MySpace Joins Google Alliance to Counter Facebook

By MIGUEL HELFT and BRAD STONE

MySpace and Bebo, two of the world’s largest social networking sites, today joined a Google-led alliance that is promoting a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks.

The alliance now presents a powerful counterweight to Facebook, which, after opening up its site to developers last spring, has persuaded thousands of them to create programs for its users. The addition of MySpace, the world’s largest social network, and Bebo, the No.1 site in Britain, could also put pressure on Facebook to drop its own standard and join the alliance, called OpenSocial.

“OpenSocial is going to become the de facto standard for developers rights out of the gate,” said Chris DeWolfe, chief executive and co-founder of MySpace. Mr. DeWolfe said that developers using OpenSocial would be able to instantly reach 200 million users across various sites.

Google and others said they had invited other social networks, including Facebook, to participate in the alliance, whose existence was first reported Tuesday.

“The most important principle about openness is that everyone is invited to join,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive.

Other members of the alliance include Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Ning, as well as the business software makers Oracle and Salesforce.com. The creators of several of the most popular programs on Facebook, including Slide, RockYou, iLike and Flixter, have announced their intention to write programs conforming to the OpenSocial standards.

The alliance is not likely to erode the popularity of Facebook or immediately alter the dynamics of the social networking market. But it could help revitalize the sites of some of its members, which have seen their social networks eclipsed by the popularity of MySpace and Facebook. Orkut, Google’s social network, for instance, is popular in Brazil and a few other countries, but has failed to gain traction in the United States.

Google may benefit in other ways. As other social networks draw more users, it could sell more advertising on those sites. TheInternet search giant already has a $900 million advertising partnership with MySpace, and sells advertising on various other social networks. Its ads often appear inside the applications created by third-party developers. Google and MySpace have been in discussions about developing a common set of programming standards for about a year, the companies said.

At a news conference today at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Joe Greenstein, the chief executive of Flixter, whose applications allow users to share movie recommendations, demonstrated his program running inside MySpace.

“We are excited about OpenSocial,” Mr. Greenstein said. But he added that Flixter was not planning to pressure Facebook, where millions of members use the company’s program, to adopt OpenSocial. Mr. Greenstein said that customizing his company’s application that runs on Facebook to run on OpenSocial had been a painless task.Facebook declined to comment.

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Does a Microsoft-Facebook Tie Portend the Next Net Bubble?

By Clint Boulton

Though just a rumor at this point, the idea that Microsoft took a 1.6-percent stake in popular social networking site Facebook has some industry experts anticipating the next Internet bubble.

Ovum Research analyst David Bradshaw said the stake could open the floodgates for social-networking vendors going public with high valuations.

“Indeed, it is such a large amount that it makes me suspect that we’re in the run-up to another bubble in Internet company values,” Bradshaw told eWEEK. “A lot of other people will seek to go public,” he said, noting that the public is ripe for a new Internet bubble.

That’s right. Another Internet bubble. Another half-decade of sky-high valuations, lavish spending and high-tech incubators.

Fueling the high-cost frenzy for such properties as LinkedIn, Twitter, Bebo, Friendster and Digg, will be the desire to implement technologies from these companies into products for the enterprise, Bradshaw said.

Should some sort of Microsoft-Facebook union come to fruition, expect some of Facebook’s social-computing tools to be incorporated in Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration software, said IDC analyst Mark Levitt.

“My take is that Microsoft is active enough in the consumer Web space that an investment in Facebook may not result in any crossing over into the enterprise for the foreseeable future,” Levitt told eWEEK. “But down the road, you are right that the Facebook’s experience and technology could find its way into Microsoft’s SharePoint solutions for enabling business social networking.”

However, Bradshaw said the stovepiped architecture of enterprise applications present some significant obstacles for vendors to address.

He said while social networks such as Facebook, of Palo Alto, Calif., and LinkedIn have made some strides on the recruitment ground, no one has cracked the selling of tools that enterprises themselves could adopt.

Aside from the challenges of negotiating social networking into enterprise systems, Bradshaw said that some problems with Facebook could preclude the company from rising as fast as some think and thwart his theory.

Those issues include privacy concerns associated with protecting minors from sexual predators and the ongoing legal action between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his former roommates over the alleged theft of intellectual property.

Gilbane Group analyst Geoff Bock agreed that Facebook’s privacy issues could scare off prospective companies. On Sept. 24, the New York State Attorney General’s office subpoenaed Facebook for documents that demonstrate the company is not protecting underage users from potential predators.

