcly into blogs with the ChatLoader Flash SWF file. This looks really cool, but I haven't fiddled with it yet.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Marc 'implores' the organizers of the upcoming London Sumposium on Social Tools in the Enterprise to not let the conference be the same old-same old:
Marc Canter from [ Marc's Voice]
I know there's not much time - but I deplore the conference advisors and sponsors to NOT make this just like every other day-long symposium you've ever attended. Make it something special, something different, for the children - if for no other reason - to leave them a legacy of innovation.
I'm all for it.
I am a real fan of what I call 'vertebrate' formats for conferences, where the theme or topics are a backbone for the event, and the activities surround and actualize it. This allows a lot of flex, and provide an opportunity for very different experiences for different attendees. 'Invertebrate' conferences have the hard exoskeleton of the theme pushed out into the forground -- like a get-together on forest fires where you have to go fight a forest fire.
In our situation, I am all for people trying to augment the on-day session with various social tools -- blogging, wikis, IM, whatever. But I don't want to spend 1/3 of the day outfitting the attendees with the tools of the trade, or relying on the tools to make the case.
My original pitch was for a late-night TV show format, where the speakers are limited to like 10 minutes of schtick and then there is a bantering interview with various folks plunking down on the couch. David Weinberger and I did that once at a conference, and it was great. (I got to be the fat guy at the end of the couch.)
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May 27, 2004
Posted by Gregory Narain
A few days ago, Yahoo! released an updated version of its Messenger product. Generally speaking, I do not use Yahoo! IM, or any specific IM client as I prefer to work with tools like Trillian so the announcement slid past me. Yesterday, an old friend and fellow developer IMed me to rave about the many changes to the new messenger and to bless their virtues. Naturally, I was intrigued so I installed it and set up an account to test it with.
After installing the app and using it for an hour or so, I've discovered many very interesting features worthy of mention. There are many new and features added to the mix, however it the most compelling cluster in the Digital Identity and Privacy domains.
...continue reading.
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May 26, 2004
Posted by Gregory Narain
John Dowdell points to an interesting research project being conducted at HP Labs, the SpeechBot. As the site describes, "SpeechBot is a search engine for audio & video content that is hosted and played from other websites".
Digging a little deeper into the technical documentation for SpeechBot, I came across this summary:
SpeechBot (http://www.compaq.com/speechbot) is the first Internet search site for indexing streaming spoken audio on the web. Unlike previous attempts to index spoken audio on the Web, which have relied on either adjacent text, metadata, or hand supplied transcripts and close captions, SpeechBot uses automatic speech recognition technology to transcribe and index documents that do not have transcripts or other content information. The use of speech recognition permits the efficient and cost-effective indexing of thousands of hours of audio content, which were previously inaccessible. Because of this indexing, SpeechBot allows users to quickly search for relevant content in long audio documents and yields a high precision on first page-retrieved items.
SpeechBot indexes streaming media files based on their content, much as conventional search sites index ordinary Web pages by their text content. Like conventional search sites, SpeechBot does not store or serve the multimedia files themselves, but rather provides users with links. SpeechBot’s current index has over 3200 shows, 3500 hours of audio and 20 million words. The index is continually updated using SpeechBot’s highly scalable architecture.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Looks like the frantic discussions of the past weeks have led to a real event coming together. Matt Mower and a host of others (including me) have dreamed up an symposium on social tools for the enterprise, which is scheduled for 12 July in London. The London KM Cluster is handling the logistics and planning, and have arranged for a beautiful venue in Bloomsbury Square. For more information or to register, please click here.
Corante will be a media sponsor of the event, and I have been asked to speak.
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May 25, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Greg Narain (of socialtwister fame) has agreed to be my first guest blogger. I hope to get him to extend some of the threads he has been blogging on recently, like his post on Lemontonic, and the froth everywhere about blogging now that Bill Gates has said the word in public.
Greg and I have only known each other a short time -- one of the many equaintences I have recently seen 'in the flesh'. But at the first meeting I knew it was kismet. We were meant to be.
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May 21, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Matt Mower conserved the transcript of the first IRC meeting we held regarding the London Social Tools Symposium (see STES #1 transcript available).
The only solid thing is that we decided on 12 July as a date, and London had been the venue selected already.
We are speaking via freenode (IRC server) and we will be trying two channels -- my head hurt from all the chat and side chat streaming through one, I admit: Matt Mower
The second meeting will be on Friday at 9am PST, 12pm EST, 5pm BST, 6pm CET and will be held in #kmtalk and #kmbackchat. Trying to do everything in one channel proved challenging. Next time we are going to try and use two channels and see how that goes.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
I guess things are going well at the Microsoft TheSpoke and Channel 9 blog projects: Bill Gates has announced that blogging is going to change business.
Reed Stevenson [from Microsoft's Gates Touts Blogging as Business Tool
Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates often takes the stage to talk about the future of software technology, but on Thursday he also told top corporate executives that Weblogs and the way they are distributed can be used as business communication tools.
"What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate," Gates told executives gathered at Microsoft's headquarters for its annual CEO Summit.
