Social Media & Web 2.0 Website Information

Status.net Could Point to the Future of Business Intelligence

Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web

Few companies have captured the world’s attention online in recent years as much as Twitter has. Rapid, structured, public communication between groups of people is not only a personal paradigm changer for many who have seriously explored the service – it’s also an incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation.

First the Web, then email, then instant messaging and SMS all helped speed up the world we live in. Twitter made that rapid communication public and easier than ever for machines to mine for connections. Just as Facebook will never be Twitter because of the lack of clear access it offers outsiders to social data, so too does Twitter have its own limitations. A service called Status.net will launch in May that could overcome some of Twitter’s limitations and make a significant impact on the world we work in.

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Laconica, the Canadian company offering the most popular Open Source alternative to Twitter, announced plans today to begin selling subscriptions to hosted microblogging installations for businesses. The default address of these new sites will be yourname.status.net. We suspect that this could be a very big deal. (We found out about it from coverage on Microblink on Techmeme.)

Step One, People Will Want It

Laconica already allows anyone to install its software on their own servers, for free (see Leo Laporte’s Twit Army for example), but the easy paid offering from Status.net could catch on much faster. The service provider will be responsible for maintenance, upgrades will come automatically, the URL is clear and dignified and the fact that the software is open source could enable a plug-in and extension community to grow around the architecture as soon as it gets large enough for that to be viable.

Companies will pay to have either public or private microblogging installations hosted and branded for them. They will do so because if they do not – their employees will have no group of allied professionals to securely cry out to for help with work problems. Their departments will remain out of touch and unfamiliar with the people and work being done around their own company. Companies without a microblogging system will seem as silly and disadvantaged in the future as companies do today that say “we don’t need Instant Messaging, we have email,” or “we don’t need email, we have a fax machine.”

Step Two, People Will Build on It

Some companies will use the hosted Status.net platform, others will decide to put Laconica on their own servers and others still will decide to use some other provider’s business oriented but developer friendly microblogging service.

Once that fundamentally structured layer of social conversation has spread throughout a substantial portion of the business world, hopefully as interoperable Open Source software, here’s what will happen.

These are the kinds of birds eye views through data parsing that an Open Source microblogging platform for businesses will enable. All of the following is based on nothing more than cross referencing user profiles, friend connections and public replies between users. Any parts of this vision that aren’t simple will be simpler for someone to build once there’s adoption and Open Source code.

In private networks, a company will be able to receive automatic notification when one of its employees has begun conversing with another particular employee more than they had before. Perhaps they’ll consider putting them in the same work group.

If one sales person doesn’t converse with the technical team as often as other sales people do, a company might wonder whether that salesperson is less comfortable explaining technical matters to customers. It will be trivial to determine which technical staff are friendliest and most appropriate to introduce a sales person to, because those kinds of connections will be fully graphable.

In public business networks, community managers will be able to identify the customers most engaged in conversation with diverse groups of other customers with the snap of the fingers. Those are the kinds of community members that companies hire. Companies will be able to see if groups of people with similar traits in their profiles are asking for customer service more often than other groups, and when they seek to engage with those communities in order to improve product usability for them – the contours of that community will be easier than ever to understand.

People say that the phrase Social Graph is too vague, but when it comes to structured, open microblogging – social connections through conversation and content are literally graphable. Here are the users, here are their friends, here are their public messages and here are their replies to one another – just drawn a line from one column to one row and a narrative will be formed by the data. Repeat that process and you’ll be able to build stories around trends.

Is this creepy? It doesn’t have to be. There’s a whole lot of exciting potential here and if an increasingly open technology world can help the business world understand the value of open over control (as it is) then this kind of analysis could be democratized and used for good.

Let’s look at this from the perspective of Twitter right now. When I’m away from my computer and think of a question I need answered, I can send that question out to my Twitter network by SMS. Three people might post a public reply answering my question. When I get back to Twitter, I see those three replies and I publicly thank one of those people in particular for providing such a good answer.

Now repeat. Again and again, throughout an organization, across multiple organizations. Knowledge sharing paths get worn in the virtual grass of the public field of microblogging. Smart companies want their people creating those paths and only a fool would neglect an opportunity to illuminate these connections in the eyes of management.

It won’t happen on Twitter alone, though. It’s too public, the company is too bound by its own limitations on how much data it really wants anyone else to pull out of the river of Tweets and relatively small groups are a very important part of the future of microblogging.

We expect that hosted or free company-specific microblogging installations will become huge sources of Business Intelligence data and we hope that happens through interoperable, Open Source software. We’re excited to see what Laconica can do with Status.net.

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Talis Takes on Amazon With Pot of Structured Data in the Sky

Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web

By making available databases of human genomic data, US census records and other data of public interest, the Amazon Public Data Sets are an incredible resource. They’re like a 21st century Public Library for robots to patronize. In this emerging era of flourishing data-centric applications, though, the state of the art never stands still.

Fourty year old British technology platform Talis (background) announced this week that it now offers free, perpetual storage and keyless API access to semantically marked-up large data sets. The offering is called the Talis Connected Commons and it’s the kind of thing that anyone with a geekish imagination can get excited about.

