This post more in like a continuation of my earlier post. ‘Does social networking have relevance in Enterprise?’ As I dug further, I realized that the change is here to stay and the evolution of social web has already been mapped. So this post is more on the lines of how companies should cope with the metaphysis of web2.0.

In April 2009, Forrester analysts published their study on the future of the social web. They have divided it’s evolution and progression into 5 overlapping eras namely ;

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share (Start – 1995 Maturity - 2003 to 2007)
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system (Start – 2007 Maturity- 2010 to 2012)
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social (Start – 2009 Maturity - 2011)
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content (Start – 2010 Maturity - 2012)
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services (Start – 2011 Maturity - 2013)

We are in a transitional state between Era of Social Colonization and the Era of Social Context. We know that almost everything is socially integrable . If we look closely, sites like Facebook and Twitter are no longer just social network sites. Instead, they are evolving into a more complex, yet simpler communications platforms. This year we are already witnessing the mighty powers of the social barrier breaking Identity 2.0 technologies such as OpenID and Facebook Connect. With the advent of these two, the pronounced dividers across all Internet sites are beginning to dissolve. By year 2010, Identity 2.0 would be the boss and online content would come on a customized platter to the users.

Companies must realize that their products or services will sell more based on WoM because the old concept of ‘Customer is King’ is back. Millions of people are going to be using the social networks and they will buy products based on what their friends have to say and not solely based on advertisements. It would be wise to nurture customer evangelists and patent online groups. Whatever be the company’s product or service, it must be showcased online so that it can be seen by customers and prospective clients, else they could be on the losing side. Some speculate that in the future, the customers would be determining what the company has to offer. In that case it is always better take product to the customers first before they bring it to company.

Therefore, I think that companies must adopt a total ‘transparent-to-public’ policy, even if they are not totally pro Web 2.0 to cope with the transition.

Having said all this, I must also say that one cannot predict the exact course of Web 2.0 because 60 years back Internet itself was a myth.

On the lighter side, here is Dilbert!

For what we know, there are quite a few organizations that go to the extremes to block out the social networking sites out of their offices, just to prevent their employees from getting distracted. Have they won the battle? Maybe! But even if they win, they could be at loss. .

Social network media is bound to seep into all walks of life and work in the next 2 years. We are in a transitional state were restricted working environments are giving way to more of a free social enterprise business culture. Like it or not, the change is here. Social media networking is a huge infantile market and Forrester analysts say that Enterprise 2.0 will become a US 4.6 billion dollar industry by 2013.. The companies that try to prevent the social media networks might have already lost their potential customers to their competitors who hold no taboo against them.

That brings us to a very important question, will there ever be a true bridge between social networking sites and enterprises?The answer lies in moderation and in the advent of Community management.

But first, what is Community management?

It has been there,right from the arrival of all forms online interpersonal communication (ie, online forums, chats rooms, newsgroups, etc) but had mostly stayed on the sidelines. It’s only now starting to get serious attention as a technique for managing social collaboration within organizations and outside. Community management would mean creating, expanding and moderating/managing online communities built that around the company’s product, service or the company itself. But that is not all, it would also include managing the vital social must-haves like networking, marketing, evangelism, human resource management, communication, corporate blurb, etc.

Enterprise social networking can be regulated process with community managers to oversee it. It would be best if companies embrace it and treat it like any other enterprise communication tool.

What are these much fabled Mash-ups anyway? Everyone is talking about them but how much do we really know about these Mashups?

Wikipedia defines a ‘mashup as a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service.’ In much more simpler terms, A mashup could be website or web based application that uses different content from various sources to create a completely new product. This product will be a new service, an hybrid, having the features of its parent resources.

Mashing up is incredible. The excitement about these mash-ups are about the end result. Its all about the innumerable mix and match end products. You could mashup Madonna and Yoda and you get Yodanna, Mayoda, MaYo, Yoma. Its a virtual goldmine. Mashups, after the API (a public interface) floodgates opened up for every one to use, the possibilities have become limitless. There is and there will be a creativity explosion.

What I think is that mashups are probably one of the greatest adages to web 2.0. You have several different types of mashups. The popular ones would include consumer mashups( the most common variety that targets the general masses), data mashups, and business process mashups.

So what else is hot? Mashup analysts – so 3008! everything else - so 2000 and late!