Gates' comments on blogging technology were the most extensive thus far from Microsoft's chief software architect, signaling that the world's largest software company is waking up to the potential of blogging as a potential threat and also as a new business opportunity.
Blogs, short for Weblogs, have been around for several years, serving as online journals for Web-savvy disseminators of information ranging from personal ramblings, product reviews, to social commentary.
The growth in the number of blogs, and those who read them, however, is attracting greater attention from businesses as a means to communicate more directly with their employees, partners and customers.
Bill's history of moving into a growing market sector and grinding, grinding, grinding until achieving dominance is a likely scenario here. I guess we should expect blogging to be a basic aspect of MSN and Office in the near term. I plan to track down some of the bright lights in blogging at Microsoft, and trick them into telling all. I was unsuccessful in getting word one out of the folks at Graw Group, the former Visio execs who set up shop to create a blogging platform targetted to come out around the same time as longhorn (see Former Visio Execs to develop Social Networking for Longhorn), but I really haven't started to dig in here, yet.
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May 20, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Ross Mayfield pointed out that Red Herring is hosting 100 CEOs blogging (see Red Herring Spring), which includes a number of companies I've blogged about, including IMlogic, and Knownow.
The content looks fairly tame.... until I got to Xplane, a company that seems to consult to others to help explain complex issues more simply through the clever use of visuals (check out the "ow, wow" graphic), and that led me to look at the Xplane corporate blogs(see http://xplane.com/xblog/ and http://xplane.com/bblog/). I love the whole "VP of No" angle.
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May 19, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Surprising me not one bit, IMlogic has announced that the company has raised an additional $16M in venture funding (see Boston Business Journal). This is (I believe) the third round of money in IMlogic.
Francis Desouza, the CEO, is one of the more visionary leaders in the IM Management market -- companies that are providing the infrastructure for enterprise management of instant messaging and related real-time collaboraiton technologies. I expect great things from IMlogic, over and above the company's existing product lines and already announced plans.
The company posted 300 percent growth in revenue in fiscal 2003, the partnership with Reuters (gateway between Microsoft Live Communication Server and the AOL and MSN public IM networks), and international expansion.
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May 18, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
We are holding an IRC Chat today (12 PM ET) for all those interested in contributing to the planning for a London symposium on Social Tools for the Enterprise. One of the key agenda items to be resolved today is the date for the event, which will be sometime between the Vienna BlogTalk 2.0 conference (5-6 July) and the Nice iDate conference (15-16 July).
Matt Mower [via email]
Hi folks.
A reminder about the IRC chat today in #kmtalk on the Social Tools for
Enterprises event.
There is a new wiki available for public edit at:
http://www.socialtext.net/stes
Please use that and not the old wiki page. (Many thanks to SocialText
for hosting this.)
There are notes about the agenda at:
http://www.socialtext.net/stes/index.cgi?potential_agenda
The chat will begin at 9:00AM PST / 12:00PM EST / 5:00PM BST / 6:00PM CET.
#kmtalk is on the freenode IRC network. You will need an IRC client,
there is a list for almost every conceivable device/os here:
http://www.ircreviews.org/clients/
My recommendation would be either Trillian, mIRC, or Hydra IRC on
Windows. I'm not sure about Linux or MacOS X. Maybe someone with an
opinion can add links to the Wiki in the IRC pages:
http://www.socialtext.net/stes/index.cgi?irc
To find the FreeNode server closest to you see:
http://www.freenode.org/irc_servers.shtml
If you need any help please ping me via regular instant messenger
MSN: mmower@novissio.com
Y!: mowerm
AOL/iChat: mattmower
ICQ: 170796182
Look forward to talk to you later.
Regards,
Matt
--
Evectors Software
Email:matt@evectors.com Web:http://www.evectors.com Tel:+44-(0)7977-076-709 Blog:http://matt.blogs.it/
See you there.
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May 17, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Last week, Ziff Davis announced plans to push into the growing arena for online gaming communities with 1up.com.
Dan Fost [from SFGate.com]
Armed with technology from San Francisco's Laszlo Systems, Ziff is taking a page from the playbook of Friendster, the pioneer of online social networking, and hoping to build something similar for online gamers.
The site, which is still being developed but can be accessed by anyone, allows users to post biographical information, photos of themselves, lists of their favorite games and even blogs, online diaries about their gaming activities.
Blogs also will be written by the 70 editors of Ziff's game magazines, such as Electronic Gaming Monthly, Computer Gaming World, Xbox Nation and the Official U.S. PlayStation magazine.
I tried to sign up, but I continue to have 'page unavailable' messages. The service is a moving target, under construction. More to follow, I guess.
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May 15, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I feel horribly remiss that I haven't mentioned that Tom Mandel and a group of other talented people (Lisa Kimball, Ross Mayfield, Tom Erickson, and Duncan Work) are presenting a 5-day online course on social software this upcoming week (17-21 May 2004), entitled Blog, Wikis, Social Networks - what can social software do for you?
These folks know what they are talking about and how to present in an online setting.
Blog, Wikis, Social Networks - what can social software do for you?