Moreover, Bock downplayed the Internet bubble theory and has his own theory on the interest in Facebook.

“The reason for the valuation is that it is a platform, and it appears to be a platform for the Net natives, people who group up and live on the Internet all of their lives,” Bock told eWEEK. “What we’ve seen time and again on the Internet is that places, locations, platforms and environments that get a lot of eyeballs and start doing useful things can get pretty decent valuations in the public marketplace.”

Bock also took a dimmer view of social computing in the enterprise, at least in the near term. The analyst said that while Facebook and Google allowing mashups make them enormously popular, that doesn’t mean these companies will help social-networking tools transition into the enterprise.

Bock said that enterprise content-management platforms from IBM, EMC and Microsoft SharePoint don’t support social networking, noting that it’s not clear how social computing works inside the enterprise.

He said businesses would have to build relationships with customers to link the information, supply chain and value chain flows together.

“We don’t have good software yet that manages those links,” Bock said. “Every major company is working on defining and managing the links and I don’t think the Googles, Facebooks and Amazons understand the enterprise enough to do that.”

If any company comes close to socializing the enterprise platform, Bock said, it’s IBM with its Lotus Connections software.

Differences of opinion on the evolution of social-networking tools in the enterprise abound. IDC analyst Rachel Happe said she is moderately bullish on the notion of social networking moving into the enterprise, noting that “social networking provides a filter to information, and information is exploding online.”

In fact, Happe called eWEEK Sept. 26 from the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT, in Cambridge, Mass., where she said research engineers from Cisco Systems and Intel talked about how they are looking to use social networking to “evolve search to information discovery and filtering.

“They see social networking as an underlying platform for a lot of applications,” Happe said, noting that her research showed that device companies are looking at social-networking applications and P2P (peer-to-peer) media distribution as something to bundle with their devices to better control information flow.

Meanwhile, Bradshaw concluded that with the evolution of this Web 2.0 world of social networking and collaboration, “Facebook is no more than a step along the way and that there’s something further to come.”

“Longer term, we believe that social networking sites have to evolve further,” he said. “Maybe we need bubble 2.0 to burst before we can get to that, but let’s hope not.”

Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta said while the industry is still trying to understand what people want from a social-networking platform, the opportunity is compelling in terms of how social networking can alter product- and service-delivery models and also influence customer and community relationships.

But is there a bubble coming?

“We are so early in this phase that it’s difficult to position this as a bubble per se,” Gotta said. “Instead, I view it as one aspect of broader societal, market and economic trends that are transforming business and organizational models.”

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Replace Facebook Using Open Social Tools

With a little savvy, anyone can create a page that hosts all of the essential stuff one would find on a Facebook profile that can be set up with the same plug-and-play ease. You’ll have to store all of your photos, videos, and contacts elsewhere, but at least you’ll be able to get to your stuff.

Start by setting up a blog. Say what’s on your mind. Unlike your blog on Facebook or MySpace, everyone will be able to read it.

From there, you can pull in your photos from Flickr or Zooomr, show off your impeccible musical tastes hosted at iLike or Last.fm, share your favorite web bookmarks from del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia and put up a list of your most recent reads using Shelfari or LibraryThing.

All of these services have open APIs, making it easy for third-party developers to build widgets for displaying public data stored there. As a result, many such tools exist.

Need to keep up to date with your friend’s activities? Pull in a feed from their blog or from their Twitter page. The Upcoming event notification service has a dead simple code generator that will create a widget listing all of the events you plan to attend, as well as those your friends are interested in. Like to chat? Meebo offers an embeddable widget for AIM chatting, and Jaxtr does the same for SMS. You can even drop in a Skype button that lets your friends call you with one click.

One of Facebook’s unique features is the “everything in one place” feed service (Mini-feeds and News Feeds), but you can build such a thing yourself. Just create an account at one of the many feed re-mixing sites like Yahoo Pipes, FeedShake or FeedBlendr. Plug in all the feeds from the various sources you want to track and paste the resulting URL into a widget on your site. Voila.

The free blogging software from WordPress has all of the functionality to let you embed these widgets and RSS streams. WordPress also has a thriving plug-in ecosystem, so it’s likely a developer somewhere has done much of the dirty work for you. Alternatively, want to create your own Facebook? Elgg is an open source solution that embraces open standards; People Aggregator is a commercial solution, and Ning allows you to host networks on a central server. All have made a public commitment to opening up their data.

An even easier option is to use a sharable and customizable start page from Pageflakes or Protopage. Pageflakes in particular allows you to build a customized chunk of cyberspace that aggregates all of your desired content just like Facebook, which you can then publish publicly (Pageflakes calls this a “Pagecast”). And beyond a simple user registration, Pageflakes doesn’t lock in any of your personal data.

