Collaboration: October 2007 Archives

I'm not a regular commuter anymore and rarely catch "All Things Considered" during drive time. Yet yesterday afternoon I had the good fortune to listen to Andrei Codrescu (always a favorite commentator) expound on "From Poetry to Web: Tools of Youthful Rebellion." Listen & enjoy!

With all the hype around Facebook apps, Web 2.0, and social media, it helps to keep a poetic perspective. Yes the times they are a changin' -- the torch is being passed to a new generation . . . but whether we are digital natives or immigrants, we still need to extract the business purposes from all the interactivity and information available at our fiingertips. What hasn't changed is the limit of the 24 hour day -- how we can work productively and play passionately within it.

It seems hard to believe that we've been too busy to blog about our annual upcoming conference in Boston. Fortunately it has a life of its own and doesn't depend on our blogging activity. This year's event is our largest yet, and we'll be blogging more regularly about it to help make sure you don't miss some of the nuggets.

Today, I just want to note that (one of the reasons we've been so busy is) because have a number of research projects and studies underway, and the results of some of these will be discussed at the conference, as well as on some of our track-specific blogs. For example, Geoff blogged yesterday about the research we are doing on collaboration, social computing, and "Web 2.0" technology use in the enterprise. Geoff will be leading a panel on this and other research at the conference. Stay tuned both here and on our topic area blogs for more info on this and other research.

Perhaps it's cyclical -- like the long Indian summer we've been having here in the Northeast. The Web/Enterprise/stuff "2.0" buzz has died down (for now) and we seem to be into the hard business of real application development. Perhaps this is a good thing -- running on hype does little to transform businesses or pay the bills.

Certainly there's been a lot of excitement around Facebook as a collaborative platform for digital natives (and fellow travelers). Yet the long-lasting innovation, I think, is around the APIs and the notion of "open platforms." Of course Google was first to open the komono with its wildly popular Web services API into Google Maps. Now we're trying to make mashups of social networks.

I'm curious but not convinced. Facebook is building out its community -- Google is not far behind, pursuing the notion of social graphing. So far we can do all kinds of useful things in the consumer space. My favorite this week is friend finding -- which also leverages GPS technology. But business applications? I haven't heard of anything really compelling, yet. I'm still looking.

Which brings me to a preview of coming attractions. My colleagues Steve Paxhia, Nora Barnes, and I expect to cut through the Web 2.0 hype next month and shed some light on industry trends. We'll be reporting the results of our industry survey at our Boston conference. We'll have a statistically significant profille of what collaboration and social computing tools are being using in American businesses -- beginning with email and Web sites and assessing many popular forms of social media. We'll snapshot how effective companies rate these tools and also report on what each tool is best suited for. And I expect that before we're done, we'll have a few indicators of next generation collaborative business applications.

So join us, November 27th - November 29th in Boston.