From the Wall Street Journal to Business 2.0, everyone's talking about social software. This affordable online course will help you get past the buzz and find out what's in it for you.
Organizations today want to foster knowledge, deepen working relationships, and create a collaborative culture and esprit de corps. Social software can deliver on this promise.
Taught by industry pioneers Tom Mandel and Lisa Kimball, this affordable executive briefing will pay off for your organization. You will try social software tools in a safe and guided environment. You will engage with social software leaders and exchange experiences with your peers and colleagues. Sign up today, and begin learning about a topic of great importance to your organization and your future.
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May 14, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have been asked to speak at INBOX, a conference from the GoldenGroup. The conference is 2-4 June 2004, in San Jose CA.
I am participating on a panel with Ross Mayfield (from Many2Many and Socialtext) on the topic of "Email is Dead"-- and I can't wait.
Are we trying to bang the round email peg into square holes it simply wasn't designed for? What do do we mean when we say email anyway? Email's openness was a factor for its adoption, is it cause for decline or will it resemble what we know and love? Will Weblogs, syndication, wikis and instant messaging replace email? You're damn right they will!
I am likely to try to set up a Stowe-on-Wheels cocktail get-together in San Jose that Thursday evening. Ping me if you'd like to be invited!
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Because of a lot of people flitting around in Europe at approximately the same time, Matt Mower and Paolo Valdemarin (of Evectors) have volunteered to host a Symposium on Social Network Applications for Enterprises in London. Matt has set up a wiki (see Matt's Wiki: SNASymposium) where you are invited to get involved if you are interested.
Current possibilities for dates range from 8 July (immediately following the BlogTalk 2.0 conference in Vienna) and up to 14 July (immediately preceding the iDate conference in Nice). The weekend is unlikely to work. I plan to attend and participate, in some undefined way.
The page may be moving to a different location, soon.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Today's Blogdex has the Corante Research webpage at lucky 13 (see blogdex - the weblog diffusion index). I guess a lot of people are reading about what we are up to.
In particular, I got the largest number of inquiries regarding out plans for the Social Networking Project. Here's the schematic at the highest level of what we hope to do and hope to accomplish.
Corante Research Social Networking Project We plan to investigate the drivers and dynamics of social networking technologies and their application in consumer and enterprise sectors. We hope to establish a baseline for perceptions and expectations for these technologies, as well as gaining an understanding of the value propositions for these tooles and the barriers to their adoption. We will combine a global survey (in progress) with interviews of a distinguished panel of social networking experts, and the results will be captured in a group of reports targeting different constituencies.
In short order, we will also be launching the Real-Time Collaboration Project, which will follow a similar model, involving survey and interviews of a distinguished group of thought leaders in the collaboration arena.
Please contact me (stowe@corante.com) with any questions or recommendations.
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May 13, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Microsoft's Taylor Collyer spoke with Cathleen Moore at N+I in Las Vegas (boy am I glad to have missed this one) clarifying plans for the company's Live Meeting web conferencing offerings. Cathleen Moore [from InfoWorld TechWatch: Microsoft prepping Web conferencing server in addition to service]
Today Microsoft offers Web conferencing as a service, but soon Microsoft will release a server version of its Office Live Meeting offering that will be offered in addition to the service. It will be a server/service continuum, depending on the size and the needs of the customer.
I spoke with Taylor Collyer, director of marketing for Microsoft's Real-Time Collaboration Group, at N+I in Las Vegas yesterday.
Collyer would not commit to a specific timeframe for the offering, but he did say they are working on it now. My earlier assumption that end of year was possible seems to be pretty far off the mark, according to feedback from Microsoft. So now I'm just going to say it is anyone's guess. Microsoft is good about letting the press know what they are working on even if it is farther away than Pluto (Longhorn, for example), and I'm thankful for that. So the server version of Live Meeting could be years out. But analysts have expected this, so it is not a big surprise.
And its consistent with what Microsoft has been saying all along, and where their vision for consolidated, medium-hopping collaboration is headed.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Received a press release from Plaxo today, with a number of interesting factoids in it:
- Plaxo has more that 2 million members now, and more than 30 million have access the service.
- Plaxo 2.0 is coming out later this month, and it will include an integration with Yahoo Search capabilities allowing users to search the web right inside of Outlook.
Another front opened in the search wars.
Personally, I would live to have some better search capabilities for searching Outlook content, but it doesn't look like Plaxo/Yahoo are going the Enfish route, as nice as it would be to have a faster and more ergonomic search capability inside of Outlook.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a transition that seems to be going on below the PR radar, Chris Tolles has been replaced by Michael Trigg at Spoke Software as vice president of marketing. Chris has taken on the role of VP of sales and marketing at Topix.
I haven't yet had a chance to meet with Michael, but his background (VP of corporate marketing and vice president of product marketing at E.piphany, positions at MCI and 3Com) indicate Spoke's increased orientation toward the enterprise end of the social networking space.
Andy Halliday, Spoke's VP of business development, suggested that I use Mike's Spoke profile to get a handle on his background, and that experience reconfirmed what a good job Spoke has done in the 'dossier' department. I particularly like the feature where web entries related to the indivicual are brought up for you automatically (click image above for full size image)). [Note that the 'Alerts' functionality is just another example of where instant messaging should be integrated into social networking.]
