Sunfleet
A Sun Labs blog on social software and group collaboration.
Companies co-opt Social Software
As I said in an earlier post about Web 2.0, I believe the most powerful and compelling aspect of the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon is the "architecture of participation." And companies are realizing this and building their own internal web application built upon individuals contributing content. For example, today's Wall Street Journal has an article about social software and how many companies are re-inventing web-based social tools for their own corporate intranets.
WSJ, 9/12/06: Offices Co-Opt Consumer Web Tools Like 'Wikis' and Social Networking
This trend is interesting for a couple reasons:
- This is a sign that the centrally-organized corporate intranet is going away.
- The reason the intranet can go away is that individuals across an organization at all levels are supplying their own information to the web of corporate information. The important thing to note though is that they are doing this because it is the easiest place to put the information for their own personal use! Just like Google's gmail, calendar and spreadsheet tools, company-sponsored web-based tools can actually be easier and better than your desktop tools. And the end-result is that the company's intelligence is now stored in a centralized location, accessible by everyone, rather than on each person's machine (or worse, only in their head).
- There is no longer an approval process for getting things published on the company's internal site. I think this is because of two factors. First, these applications are being set-up and used at the grassroots level, not the top management, so the typical approvers are not in the original install loop. Second, each person who contributes content to the web has their name attached to each piece of data they contribute. This mitigates the risk the company will be blamed for mis-information. Ideally, correct information will emerge through collective intelligence.
- Social networking goes beyond MySpace and LinkedIn to actually getting work done. I am a believer in using social network tools for forging within-organzation contacts and the article mentions that quite a few companies are using these networked applications to make connections between knowledge workers.
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" |
Siggraph 06: Collaboration, Virtual Worlds & Second Life
Continuing on the theme of "interesting things at SIGGRAPH" .... I attended an Exhibitor Tech Talk on the topic of collaboration and Second Life. There were several presenters from Linden Lab, the creators of the Second Life. (One of the presenters was Pathfinder Linden. Here are his P*werP*int slides.)
I won't give a description of Second Life here, either because you know about it already or you don't care, but I will list out what I found to be most interesting. This is coming from the perspective of someone who does not play multi-player games but is very interested in making collaboration and communication effortless.
- Everything you create in the world, you own. So this leads to monetary exchange of the items/objects people have spent a lot of time creating. This also implies, even without any monetary exchange, that the time you spend creating something is not "lost" time, but rather went towards creating something valuable. (I am guessing this is one of the main reasons why the game is so popular.)
- The main thing to do in Second Life (it seemed) is to build things. And when you build things, people can see you doing it within the world, so it becomes an inherently social activity. Or at least an activity that involves social awareness. Since you want to build things and you can see other people building things, it seems like a great place to learn from other people.
- Second Life supports live streaming of video, so real-world (non-virtual? what is "real" anymore?) events can be shown within Second Life. This can lead to crazy things like within Second Life's replica of Harvard's Berkman Center you can see live presentations that are going on at the physical Berkman Center at that moment. Or you (as an avatar) could look at yourself giving a presentation in real-life from within Second Life. Freaky! And also very interesting for workplace collaboration scenarios with a mix of collocated and remote workers.
- A point that was never mentioned: there is no audio in Second Life. So all communication is basic text chat (I'm assuming). Could it possibly be as bad as it sounds??
As a side note, the presentations by Linden Lab employees included a few too many examples of overly-sexualized female avatars for my taste. To counterbalance that, I am providing here a picture of a demo going on elsewhere at Siggraph that involved gratuitous objectification of the male body.
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" |
Google (Social) Trends
Have you checked out Google Trends yet?
As I see it, it can be used to track anything that changes over time that is reflected in what people write about and read about on the internet. So what about social relationships? Celebrity relationships certainly change over time and we definitely love talking about them. Are you on Team Jolie or Team Aniston? Check out how (in the graph above and here) Aniston used to track Pitt and now Pitt appears to track Jolie. Ha!