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Enterprise 2.0-Change Is On The Way

By Steve Wylie

There has been much talk recently about Web 2.0 tools, mostly in the consumer market with companies and products such as MySpace, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. In 2006, professor Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School coined the term “Enterprise 2.0″ to describe the principles of Web 2.0 in a business context, defining it as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

Professor McAfee established his six “SLATES” to describe the key attributes of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. SLATES stands for Search, something we’re all intimately familiar with; Links, which concludes that the most-linked-to information must therefore be the most relevant; Authoring, which fundamentally says everyone has something to contribute; Tags, which provide emergent categorization of content; Extensions, which use algorithms to find user patterns and make recommendations; and Signals, which alert users of new content and updates. My paraphrasing really doesn’t do McAfee’s SLATES justice but hopefully provides a basic understanding of his principles and insight into why social computing tools and technologies such as wikis, RSS, tagging, and presence will play an increasingly important role to the future enterprise.

Enterprise 2.0 tools are a direct response to a much-needed change in our business communication and productivity tools. Our Enterprise 1.0 systems are largely built around e-mail, a tool that was never intended for such demands. Certainly there are other business applications that have yielded mixed success, but I’ll pick on e-mail at the moment since it is the most widely used — or perhaps misused — business application, despite its many shortcomings.

We have become addicted to e-mail in a sort of love-hate relationship. We check our e-mail obsessively yet dread the ceaseless flow of messages to our in-boxes and, of course, the endless spam. We struggle to find relevant information buried in an e-mail or question whether the right people are copied on a thread. E-mail is a closed communication medium that does a poor job of capturing and sharing knowledge, a key ingredient to success in any business and a key feature of Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 tools offer a chance to break our e-mail addiction and our reliance on other Enterprise 1.0 applications. These tools unlock new value in the form of transparent, contextual communication; ease of access to information; and more effective use of data trapped inside applications, on desktops, or embedded in e-mail attachments. They allow us to capture the knowledge and opinions trapped in the minds of our knowledge workers through simple participation. The early adopters of Enterprise 2.0 tools and concepts are finding them both powerful and liberating.

But with any new technology, user adoption is the key to success. This could not hold truer than with Enterprise 2.0 tools. Their ease of use certainly will help with user adoption, but there must still be a willingness to break a decades-old addiction to e-mail. There must also be a willingness to work more transparently and in more public forums with the use of wikis, tags, or blogs. For these reasons the shift to Enterprise 2.0 is as much about enabling the right business culture as it is about providing the right tools for users. The shift to Enterprise 2.0 will also happen organically, over time. As new generations enter the workforce, they will expect and demand a Web 2.0 experience from their business applications. This generation is more accustomed to IM and Facebook than to e-mail or restrictive business applications. They have embraced transparency, sharing information, and participating willingly in public, digital conversations.

All of this presents both a challenge and an opportunity for businesses. These changes are taking place often unbeknownst to IT and with little regard for company IT policies and controls. This presents an alarming reality for companies with potentially sensitive information or in heavily regulated environments. IT is faced with bringing some level of control and aligning Enterprise 2.0 with corporate policy while not stifling the benefits that Enterprise 2.0 tools can yield. Striking that delicate balance is a key ingredient to success with Enterprise 2.0 and is sure to be a subject for much continued discussion and debate.

But the role of IT can and should not just be reactionary, shoring up and adapting to changes already under way. IT is held more accountable to tangible business results than ever before. There is a real opportunity for IT to drive the Enterprise 2.0 agenda as a strategic advantage and with adherence to corporate policy. This will become easier as business-grade Web 2.0 tools continue to reach the market and best practices are established. New vendors are emerging in droves to address this need, providing all the functionality of Web 2.0 tools, but with the security, integration, and scalability required for commercial deployment. Existing software platforms and tools are also rising to meet these new demands, adding Web 2.0 features and functionality while providing a bridge from our familiar business-grade applications.

A race is ensuing that will include incumbent and startup vendors alike. If the consumer market for Web 2.0 tools is any indication, we are in store for some radical changes ahead, with new rules, new technology leaders, and most certainly new efficiencies and value from our business applications and knowledge workers than we’ve ever seen before. Brace yourself for the shift to Enterprise 2.0.

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Dial Google for Mobile Social Networking

By Clint Boulton

Google is expected to announce software and services that will enable handset makers to bring new phones to market by the middle of next year, the Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 30.