We have business analysts, content analysts, system analysts. What do they do? For the most part, they analyze and streamline all the information that is available to them. They see and analyze what fits where and what does not. With mash-up technology growing exponentially since 2008, I think that it is only logical to have mash-up analysts. Many companies are thriving on ‘2.0′ technologies (like RIA widgets,mashups, blogs) and they allow their clients/users to create and share their creations themselves. So I’m guessing that there will be more technically qualified people who would take up roles of ‘Mashup Analysts’ in the future.
PS. Check this site out. www.stormberry.tv. I found this website in on of the mash-up networks. This allows users search youtube using the youtube API. The user can view the video, or they can add subtitles to the video using a web interface provided. These subtitles can then be translated to another language using Babelfish engine. This gets my thumbs up signal.

Tracking friend’s activities across social sites like Bebo, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Hi5, imeem, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pandora, Slide, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Windows Live Spaces, Yelp, and YouTube, is of course another sign that we are all social and our social life is increasingly getting shifted to internet. Spokeo and FriendFeed are the two main social network aggregation services doing the heavy lifting task of tracking. The question I have is that do they simplify our online life by pulling all of the content into one centralized monitor or it adds to the complexity

Here are some comparisons points:-

• Spokeo is little harder than FriendFeed to bring friends accounts together if friends sign up for online services using multiple email addresses. FriendFeed has also this nice feature of setting FriendFeed RSS feed which can then be handed to all contacts.

• Spokeo is also largely a one-way tool - you can reply to and share updates, but only via email to the contacts. FriendFeed lets you share content from 28 different services via a single stream, and subscribe to the streams of your friends.

• Spokeo is very simple to set up- it can take in directly all of the contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, and then go out to the 30+ sites it monitors and bring back any new content from people in your address book. In comparison, FriendFeed is more complex- it takes in Facebook friends, but only the ones who are also FriendFeed users, plus each member must specify which sites he wants to expose to others.

• FriendFeed publishes all of the activities in an endless stream which includes all of friends’ (including those who decide to make their content public) content-bookmarks, blog posts, status updates, pics, and videos. Spokeo’s appeal is to keep track of interesting friends who are prolific across the Web.

OuterJoin is big believer of OpenId and perhaps understandably, given our Yodlee background. The OpenID Foundation formed in June 2007 has a good early start- as of July 2007, over 120 million OpenIDs on the Internet and approximately 4,500 sites OpenID integration was reported. Membership has cut across the industry- individuals, students, non-profits, startups and industry giants.

A brief definition- OpenID is free technology that simplifies the online user experience by eliminating the need for multiple user names across Internet sites, enabling individuals to take more control and ownership of their digital identities. This user-centric digital identity technology helps users reduce the pain of managing dozens, even hundreds of usernames and passwords, and provides more control over what personal information they share with Websites when they sign-in using an OpenID.

I also see, OpenID concept promoting the decentralized, free and open standard in terms of personal information. The latest update I found was more than 10,000 Websites support OpenID log-ins, and an estimated 350 million OpenID enabled URLs currently exist. February 7, 2008 was historic day for OpenID as Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! joined as first corporate board members. Also adding credibility is the news that integrated OpenID support has been made a high priority in Firefox 3 and OpenID can be used with Windows CardSpace.

By end of 2008, I think much like the Jabber Foundation and Mozilla, OpenID will also see acceptance internationally and hopefully ecommerce websites will also enter mainstream in terms of adoption, though concerns on phishing attacks and user identity theft will continue to persist.

MOLI.com is a recently launched social-networking site and our client. We have learnt what team work can achieve- they blazed trail at eTrade and are doing again at MOLI.

You might wonder “another social networking site???? But, there is method behind every madness. Unlike most social networking sites, which allow only one user profile, MOLI allows multiple profiles for the same person or entity. Now attached to these are all the different groups one is associated with. It also gives the ability to link any e-commerce endeavor. That’s powerful proposition. That’s not all, throw in original content- video, blogs, competition and events; entertainment aspect is also covered. MOLI caters to the under-served market age range of 18 and above - users, who do not want chaos, spam and have developed sophisticated tastes (who do not want to be poked).

Social Network might be perceived as saturated space but if anybody has a good chance to crack it, MOLI has to be the front runner. If you think about it- every new service/startup has social component to it, so that challenge is global and not just limited to pure ’social network’. This is the first social network with built-in ‘e-commerce’ which makes a lot of sense, since when you first start any enterprise (store or anything else); you approach your social contacts (friends & families) first.

Registration is free with a slight charge for some premium commerce tools. Check it out and get connected with me!