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
I am excited to announce the launch of Corante Research (see About Corante Research), a new initiative here.
Corante Research is part of a broad new growth plan that will have me, Hylton and others building upon the strong foundation here. We're excited about initiatives underway, have other developments we'll be letting you know about and are eager to hear from others about ways in which we might work together.
I have assumed the role of managing director for Corante Research, and will be dovetailing the work that I have been conducting through A Working Model into this new research group, and kicking off several initiatives, including the Corante Research Social Networking Project, the Corante Research Real-Time Collaboration Project, and a Corante Research New Media Project, about which we will be providing more information in the near future.
For more information on these, and other research activities, please contact me at stowe@corante.com.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
A recent AT&T study about communication media shows that teenagers are living in a future world, one that most adults are simply unequipped for.
[from Getting The Most From Your Favorite Gizmo ... The Telephone]
U.S. Postal System
- Although the U.S. Postal System scored second highest for usage [83 percent], the majority of consumers [64 percent] spent thirty minutes of less communicating by conventional mail during a ten day period.
- Men are slightly less likely [80 percent] than women [86 percent] to have used the U.S. Mail. By age, the differences are more dramatic.
- Fifteen to 17 year-olds are least likely to have used the postal system -- just 44 percent -- with the number climbing to 76 percent among 18-34 year-olds.
Email
- Email was used by 62 percent of the consumers. 62 percent also indicated they spent two hours or less communicating by email.
- Senior citizen use of email, however, was found to be 35 percent while 56 percent of 15-17 year olds indicated they had used email within the past ten days.
Voicemail
- About half of 15-17 year-olds had used voicemail [49 percent], while only one quarter of seniors 65 and over had used it.
Instant Messaging
- Teens were the most likely to use instant messaging (IM) and the numbers continue to decline as age increased: Half of 15-17 year-olds used IM, 41 percent among 18-34 year-olds; 33 percent among 35-49 year-olds; 24 percent of 50-64 year-olds, and 14 percent of those aged 65 and over.
Text Messaging
- The best predictor of text messaging use is age. Four in ten [39 percent] of 15-17 year-olds have used it during the past ten days. Use decreases steadily with age down to 4 percent use among those age 65 or older.
So, predictions: postal mail is nearly dead, and we should anticipate that the next generation will never use it at all, vmail and email are still growing in use, but IM (including text messaging) is emerging as the defining communication medium of our time and should become the leading communication medium within the next ten years, eclipsing telephone, email, and (cough, cough) postal. I don't just mean text messaging, but synchronous, presence-based, identity-validated communication a la IM. This may include voice, video, app sharing, web conferencing, or other dimensions of interaction, but it will be based on the IM backbone. So the title of the press release is laughable, really.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Seems like a long time ago that I wrote about the market ramifications of Google purchasing Pyralabs (of Blogger fame). Now, a lifetime later (15 months have passed) Google has gotten around to having an official blog: see Google Blog.
Its hard to judge a blog after only a few entries, but a few comments. The first entry is signed by Ev Williams, the Blogger Program manager and founder of Pyra, welcoming us, in a ribbon-cutting ceremony. But the other two entries are unsigned. Is it a unnamed, faceless PR staff at work? I would have hoped for interaction with specific real people. If not Eric, Sergey, and Larry -- who are 'first named' in the first blog entry as if we all know who they are although they are not explicitly present, as if we, the readers, are already members of the Google cult-of-personality -- then other tangible and responsible peoples' names should be on the entries, taking responsibility.
The flap outlined in today's WSJ (in Tech Journal) regarding Google's decisions to pull an entry dealing with outsourcing of engineering jobs to India, suggests that even a iconoclastic icon like Google can find itself painfully and publicly pulled between the conflicting goals of openness and corporateness.
What does it mean for a publicly traded (or soon-to-be) company to have an 'official blog'? Will it just be marketing propaganda or brochureware packaged in a different folder format? Or is it going to be an active dialogue with the marketplace? Which marketplace, by the way? How could a behemoth the size of Google have only one official blog? Won't it actually need hundreds? Or at least dozens? One per product line? Who will watch the content, to make sure it passes SEC muster? Who will watch the watchers?
These and a thousand related issues will need to be aired and resolved before the openness/corporateness divide can be bridged. But I retain the conviction that the final bridgework will rely on blogging, and other social tools, and in that regard Blogger and its competitors are looking at a big future, although the societal impacts of increasing openness in the business scene -- as a needed element of transparent corporate governance -- are likely to lead to wild oscillations in our perceptions of what goes into appropriate, effective, and legal corporate public relations.
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May 11, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have uncovered all sorts of stories over the past few years that demonstrate that people find it easier to 'talk' about some things through IM, rather than face to face. Teenagers find it easier to talk to their parents about many issues through IM, for example (see Online Communication Makes Difficult Topics Easier). It should come as no surprise, then, that more people in the UK are using cellphone text messaging (which is much more common there than here in the US) to deal with difficult subjects, such as breaking up with your honey, quitting your job, or arguing.