The news, in which the Journal cited people familiar with the matter, is a variance from original reports claiming that Google wouldn’t shed light on its mobile plans until next year.

The Journal said Google would not release an actual phone, but rather a software operating system and likely some mobilized versions of popular applications.

IDC analyst Karsten Weide agreed, noting that he is expecting something fairly pedestrian, a showcase of Google’s online applications such as Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail for the mobile phone.

“They’re going to open it so other developers develop applications on it and then they are going to sell advertising against that,” Weide told eWEEK.

Google declined to comment on or confirm anything in the Journal story, but mobile versions of traditional Google Apps will likely be the tip of the iceberg. This is because Internet companies far and wide are laser-focusing on the mobile and social networking markets to find green fields in online advertising.

The real forward-looking services are intersections of mobile and social networking services, and Google knows this. Consider that Google has purchased three mobile social networking startups Dodgeball, Zingku and Jaiku in the last two plus years.

Dodgeball, a mobile social networking startup purchased in May 2005, lets friends find each other from their mobile phones using location-based services.

Zingku and Jaiku, acquired this past September and this October, respectively, are mobile social networking service providers that offer the brightest hope of success for Google if it can seed its phone.

Zingku lets users create and share invitations or “mobile fliers” using standard text messaging, picture messaging, instant messaging and Web browsers.

For example, merchants, which Zingku defines as “anyone who has something to promote,” can create interactive “mobile fliers” and then e-mail a “zing-code” to their customers who opt to pull the flier to their mobile phone. The customer can zing the flier to friends they think may be interested.

Jaiku’s software enables microblogs, or short text messages used to update those in a social network on what’s new.

These applications might not seem like a big deal now. After all, of the millions of people who own smart phones, how many of them have even discovered Dodgeball, Zingku and Jaiku?

But that is immaterial. As we’ve seen from MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and just about any other social network, the user pick-up will be viral. If Google can just put a little bit of its cachet and marketing oomph behind these services, people will use them.

IDC’s Weide agreed that there’s no reason why Google’s mobile suite could not at some point in time include social networking functionality or services. Of course, rolling out the applications is the easy part and something Google has proven its mettle at.

What will happen if Google bids on spectrum as it has suggested? What if it can’t compete with the phone carriers, which are loath to allow their devices to any applications and services? What toll will privacy concerns have on Google’s bid for the wireless market?

Weide told eWEEK there is speculation that Google will get in bed with Apple for its wireless network strategy. Hmmmm. Is that why Google CEO Eric Schmidt landed a seat on Apple’s board?

All quipping aside, Googlers love Apple. During a keynote on innovation at Interop New York on Oct. 25, Matt Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise repeatedly alluded to Apple’s history of innovation, from the iPod to the iPhone.

What company wouldn’t want to duplicate Apple’s iPhone success coming into the market, selling millions of phones? Apple is a tough act to follow in the consumer space, so you can bet Google will put forth its best effort.

But will it be enough?

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Web Travel Resources, Part 1

By A. Martin

Practically every airline trip today begins on the Internet. But with so many travel-related Web sites, if you don’t know where to look, you can end up experiencing information overload, wasting time, and getting frustrated.

Travelocity.Travelocity Businesspromises 24-hour-a-day phone support for business travelers at no additional charge. ItsFareWatcher Plusgives you automatic updates on fare changes and deals for up to ten destinations. Windows Vista users can install theTravelocity Desktop FareWatchergadget to receive alerts.

Expedia. This popular site also offers tools and services forbusiness travelers. In addition, it includes helpfultips and informationon 65 airports worldwide, to help you figure out how to spend your time during layovers.

Orbitz. Orbitz’sTraveler Updateprovides a dashboard-style overview of current security wait times, local traffic, weather, flight status, parking rates, Wi-Fi network accessibility, and other information for U.S. airports. Traveler Update combines information generated by users as well as reports from the FAA, TSA, and other sources. You can use the service on your computer and on Web-enabled phones.

SideStep.This sitesearches over 200 travel booking and airline sites–including Expedia, Travelocity, and JetBlue–and displays results in its downloadable toolbar. When you research a trip on a travel booking site, SideStep’s toolbar automatically pops up to show you the itineraries it recommends so you can easily comparison shop. You can search for airfares, hotels, cars, vacation packages, cruises, and more.

Airfarewatchdog.com. The folks atAirfarewatchdog.comclaim that “real people” compare airfares on airlines that booking Web sites don’t typically include, such as Southwest Airlines. The site also includes smaller airlines, such as Allegiant Air and international carriers, which don’t usually share their best fares with the big travel booking sites. The site is no-frills but includes useful features, such asFare of the DayandTop 50 Fares.