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The Setting

If the current web economy is being rocked by easy publishing systems that make the people formerly known as “consumers” capable of publishing and socializing around content of their own creation – then the next step of internet evolution may come in the form of automated systems able to process meaning and patterns out of large amounts of that user-created and other information. When structured, free and available programatically in bulk – that data is like a big pot of gold for developers.

While Amazon offers free access to data sets, transport of the data is still paid for by users. The Talis Connected Commons also offers an API by default (a SPARQl end point, in particular) and is focused specifically on semantic data. The system is made for public sharing – two variations of Creative Commons licenses are supported for the data stored there. Talis is requesting that data set owners email a short description of their content to the company for approval and inclusion on the site.

In other words there’s no gold in the pot yet. Talis is established more than well enough and this offering is aimed at such a sweet spot, though, that the only way the Connected Commons won’t be filled with good data is if the company totally drops the ball. We don’t expect that to happen.

The Plot

This project is in the same vein as Nova Spivak’s forthcoming ontology authoring and hosting service, the vision of open source microblogging as the future of business intelligence and more.

There’s a chain of events that news like this helps fill out. First massive bodies of data are created or gathered – books are scanned, census data is collected, patients donate their anonymous aggregate medical data to science. Then the data is semantically analyzed and marked up (through any number of different semantic processing engines). Then the data is stored and an API is made available (this is where the Talis Connected Commons comes in). Finally, developers build applications that leverage the smart data offered up through the platform, data visualizers find new stories to tell in images built from the marked up data and new relationships between people, organizations and concepts have the mist cleared away from them through systematic analysis of various permutations of previously unavailable structured data.

Amazon Public Datasets include things like human genomic data, US census data and data parsed from Wikipedia. What will the Talis Connected Commons provide a home and API for? We look forward to finding out.

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Tinker Builds Microblog Communities Around Topics

Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web

Tinker, a new service that aggregates Twitter conversations around topics, came out of private beta today. Unlike services that merely attempt to track Twitter hashtag trends or attempt to describe what context a hashtag brings to a tweet, Tinker lets its users select popular events that are already being tracked, or create their own event stream by choosing a keyword or hashtag and adding a few filters, such as ‘no swear words’ and selective blocking of individual Twitter or Tinker users.

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In essence, this service is attempting to build communities around keyword-based categories. Once you follow a popular event, say SXSW Interactive, you can see other people that are also following the event, and who has been most active either sending tweets or Tinker posts (essentially tweets sent from Tinker), along with some helpful activity charts on the event topic. Creating a new event is almost as simple as following an existing one, just fill out a small form and your event is created. Once your event exists, you can update Twitter directly from the event page, and hopefully other Tinker users will see your update and will start following your event.

Tinker lets you get the word out on your event by allowing you to embed a widget with recent activity around your event. The widget they allow you to use, however, uses an iframe, which may not appeal to everyone. Each event does have its own RSS feed though, so a generic RSS feed widget can be used too.

We spent some time tinkering with the new service and we have some reservations. The big one: You can search for hashtags or keywords directly on Twitter’s search portal. Since Tinker does not actually have its own comment engine, all contributions made via the Tinker interface go straight back in to Twitter and, more importantly, have the same issue as Twitter posts, which is simply that there is no ‘conversation’. Your posts, either on Tinker or Twitter simply serve to enlarge the buzz on those topics, but nothing to really connect Tinker users together through conversation. This can be plainly seen on the most active events where it’s impossible to keep up with all the updates happening at any given time.

Tinker has other problems too, like the standard ‘free’ accounts only allow creating events around a single keyword or hashtag.. apparently more powerful searches are reserved for paying customers or site partners. Again, this severely limits with an average user can do, to the point where making a new event seem almost redundant. Finally, maybe it is because the service is new, but when I tried to create an event (using the occasionally used hashtag #sleep, you can see it here), it took quite a while for Tinker to show relevant tweets, then it decided to double all the tweets in the listing. On top of that, it allowed me to send several updates without confirming that they were actually posted to Twitter. As a result, I ended up spamming my Twitter friends with a bunch of duplicate tweets.

Update: Samir Arora (@samirarora), founder of Glam Media sent me a tweet stating that they are looking in to the duplicate issue. Thanks Samir!

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Facebook CFO Leaving the Company; IPO Imminent?

Mar 31, 2009 General, Mashable, Mobile 2.0, Social Media, Social Networking, Video, Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps

Facebook Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu is leaving the company, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal . The WSJ’s sources says that Facebook is now searching for a CFO with “public company experience,” which would set the stage for an IPO of the world’s most popular social network

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Facebook CFO Leaving the Company; IPO Imminent?

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Tags: block, business, design, events, General, Google, Mashable, News, permalink, social, Social Media, twitter, Video, Web

Yahoo Sideline: An Open Source Desktop Twitter Keyword Monitor

Mar 31, 2009 General, Mashable, Mobile 2.0, Social Media, Social Networking, Video, Web, Web Apps

Yahoo may be in overhaul with a new CEO and constant chatter about the health of its search business, but they still know how to program interesting and useful applications. Yahoo user interface engineers decided to try something a little different and experimental. The result was Sideline , a Yahoo-built application that runs on desktops via the Adobe AIR platform.

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Yahoo Sideline: An Open Source Desktop Twitter Keyword Monitor

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tags: adobe air, General, Mashable, Mobile 2.0, sideline, Social Networking, twitter, Web Apps