[from The Many Uses of SMS: Mobile9.com]
The NOP poll for Sicap, a messaging services provider in Switzerland, revealed some interesting findings regarding SMS usage:
- 45% of women owned up to secretly checking the text messages on their partners' phones, compared to 31% of men [Note: 90% of Italian divorces were linked to cell phone use (see Divorce, Italian Style) in a recent report]
- 9% of Britons admit to dumping a partner by sending an SMS, or short message service, from a cellphone. Among those aged 15 to 24, the figure rises to 20%
- 44% had used text messages to flirt; among the 15- to 24-year-olds, the figure rose to 75%
- About 31% of adults said they had sent a love letter by text -- even among the over-65s, 9% had done so
- 30% said they had conducted quarrels via SMS
- 2% say they have used text messages to quit a job.
[Pointer from SocialTwister]
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
In an effort to reduce expenditures, Kubi Software has let go of about 1/3 of the staff at the company this week, 12 of 35 staff being released.
Kubi is known for its Outlook plug-in collaboration solution, which the company has attempted to position as "Collaborative Email" in a very confusing combination of category creation and misleading messaging. The product has a lot of promise, as I suggested in an article last year. Kubi recently raised $7M in a venture round, so the strategic plan has to involve playing for time for a long time. And with a technology that brings it directly into competition with the very large players -- Microsoft, and IBM, most notably -- and literally dozens if not hundreds of other starving start-ups, playing for the long game is probably a very wise move.
[Update: 12 May 2004: Telephone discussion with Nina McIntyre, VP Marketing at Kubi, has confirmed my hypotheses regarding company strategic plans, and the need to conserve cash for a long, long foot race. I also learned (at this late date) that noted software wizard, Mussie Shore (formerly of McKinsey and Lotus), joined the company in January as VP of Product Management and Design. How'd I miss that?]
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
 The recently announced integration of Picasa Hello with Google's Blogger service is fairly seamless, and works pretty much as you might expect, if you had given a lot of thought to it.
The Hello client is a cleverly implemented fusion of digital photo sharing with instant messaging (see earlier review), made really compelling when supported by the Picasa digital photo management product. The ability to share digital pix with buddies and friends through a 'chat' model, based on the metaphor of a scrollable and savable filmstrip is really great. (And now is being widely copied, it seems.)
The folks at Picasa and Google have come up with a collection of integrated elements to make Hello talk with Blogger; literally. To make the connection, you have to add 'BloggerBot' to your Hello buddylist. Then, to post pictures to a Blogger blog, you share the photos with BloggerBot, just as if he were another person, more or less. However, the interaction with the bot leads to a number of additional controls presented in the UI, such as the option (one I recommend using) of creating a brand new Blogger blog as the place to post your digital photos. Check out stowepix.blogspot.com to see the photos I posted. The augmented IM interface also supports adding captions for the photos, which also worked.
I had less luck trying to use an existing blog, although I created one only minutes earlier through the conventional (although newly improved!) Blogger interface. I never was able to get the snags out of that, although I gave up after only a minute or so, being a lazy and weak-kneed analyst at heart.
This was also my first peep at the new Blogger, which looks like it has remained true to its lowest common denominator model, and if anything has simplified what was almost the most minimal of conceivable blog feature sets. I must confess, that like other reviewers, I find myself wondering about things like trackbacks, predefined lists (like Typepad Typelists), and the like. It definitely needs more than this to get me to recommend it. I can't seem to enable comments for the photo blog I created, although comments are turned on. I will reserve final judgment, but at first glance it looks like hardly any work has gone into extending the feature set (although I don't recall comments being a built-in of Blogger before), so I am presuming that they spent a great deal of time and energy on performance, scale, and reliability -- all below the hood. I am willing to hold my breath a while, I guess, but this is pretty tame stuff.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
I read a Mother Jones piece by George Packer on blogging, and although I think it really is more about political blogging, rather than blogging in general, I find myself being partially persuaded by Packer's characterizations, but not his conclusions: George Packer [from The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged]
The style of thickly descriptive storytelling, based on heavy reporting, immersed readers in the arc of an election year, achieving a sense of unity between the protagonists and the spectators, so that the campaign seemed to involve the whole of American society in the theatrics.
Blogs, by contrast, are atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant. They lack the continuity, reach, and depth to turn an election into a story. When one of the best of the bloggers, Joshua Micah Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com, brought his laptop to New Hampshire and tried to cover the race in the more traditional manner, the results were less than satisfying; his posts failed to convey the atmosphere of those remarkable days between Iowa and the first primary. Marshall couldn't turn his gift for parsing the news of the moment to the more patient task of turning reportage into scenes and characters so that the candidates and the voters take life online. He didn't function as a reporter; there was, as there often is with blogs, too much description of where he was sitting, what he was thinking, who'd just walked into the room, as if the enclosed space in which bloggers carry out their work had followed Marshall to New Hampshire and kept him encased in its bubble. He might as well have been writing from his apartment in Washington. But the failure wasn't personal; this particular branch of the Fourth Estate just doesn't lend itself to sustained narrative and analysis. Blogs remain private, written in the language and tone of knowingness, insider shorthand, instant mastery. Read them enough and any subject will go dead.