LastMinuteTravel.com. The name pretty much sums it up.This siteis designed to help you find the best fares for airlines, hotels, cruises, rental cars, and vacation packages, particularly for those traveling with little advance notice.

Mobissimo. Unlike some travel booking sites,Mobissimolets you search for international trips as well as domestic U.S. jaunts. The site is limited to airlines, hotels, and rental cars.

Flycheapo.com. Thisbare-bones siteis useful for finding low-cost carriers within Europe.

WhichBudget. Going beyond Flycheapo.com,WhichBudgethelps you find low-cost carriers in 124 countries. The site’s text-heavy interface will give you flashbacks to the mid-nineties, but it’s worth a visit nonetheless.

I wrote about the following sites in my July column.

Farecast. This site charts recent airfare history for the itineraries you enter and predicts what your trip is likely to cost in the immediate future.PC WorldnamedFarecastone of the20 Most Innovative Products of 2006.

Kayak. UseKayakto search multiple travel booking sites. The Buzz section reveals the best prices others have found using the site. Kayak was named one ofPC World’sTop 100 Best Products of 2007.

ITA Software.This siteis known for being objective (unlike some travel sites) and makes it easy to find itineraries that combine the lowest fares and convenient routing.

Yapta. You can useYaptato get alerts whenever an airline itinerary you’ve booked drops in price. Armed with that knowledge, you may be able to receive a refund or credit for the difference between what you paid and the lower fare.

FlightStats. Head toFlightStatsfor on-time performance records for major airlines.

SeatGuru. Peruse seating diagrams for domestic and international planes atSeatGuru.

15 Essential Mobile Web Sites: Ever needed to make, shall we say, a pit stop when you’re on the go? The mobile browser version of MizPee may help you find the quick relief you need. Read about MizPee and 14 other great Web sites for mobile browsers inour roundup.

The Best Mobile Browsers: You might not be surprised to learn that Apple’s Safari Mobile, for the iPhone, earned our thumbs up amongmobile browsers. We also reviewed Palm’s Blazer, the RIM BlackBerry browser, and others. Which browser came in last price? You might be surprised.

Mobile Broadband Explained: Quick–what’s the difference between EvDO and EDGE? If you’re not sure, read our “Business Buyer’s Guide to Mobile Broadband.”

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Matchmaking for Investors and Entrepreneurs

Posted by Wendy Bounds

Here are two things to check out on the funding front, particularly if you aren’t in tech.

First, a tool that could help democratize the funding hunt — IdeaCrossing.org. Think of it as matchmaking service between entrepreneurs and investors.

IdeaCrossing is open and free to anyone in the U.S. Entrepreneurs build a profile, and the system matches them to like-minded participating investors. Investors can see these profiles (the entrepreneur doesn’t get to right away) and reach out with time or money.

The site is still in beta with about 1,000 users. It needs critical mass to really work, but is a good idea that could help tap pockets of money in more regions.

It’s also getting easier for nontech companies to get on angels’ radar. More are broadening into retail, real estate and consumer products to appease members with nontech backgrounds.

Some groups are very specific. The founder of IdeaCrossing, a Cleveland nonprofit called JumpStart Inc., invests only in companies that bring jobs to northeast Ohio. One group, 12 Angels Investment Group, invests in firms that help prevent or treat addictions. Others, are funding women- or minority-led firms or ones with a social or environmental bent.

If you know of specific angel networks broadening their portfolios, let us know here.

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Searching For A Way To The Top

By Rachel Rosmarin

You know you’re watching the early days of an industry when entrepreneurs still think they have a chance to be David in a contest with the current Goliath.

In one corner of the search engine business, you have Google with 16,000 employees and a current market valuation of $217 billion. In September, Google conducted 64% of all searches conducted on the Internet in the U.S.

Then there’s tiny Mahalo. Jason McCabe Calacanis is chief executive and founder of the fledgling search engine company, which relies on hand-compiled data. Mahalo has an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding and fewer than 100 human editors who pick and choose what information searchers receive at Mahalo.com.

Or there’s Yahoo! , a behemoth in its own right but still a distant No. 2 to Google. Not just anybody can enter the search game, asserts Vish Makhijani, Yahoo! senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo! Search. “There’s a scarcity of capital, and of talent,” he says. Yahoo! trails Google by a wide margin, but it’s easy to forget that the company brought in $1.8 billion in its most recent quarter, based largely on search engine advertising.