Last week on April 3, 2008 one of the big news items was Seesmic acquiring Twhirl, an Adobe AIR based Twitter client. Now both are very small companies and I am really wondering how it can be an acquisition? Both came together in a quest to offer consumers a more complete product. One of the web 2.0 problems is that there are few companies which are product features rather than a complete product itself.

Seesmic is a video micro blogging web application developed by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur. Twhirl is a very popular Twitter application; it accounts for 7 percent of the traffic on Twitter.

Seesmic plus Twhirl, powered by XMPP (Twitter supports XMPP messaging) is going to be power- Instant text and video communication and presence status, which is a more complete product than earlier and hence more attractive to consumers. Video blogging has had limited success compared to text blogging and this is a way for Seesmic to shift its focus from video to overall ‘microblogging.’ Despite Twhirl’s importance in the Twitter ecosystem, it is not a huge app by normal software standards. A combined service will provide a more compelling way of communication factoring in user’s broadcasting & time preferences.

Overall, Twhirl will benefit the Seesmic community in the following ways:

• Getting in touch with your friends using microblogging is much easier using a client than through your browser.

• Twhirl works on Mac AND PC, soon on Linux too.

• Twhirl lets you easily use all the advanced messaging options of Twitter (replies, direct messages)

• Twhirl allows you to have multiple Twitter accounts opened simultaneously.

Of course, adding video to Twhirl will be a plus to the Twhirl community. Maybe I need to shift from WordPress comfort zone to the Seesmic world.

I wish I had this exceptional ability to forecast the future. Every time I try to do, I end up with egg on my face. When blogging first came to the scene, I said too much work for people to do and here I am today- blogging hard . Then micro-blogging came and I thought, now, we have to micro-manage time! Looking at the number of players in this space, I am beginning to wonder whether this has come of age. Here are some of the active players:

Twitter: the first on the scene which allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.

Jaiku was the first competitor to emerge & the acquisition by Google made it even stronger. Jaiku’s put in special effort to create Jaiku Mobile, a live phonebook that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of one’s Jaiku contacts right in their phone contact list.

Pownce, another competitor sends just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. Of all the Twitter competitors Hictu added features that separate them from the rest, they’ve given users more networking options & also ways to control content from within their account.

Utterz lets users create rich media micro posts with text, audio, or video and have it automatically updated on their blog, web site, or Facebook account directly from their cell phone! It’s a microblogging tool that lets users call audio in from their cell phone, making it easy to post updates when a data connection is not available.

Loopnote calls itself -Notifications 2.0, it is about management of all notifications/messages in a central place.

So who is going to forecast the winner in this space or evolution in this space, not me

I came across an interesting news in Techcrunch- Digg Users Are Doing Their Best To Kill An Acquisition. It made me wonder the strong emotions people have with the user generated web 2.0 sites. Why not, it is their content; it’s their time & effort which made the site what it is. They have enjoyed contributing and do not want to change that in any sense.

Take any large social communities; the content is all user-generated. Just exclude the community content from a site like Digg, Flickr, Twitter or Facebook and there’s little left that makes them interesting. So who’s controlling these startups the community?

Startups need to be extra cautious if it’s the community that keeps them going. One wrong move that makes your community not happy and you’ve turned your asset into a liability. With the community driving the market value, you cannot separate the community from the website. Our community optimization services are designed to help companies in this direction- keeping community happy.

Jaxtr is a free service that brings voice to social networks and blogs. It focuses on consumers with online profiles. Users can link their phones with their online network to hear from callers worldwide while keeping their existing phone numbers private and giving them control with the people they meet online.

Jaxtr reported 5 million registered users in 5 months since July 07. This makes Jaxtr the fastest growing Internet communications service in history ahead of Skype, Hotmail and ICQ. Out of the huge user base 85% are international users and only 15% are North American.

What’s Jaxtr’s Viral Strategy: It’s an email signature calling links (send messages to all your address book contacts). Something like
I am using Jaxtr, and if you also sign up, we can talk for free on the phone at any time.
-Sender

P.S. Here is the link to sign up:
http://www.jaxtr.com/user/ticket?n=T10ftmmlt9×5oc&type=joininvite&eb=87

My Assessment:

• The large number of international users Vs US users shows that growth is driven by Free Call messaging which has a huge appeal outside US
• Jaxtr sends emails to all the contact listed in the address book

I am not convinced about the existence of demand for Jaxtr’s service and this can be seen by fewer uptakes on their Facebook app.