I think that blogs definitely put the reader into the skin of the blogger, and that the gonzo experience -- seeing things through a particular set of eyes linked to a particular sensibility -- is central to blogging.
I also think that Packer is right: blogs are indeed "atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant" and those are characteristics that typify successful media of our time. However, traditional journalism attempts to dissociate the author from the story. The pre-Heisenburg notion of an impartial, fact-finding, objective journalist who merely transcribes as history unfolds -- that idea is gone, or at least going.
While all experience of the world is private (until shared, at least), I don't believe we are trapped to find only stunted and insular insights in blogland. The form factor of blogging is shortish snippets, as opposed to longer pieces, and to gain a sense of the writer's mastery requires more of the reader than traditional journalism: the reader must return, and read again, and again, perhaps, to understand what the writer is up to. It is a serialized experience, and hoping that it could be condensed or smoothed into something else, smoothing into something more conventional means you are missing the point.
At any rate, no doubt about it, the revolution will be blogged, whatever revolution you may be thinking of. I guess in this case, the implicit argument is that the failure -- if that's what it is -- of Dean's populist revolt should be laid at the feet of the bloggers and the emergent democracy vanguard.
What may be missing from Packer's thinking is the participatory and involving aspect of most blogs -- something that is missed, or glossed over, if you apprach them with the eyes of a traditional reader. Every blog implies a community of readers, and their involvement -- to the degree that it jumps out -- changes the experience of reading totally, turning what may be thought of as "atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant" into something else entirely.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
A recent post from Loic Le Meur on what's the state of the practice in Estonia makes me cringe when I think about the US and e-government, which seems focused on Patriot Act style surveillance and security rather than anything to make life better at the grassroots, like mobile phone payment of parking fees. Loic Le Meur [from Estonia: 40% of the street car park payments made via mobile phone in some cities]
In the summer of 2001, the Government created a web page Täna Otsustan Mina ("I Decide Today"). Ministries upload all their draft bills and amendments there, allowing people to review, comment on and make proposals on the legislative process as well as propose amendments to existing legislation. Ideas that gain substantial support will be reviewed by competent bodies. Approximately 5% of all ideas are used as amendments to bills.
In April 2002 the Look @ World Foundation started an ambitious training project – the goal being that by spring 2004, 100,000 Estonians will have been taught basic computer and Internet skills. In October 2003 more than 75 500 people have passed the training. Primary feedback indicated that 59 per cent of the participants have become regular internet users.
[Note: Big Brother-esque activities are apparently going on in Estonia, too, however.]
Since January 2002, the Citizenship and Migration Board (www.pass.ee) has been issuing a new primary domestic identification document - the ID card. In addition to many advanced security features, the card has a machine-readable code and a microchip containing the visual data on the card and two security certificates (long number series), to verify the individual and supply digital signatures. Possible future uses of the card include integration of ID cards and banking cards and various access cards. By the end of 2003, 350,000 ID-cards were issued.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Dana (over at Moore's Lore) thinks we should hang Ev Williams because of the recent Blogger release. I haven't yet fooled around with the Picasa integration (see yesterday's story) but it looks like the push is toward mass market appeal, as opposed to more features for weenies like us.
The jury will have to remain out a while on that one, and perhaps it will be better to look at the next series of releases, to see if the numbers creep up and if defection rates (always very high for blogging tools) go down.
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May 10, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was interviewed for a recent piece at Knowledge@Wharton with overview of social networking's promise, but because of my hard disk crash, I can't dredge up the identity of the author. I particularly like the prognostication about future market consolidation:
[from Need a Job? How about a Date? Networking Services Want to Help - Knowledge@Wharton]
For all the enthusiasm about social networking services and the disclaimers that this time it is different, their success is far from assured. Anker of August Capital is skeptical of networking services aimed at corporations, for example. The impact of collecting and analyzing networks within companies may not yield results for 18 months to 24 months, he points out, making behind-the-walls networking a tough sell to CEOs beset by impatient stockholders. Dan Keldsen, a senior analyst at the Delphi Group, sees a more profound reason enterprise-oriented networking services may flounder: “Sales people are not known for sharing leads or contacts. They’ll find ways of subverting the system,” he suggests.
The broader social networks may find that there are only so many people interested in networking; that many of those interested in joining social networks won’t pay fees of any sort; that, as the novelty of networking fades, members will drift away, especially as it becomes evident that networks deliver less than they promise.
As a result, some social networks will disappear. Others, the betting goes, will be subsumed by bigger fish interested in using them to provide ancillary benefits to existing customers. Zero Degrees, a Los Angeles-based social networking service, has already been devoured by Barry Diller's Interactive Corp. Conversely, experts also expect that existing web-based businesses will add social networking to their services, thus ratcheting up further the pressure on the startups. Monster.com – which might expect to see its business cannibalized by social networking aimed at helping people connect for jobs – recently added networking to its offerings, telling subscribers that it will help “introduce you to the right people.”