Makhijani believes that Yahoo! has room to grow in search, but after many months of criticism from Wall Street and consumer defections to Google, he’s reluctant to share many details of Yahoo!’s battle plan, a choice that makes Yahoo!’s public statements a bit hazy and bureaucratic.

Calacanis, by contrast, is dreaming big–and he’s not shy about bragging about it. He thinks his human-powered search engine will be a breath of fresh air to consumers sick of spammy search results offered up by Google and Yahoo!.

“No offense, but those guys in senior vice president positions at big companies don’t have the vision to realize this could be successful,” he says. “They think it can’t be done. That’s what creates a market for delusional people like me.”

Both Yahoo! and Mahalo believe there is more than enough room in search for them to both make a good living. But both companies have a long–and likely impossible–slog ahead of them if they plan to knock out Google’s Goliath.

We asked Makhijani and Calacanis to lay out their vision of the future of search, opinions on Google’s weak spots, the sustainability of search engine advertising, and the chances for tiny search start-ups.

And both men are bold enough to argue why their companies will be the search engine leader in five years.

Forbes: Google is the leader in your industry. But everyone makes mistakes. What is Google’s weakness?

Vish Makhijani: Doing search is hard. It’s billions of documents with a millisecond response time. Only a few companies can do this well. Even throwing tons and tons of money at it, like [Microsoft in] Redmond does, isn’t a formula for doing it well.

But the industry is diverging. The notion of “10 blue links” is going away. If you cover up “Google” or “Yahoo!” on the 10 blue link search-results pages, a user can’t tell the difference between us.

Jason McCabe Calacanis: The people who run Google are very smart, and they hire incredibly smart people. They’ve done a great job building elegantly simple products that users intuitively understand. When a company gets too distanced from its founders, the emphasis on product isn’t there. Yahoo! is going to have a massive resurgence because Jerry Yang is now engaged as CEO.

Google’s greatest weakness will be maintaining focus and retaining their talent. They’ve been so successful that maybe some of those talented people who’ve been there since early on don’t need to work any more.

Yahoo! started as a “human-powered” directory in 1994. Mahalo’s search results are handwritten by people. Will we see a mainstream return to edited search results?

Makhijani: It’s a notion of trust. Jerry and David built the directory, they did all the work. Then comprehensiveness became super-important, but you forsake the trust that a real person said, “We’re going to put this here.” Things are coming full circle, but a “today’s version” of Jerry and David’s directory is not going to fly.

Calacanis: In fairness, all the big guys use human gestures to determine relevance. But they don’t rank the stuff with human input. [Mahalo] will appeal to a certain group of people, and Google’s machine search will appeal to another group of people. There’s a perception in our industry and our business that winner takes all, but the truth is, there’s a lot of fragmentation.

The odds seem slim that either of you will beat Google and become the top search engine within five years. Convince me otherwise.

Makhijani: There’s nothing about search today that locks somebody in as No. 1 for years and years.

We are not the leader, and we’re going to attack and solve as many problems as we can to become the leader. We take tons of chances. We can take an iterative approach to trying new ideas. We are blessed with a really good lab-testing environment. We just launched [search advertising system] Panama, and we take a lot of that revenue and pour it back into [research and development] of our search product. Luckily, search advertising is a great business model to have.

Calacanis: I fully believe we will become one of the top three search engines. More than 1 million people visited us in the last 30 days, and we just launched. People like to surf around a directory–it is discovery. Maybe people stopped doing that on the other search engines because there’s so much spam on those sites. Our site is not really game-able.

I think we can get to that top level, and I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think we could. Google is going to be very hard to displace, but it is still possible. You never know. Google became No. 1 in five years, so why can’t we? It will be a lot of hard work, and it will take five years. In that time we could get double-digit market share.

Is “search engine fatigue” a real problem? It is hard to believe that people give up on what they’re looking for so easily.

Makhijani: When you look at customer satisfaction numbers, they’re high, but if you peel the onion you see a fair amount of lack of success. We see abandoned and failed searches. We see users go check their e-mail instead. They blame themselves for bad queries when they don’t exceed. That’s garbage. There’s opportunity for improvement here.

Calacanis: Search engine fatigue is very real. Almost anything can be found, but you get into a needle in a haystack problem. And now there’s a cottage industry of people who try to intercept you as you search. We’ve done testing in our lab, and all the Mahalo users give up on searches. Some of the problem has to do with the person–it takes two to tango. There are spelling error issues and ambiguity issues. People don’t know enough to type in the words that would help.

Search engine advertising is big business, but it is getting messy. How long can that business model last?