And then there's the TomKat trend that came out of nowhere on approximately May 22, 2005.
Ok, now that there's a quantiative tool that can be applied to celebrity gossip, we need to find a practical use for the data.
[update: some more fun ones:
Steelers v. Seahawks
John Kerry & John Edwards v. George Bush
Romeo & Juliet (looks like they're still going strong)
]
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" |
Skype & Massively Multiparty Online Conference Calls (MMOCC)
From Ars Technica:
The other new feature from Skype is currently being tested by a handful of Skype partners. Skypecasts are massively multicaller conference calls supporting up to 100 people from anywhere in the world. Each call is moderated by a host who can control who gets to speak via "mute" and "eject" buttons. Skype is positioning Skypecasts as an online community-building tool and a way for people to "discuss shared interests." Plans are for the current testing to be followed by a wider public beta.A conference call with 100's of people involved is an interesting "large group" problem. With the ability to have an integrated visual interface (AKA Skype's interface), it seems to me that Skype has a big opportunity to create cool visualizations of the group interactions. You don't want to hear the fidgeting and mumbling of 100's of people, but what if you could SEE it in the interface?
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" | Comments[0]
In Honor of V-Day: The Dumpster
The latest in social network visualization: The Dumpster! A visualization of teenagers' romances, gathered from online blog entries. Sure to be overly dramatic and quite entertaining! This was work done by Golan Levin (a Media Lab alum), Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Tate Online.
Happy Valentine's Day!
(NOTE: I am having difficulties viewing this from behind Sun's firewall. It looks like the applet requires an open HTTP connection. :( )
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" | Comments[0]
Conversation Table
Following on the theme of technology that detects and records face-to-face interaction, check out the Conversation Table that lights up when people speak, animating who has the floor with LED lights. Lira Nicolovska built this as part of her doctoral work in architecture at MIT.
This Conversation Table was shown in Nikolovska's exhibit "Four Tables."
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" | Comments[0]
IDEO Business Card Brainstorm
Imagine if that stack of business cards you've been collecting contained some useful information! IDEO ran an "Identity Card Concept Project" that explored this idea with sketches of different possibilities. Definitely a creative bunch of ideas.
The one I find most intriguing is the proposal that a business card act as a "Listening Card" that helps you "identify and subtly characterize the people" you are interacting with by quantifying when they spoke in the meeting. You can characterize each person as either the "hectic loudmouth," "cool talker," "quiet wanderer," or "silent observer."
First off, this is similar in nature to my own doctoral research project, Second Messenger, where I demonstrated that showing people information about speaking patterns influences subsequent interactions. But I very much disagree with the claim that this is a "subtle" characterization of people. Quite the opposite! The visualization of speaking patterns is a blunt instrument for characterizing people's personalities and should be interpreted as such. Yet I do like the idea of collecting observed behavior information and incorporating it into a handle (the biz card) for later reference.
originally via information asthetics
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" | Comments[0]
Fear Mongering: Tracking the Threat
As if They Rule weren't enough to pique your interest in social networks. Check out this website: TrackingTheThreat.com.
The interface is similar to TheyRule.net, but here you view entities like countries, businesses, and terrorists. When you "expand" on one of the entities, say Osama bin Laden, you can see who, what, and where he links to.
Feel the fear level rising yet?
Found via information aesthetics.
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" | Comments[0]
Who Rules Corporate America?
They Rule! Want to know who's in power within the US's largest corporations? This is a cool and very informative Flash social visualization of who is on different boards of directors. Here's a glimpse at Sun's board:
Read more about TheyRule.net here
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" | Comments[1]
The RSS Bandwagon
If you want to read 100's of blogs a day, you can use an RSS Reader to consolidate and alert you to new blog posts on all your favorite blogs. I recommend the MacOS application NetNewsWire ($20) or the web-based Bloglines (free).
Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools" | Comments[4]