All in all, the betting is that only a handful will be left standing after another 18 to 24 months have passed. “I can’t imagine that there is room for more than one dominant social network, one dominant business network and one network for special interests,” says Croson.
I still believe that many have discovered viable business models that will be either standalone long-term businesses in their own right or will rapidly become key feature sets for existing markets. So, in the final analysis it doesn't matter if SNAs continue on as an independent market or not: people will be harnessing the power of social networks for years to come, independent of the label on the box or the terms that are then in vogue.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Got very interesting email this morning, announcing a new partnership between Picasa -- the digital photo management company, whose Hello IM/Photo sharing app I reviewed here last year -- and Google's Blogger service. I haven't yet fooled with the integration, but I plan to.
Wendy Corn [via email]
Dear Stowe,
Picasa, Inc., (http://www.picasa.net) the leading digital photo organizing software which allows photographers to organize, manage and share digital photos, announced today it's working partnership with Blogger.com, a subsidiary of Google, to allow Blogger members to post photos and captions directly to their personal online journal or Weblog using Picasa's innovative sharing tool Hello.
Hello (http://www.hello.com) opens a private peer-to-peer network connection for instant sharing of photos and immediate feedback through Hello's chat function while Picasa facilitates users to organize and share their digital photos. This integration gives Bloggers a fast and easy way to expand and express themselves through their Blogs while increasing visibility on the web through photos. In order to post photos and captions, Hello users simply send their photos to the username "Bloggerbot" and immediately their Weblog is automatically updated.
Please consider sharing this news with your readers by adding a link to Picasa and posting the press release below. If you are interested in writing a feature story or would like to review Picasa/Hello please contact me. For more information please see the press release below.
Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you.
Best,
Wendy R. Corn
On Behalf of Picasa
The following press release is not yet available on the Picasa website, as far as I can see.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Picasa Brings Instant Photo Publishing to Blogger
Blogger Users Can Add Pictures to Their Blogs With Picasa's Hello Software
Pasadena, Calif. - May 10, 2004 - Picasa(tm), Inc., the leading developer of software which enables photographers to effortlessly organize, manage and share digital photos, announced today a product integration with Blogger(tm), the free, fast and easy-to-use service for publishing and sharing information online. Through Picasa's Hello photo-sharing application, Blogger users can now post photos and captions directly to their personal weblogs, or blogs.
Hello enables users to instantly share images securely over a peer-to-peer network and chat about them. The new Hello "BloggerBot" enables Hello users to post photos and captions to their Blogger blogs. The BloggerBot resizes the photo, uploads and publishes it to the web in seconds.
"Blogs are a popular platform for sharing information on the web, and we are thrilled to be working with Blogger to use the power and efficiency of Hello for publishing photos to blogs," said Picasa CEO Lars Perkins. "Picasa is committed to simplifying the sharing process for digital photos, and by adding the ability to publish to Blogger blogs via Hello, we offer users another option to share photos with friends and family."
"We're pleased to be able to offer the ability to post photos and captions through Hello," said Evan Williams, Blogger program manager, Google Inc. "This is a great opportunity that further enhances and improves the web publishing experience for Blogger users."
Hello currently has more than 250,000 users and can be used with or without Picasa, the company's flagship digital photo organizing software. Hello is offered as a free download available at www.hello.com.
Picasa is award-winning software that has been used by hundreds of thousands of people to organize their digital photo collection. Picasa users do not have to manually organize their digital photos. Upon installation, all images on the hard drive are automatically organized into albums, and new images are automatically added as they are saved to a user's hard drive. Picasa enables users to browse quickly through the entire collection of photos on their PC by displaying thumbnails of each image. The thumbnail system removes the need to search for digital pictures using original file names, which makes it difficult for many digital camera owners to find the photo they need. Advanced features include: cropping, rotation, red-eye removal, keyword search, slideshows, movie support and photo timeline display. Consumers can purchase Picasa for $29.00 or download a free 15-day trial at: www.picasa.net.
Owned by Google, Blogger is a free web-based service that helps consumers publish on the web instantly without writing code or installing software. Blogger's powerful publishing tools enable users to create, collect, and share opinions and experiences with a web-wide audience, whenever they'd like. For more information, visit www.blogger.com.
About Picasa, Inc.
Founded in 2001, Picasa, Inc. (www.picasa.net) develops software that makes it effortless for digital photographers to organize and share their digital photos. Picasa, the company's flagship product introduced in October 2002, can be used by photographers of all skill levels to easily categorize their digital photos. Picasa is a privately-held company headquartered in Pasadena, California, and a network company of Idealab, a creator and operator of technology businesses.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
I had a hard disk crash last week. While it led to a series of aggravating and painful problems, I am glad to say that I came away a whole lot better off than I thought I would, thanks to a collection of systems I had been using.
In particular, the Mirra personal server that I recent reported on (see LCD Collaboration) really saved my bacon, having backed up all my documents. But I also would like to point out that Yahoo Calendar and Plaxo also played a big role, since I was too dumb to tell the Mirra server to "mirror" my Outlook folder onto its separate hard drive (a mistake I will soon fix). Yahoo allowed me to reclaim (most) of my appointments, and Plaxo gave me back all my contacts. Thanks to those services, it took me only a few hours to get back to work, once the PC folks returned my laptop, reformatted.