Makhijani: A significant population doesn’t always distinguish when something is advertising or a search result. The notion of trust is super-important, and we take that very seriously. But we continue to deliver value in that advertising as well. The same team of scientists works on the relevancy of ads as on search results. And if you force lower-quality ads, people will choose another search engine. We’ve seen that. Will that business model change over time? Who knows? I see keyword advertising continuing to disrupt legacy advertising, so it will last a long time.

Calacanis: If you’re using machines, they’re going to be game-able. It is like IRS or credit card fraud. Some people will cheat. There are good “search-engine optimization” techniques, but 90% of it is black hat and smarmy. The people who are looking for loopholes and looking for ways to increase their ranking require a policing effort from Google. It is not going to end.

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The state of Enterprise 2.0

by Dion Hinchcliffe

Industry analysts, CIOs, and business leaders around the world are continuing to try to read the industry tea leaves in 2007 when it comes to the subject of Enterprise 2.0, the increasingly popular discussion of using Web 2.0 platforms in the workplace. The primary topic of interest? Whether Enterprise 2.0 brings real bang for the buck by making the daily work of organizations measurably more productive, efficient, and innovative. Investors and executives are just not going to make significant bets on Enterprise 2.0 in terms of resources and risk exposure without good information on the likely returns of implementation.

Up until recently, the lack of mature Enterprise 2.0 products, good case studies, and feedback from early experiences that successfully dealt with some of the challenges that these frequently disruptive and occasionally subversive tools introduced. This immature state of affairs was often holding back even corporate pilots of highly promising candidate Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as enterprise blogs, wikis, and even mashups.

However, increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1 billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.

The big question for many of those on the fence now is: 1) Do we now have the right capabilities in terms of ready Enterprise 2.0 products? And 2) Do we generally understand how to apply them properly to obtain good returns on our investment in them? Knowing the answers to both questions will almost certainly tell us if we’re ready for mainstream adoption of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 any time soon.

Enterprise 2.0 redux

Professor Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School famously introduced the term and concepts behind Enterprise 2.0 last year and it’s had a heady ride across the industry and in the press ever since. Initially defined by McAfee as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”, the broader global community has attempt to expand, reinvent, and co-opt Enterprise 2.0 with varying degrees of success. But the essential, core meaning has largely stayed the same: Social applications that are optional to use, free of unnecessary structure, highly egalitarian, and support many forms of data.

McAfee even coined a menmonic to make it easy for everyone to remember what appeared to be the key aspects of these social platforms. Called SLATES, it was an easy checklist to verify that the tools you were considering had the right essential ingredients. Under this initial definition Web 2.0 poster children blogs and wikis were identified as Enterprise 2.0 platforms (provided that they provided reasonable support for SLATES) as well as more sophisticated tools such as prediction markets and even vertical business applications like customer directed taxi cab dispatching were given as early examples of richer Enterprise 2.0 applications.

Examples platforms that failed to make the cut as Enterprise 2.0 because they didn’t have the qualities that were believed to be important for business business outcomes? These included most corporate intranets and portals, most groupware, as well as e-mail and “classic” instant messaging. Why? They either didn’t provide access to a voice for workers to communicate and collaborate with or they didn’t create results that were persistent and globally visible. In the end, Enterprise 2.0 takes most of the potent ideas of Web 2.0, user generated content, peer production, and moves them into the workplace.

Did the original articulation of Enterprise 2.0 have the right focus and point us in the best direction? And has the conception of it evolved from this vision to reflect that which we’ve learned along the way? Going back again to our two questions that will inform us as to the state of Enterprise 2.0; what have learned from our experiences with the early platforms and initial rollouts of Enterprise 2.0 and what does it teach us?

state of Enterprise 2.0 – Fall 2007

Here is what appears to be what we’ve learned about Enterprise 2.0 up to this point in time. There is of course no way to make this list complete though I believe it covers most of the big lessons. Also, entirely in the spirit of Enterprise 2.0 itself, I strongly encourage that you add anything that you think I’ve left out in TalkBack below or in a link from your own blog.

Lesson #1: Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you. Enterprise 2.0 is now happening on its own in many organizations and it’s up to the business and IT to not so much take control but to enable it with things such as effective enterprise search and which helps prevent silos and duplicate, yet unsynchronized data from forming.

Lesson #2: Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis. The discussion often starts with these simple freeform tools but should progress beyond this to other platforms that are better for specific situations such as enterprise mashups which enable for user-created Web applications what enterprise blogs and wikis for user-created content and structure. Predictive market products such as HP’s BRAIN platform and online innovation facilitators such as Innocentive are other potentially more sophisticated examples of Enterprise 2.0 platforms. Social bookmarking is also starting to gain speed in the enterprise as way of providing a rich information discovery mechanism internally.

