Stu Downes

I’m a fairly recent adopter of Twitter having only started using it a couple of months ago, despite knowing about it for a year or more – and having some preconceptions which stopped me using it.  Well I’d thoroughly recommend it as a business and social tool.  This video cast explains my views best:

link to youtube videocast

The real reasons I recommend twitter is that it isn’t just an Instant Message status tool.  I can convey feeling, mood, actions, next actions, all in a context which is recorded and hence people can view a historic timeline of my twitters.  This is really useful in a team, especially my team which is geographically dispersed.  It also allows me to understand more about colleagues workstyles and mood – very important when you aren’t co-located – I won’t know if you are ill or feeling rough, but with twitter I will.

Useful applications which extend twitter are:

Twiteroo (thick client)

BlackBerry Client

Facebook status / twitter integration

This announcement hasn’t received much blog attention.  The announcement is interesting because of the approach.  This isn’t a direct integration with the IBM Sametime server but appears to be a web services based approach building on the SOA framework and integrating the Nortel telephony solutions with Websphere application server.  Building the platform as an SOA platform should allow this solution to extend well within an enterprise application infrastructure enabling UC and presence not only within IBM’s collaboration products but further into line of business applications.

Under the terms of the new agreement, the standards-based IBM WebSphere Application Server will be integrated into Nortel’s new software-based solution foundation environment. Nortel is abstracting communication components from the underlying existing telecom infrastructure and making them available within this new web services-based environment. This will allow companies to easily create SOA-based communications-enabled applications and business processes by linking together business systems and applications with communication systems and networks.

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As part of this announcement, the Nortel software based foundation environment will be integrated with IBM’s unified communications and collaboration platform, Lotus Sametime. Through this integration, businesses will be able to add advanced communication and collaboration offerings including capabilities like click to call, click to conference, telephony presence and shared directory services. For example, with Lotus Sametime and the Nortel software based foundation environment, a customer could see if a contact’s phone is in use without leaving the Lotus Sametime client.

  So I’m about a week behind writing about this although I’ve had a number of interesting email discussions.  Google’s OpenSocial API is their attempt to drive a common interface between numerous social platforms.  James comments:

Fundamentally I think the benefit of someone like Google kicking off OpenSocial is a good thing – we can see this in the momentum that has gathered so quickly around it. But the concept of People, Activities and Persistence is simply enough that it can be replicated and for me the enterprise social networking story that plays out behind it will mean Google can’t completely dominate it

Nick comments:

Many companies can see the potential benefits of having their employees tied together through a social network. It could help encourage productive collaboration without requiring big investments in complicated and expensive knowledge-management systems, which rarely work. But companies, particularly large ones, are antsy about putting sensitive corporate and personal information into an open social network like Facebook – not only because of security concerns but also because of lock-in fears.

Programmatically the concept is great, a reduction in the number of APIs will improve the number of social tools linked by applications – some will be useful some dreadful.  In terms of the enterprise my position is to take a watching brief.  We have already seen some security concerns.  I’d be interested to see if any larger players in enterprise collaboration join the list, which presently includes:

Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

Given that IBM are warming to Google and recently announced a joint cloud computing solution for students and acedemia could we see IBM entering the fray?  Connections would seem an obvious candidate to allow organisations to federate data with other social sotfware tools (LinkedIn etc.)  or SaaS tools (salesforce.com).  Like I said time for a watching brief.

Recently an independent site focused on promoting ideas and discussions for the Lotus Community was launched.  Mark highlighted that Microsoft have launched SharePointPedia.  So is this the beginning of the end of traditional forums and discussion groups for product based communities?  For me the key benefit of both these sites is the ability of the community to promote content.  I suppose time will tell on which forums win.  The key for all these forums is to have a purpose and actually deliver benefit both to community members and the manufacturers / products.  In this case I would be more willing to participate in the SharePoint community simply because it is a vendor sponsored product so I can be more confident someone is tracking the content and talking to the product managers about interesting content.