All I really lost was the spit associated with setting up all the apps (which I will most likely to struggling with for weeks), and the last three of four months of email. Sigh. So If I have had a recent email exchange with you on anything important, you might want to fire off copies of the last handful of emails my way.
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May 06, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In advance of the E3 2004 conference, Majesco has announced its Wireless Messenger for Game Boy Advance: Craig Harris [from IGN.com
Though details are rough, according to the company Wireless Messenger will enable users to send instant text messages wirelessly, and the Wireless Link will allow gamers to play any game link-compatible multiplayer game wirelessly.
Both products will make their official public debut during the Electronic Entertainment Expo next week.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Participatory journalism is becoming more real, with evidence like the following:
Leonard Witt
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have been asked to speak at the upcoming iDate 2004 conference in Nice, France, scheduled for 15-16 July. Corante will be a media sponsor, as well.
I am interested in finding other excuses for extending my stay in Europe a week (through 23 July, potentially), so I am entertaining opportunities for other speaking engagements around that time in Europe. Please contact me at stowe@corante.com if you have thoughts along these lines.
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May 05, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a recent piece, Clay Shirky digs into my recent Darwin column on the implicit agreements that underlie social networking applications, and how we can fall into a problematic area when we expect conventions to support us that just don't exist:
Clay Shirky [from Many-to-Many: Un-Linked In]
..., Stowe Boyd tells an interesting story about a guy selling one degree connections to him (scroll to “SNA jacking”), on the grounds that he has snammed enough people to act as a valuable bridge. The snammer in question
"is making contacts with folks on the LinkedIn network under false pretenses: We all presume that he is like us, and that his network is made up of people like our own business and personal contacts, not clients paying for access. Don’t get me wrong, I think that his model — pay to play — is potentially a good one, so long as everyone involved is operating under the same set of rules. However, that’s not the set of rules I was operating under when I joined LinkedIn, and it wasn’t what I thought was going on when I accepted his request to become a contact. I don’t want him to make money on my reputation and contacts, and I especially don’t want him to do so without my knowing about it." It’s interesting to me that Stowe invokes the ‘rules’ he joined under, when no such things existed. What he means is “I made certain assumptions about the social fabric that this guy is violating, and as in real society, I expect my assumptions to be both shared and actionable.”
That they are not comes as a surprise, and this tension between what we expect vs. what the terms of service say and the software allows is a lot of what makes the currently clunky YASNS world so interesting to watch.
My take is that the interpretation of business intent will drive acceptance and rejection from potential customers. Any successful SNA service will have to align itself with some inviolable set of principles that deal with privacy and security, but just as importantly, with the ethical application of access. We can't have shifting boundaries and agreements in this regard.
I personally feel that it is time for the social software companies to collectively ratify some such set of principles. Its long overdue, and there have been more than enough murmurings -- among the vendors, analysts, and users -- to justify such an activity.
Where do I sign up?
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May 04, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was briefed this week by Joe Hildebrand of Jabber on the company's recent announcement about a teaming relationship with EBS. I usually don't report on teaming announcements, which can be mere marketing fluff. However, this announcement represents a watershed on several levels.
First of all, this is the first time Jabber has been able to tell the story about how its XCP technology is being used as the core real-time messaging infrastructure for a financial services real-time application. There have been a number of other applications along these lines, but the companies involved have decided not to announce the Jabber technology role, for competitive or other reasons.
Second of all, this is a great example of the application of XCP in a really big space. EBS is responsible for 70% of the world's foreign exchange trades, and the application developed will be making extensive use of Xdata forms within the XCP technology.
EBS had a real challenge in transitioning: zero downtime was required. Because of the XCP architecture -- they integrated the proprietary protocol of the existing FX trading client into the XCP server -- the company was able to accomplish the transition without a hitch. Over time, a gradual tansition to a new Jabber client can be accomplished, without any downtime.
So, this EBS relationship is not just an empty marketing announcement, but an indicator of the maturity of Jabber technology, and a real good example of where real-time collaboration in the financial services arena is headed.
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May 03, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was pinged this morning by Peter Quintas, who told me that Silk Road has acquired some moblogging technology: Peter Quitas [from tourniQuet]
I'm so exicted about this technology and offering that I wanted to share the scoop... We've acquired a mobile blogging solution that integrates directly to the network operators. The technology can be served through 2 models, the typical SMTP send-like-an-email model, or through MMS, a more robust and secure channel. This is a HUGE capability for enterprise use.
Some highlights of the latter model:
- Information on user agents (devices/users) are easily available
- Robust authentication, authorization, guranteed message retrieval
- High security, SSL and digital signature based integration possible
More to come soon...
I am intrigued. Silk Road is moving very fast into the enterprise blogging space -- moving out ahead of the more established content management players -- and I am glad to see the inclusion of moblogging features there. I hope to have more substantive information soon.
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