Lesson #3: Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase. While a widely covered report from Forrester earlier this year clearly showed that CIOs would prefer to buy one single Enterprise 2.0 suite instead of cobbling together a combination of point solutions for blogging, wikis, RSS consumption, and social networking, the reality is that even the best Enterprise 2.0 suites will be missing key pieces for a long time. To get decent returns from Enterprise 2.0 implementations, organizations will require really good enterprise search, access to enterprise data from within Enterprise 2.0 tools, the ability to create mashups at a low level to the more sophisticated Enterprise 2.0-style products at a higher level. That’s not to say an Enterprise 2.0 suite such as SuiteTwo or Microsoft SharePoint can’t form the core of your Enterprise 2.0 strategy, but other products and integration work will be required to make it provide real business results in your local IT environment. This will include products that will make your Enterprise 2.0 suite support single sign-on, work in your portal environment, provide management and moderation controls, as well as integrate with your ECM and other traditional enterprise platforms.

In other words, by the time you’ve installed, configured, customized, and integrated all of the ingredients you’ve brought together, if you’ve lost sight of the specific reasons why Enterprise 2.0 is supposed to work better, your effort will have been in vain. I see this often when Enterprise 2.0 projects don’t provide, say, read access to RSS feed readers to workers or fail to make it easy to create a blog post or wiki page from the Intranet and a dozen other minor decisions made on top of the Enterprise 2.0 tools selected, yet contrary to their spirit and that will be significantly detrimental to the outcome. Best advice: Clearly understand the benefits of these news tools and ideas and then do your very best to ensure they aren’t negated.

Lesson #4: Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media. Just like the previous generation of workers received computer literacy classes en masse and learned how to use business productivity applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and email, the same will be required for the current generation of workers and Enterprise 2.0. The hurdle is making sure that workers have a clear understanding of the specific techniques of how to apply Enterprise 2.0 tools to their daily work. Social media information formats such as project status wiki pages to departmental news blogs are still foreign to most workers today and proactive worker education will be required to make sure the investments in Enterprise 2.0 are being appropriately reaped.

Lesson #5: The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time. One major benefit of the open, globally visible information in Enterprise 2.0 platforms is that organizational retention of knowledge actually begins to accrue on a wide scale. But it’s a continuous, linear build-up and almost never a sudden and pronounced business benefit. Adoption and habits also take time to form and it’s quite typical to see 6 months go by before significant activity begins to take place in the Enterprise 2.0 platforms in an organization. Do not expect big immediate wins but carefully measure your rollouts and make sure their network effect is being established. Particularly if your tools aren’t following SLATES, and many platforms, such as SharePoint often don’t follow SLATES by default, then growth and uptake can require a great deal of work. But like compound interest, it doesn’t take forever to begin achieving respectable results on a regular basis and all the best rollouts we’ve seen have given their Enterprise 2.0 strategies the time and support to work organically.

Lesson #6: Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business. In fact, this seems to never have happened. In fact, instead of competition, enabling connections to existing IT systems can provide significant benefits and allowing reports, views, and documents to be hosted by or connected to Enterprise 2.0 tools and can help make sure that there isn’t another silo of content in the organization. Having a blog post on the budget for FY 07 with the actual current numbers being displayed in an HTML table live from an RSS feed from the budget system is an example of this. In this way, Enterprise 2.0 seems to work better when it lives in close contact with existing IT systems than in isolation. The biggest impact of this lesson is that these new tools are so different and generally support such different types of knowledge than usually captured, that impact to existing systems seems to be minimal. Interestingly, you might see a decrease in the use of e-mail or ECM when the conversations that formerly happened on those platforms make a more natural home in Enterprise 2.0 platforms.

Lesson #7: Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready. Beyond simple productivity gains, other sorts of more subtle returns often accrue around Enterprise 2.0. McAfee has recently noted that these types of tools tend to create many more links between workers and different groups in an organization and that these types of links tend to provide better benefits than the stronger, more frequent links between organizational entities and individual workers. For this reason and others, Enterprise 2.0 platforms seem to foster a new type of collaboration that exhibits more innovation, creativity, and cross pollination. And because these tools are generally so freeform, they will regularly be used in ways they were never originally intended. Blogs and wikis in particularly can be put to just about any use in terms of accumulating knowledge and collaborating over a network and increasing I’ve seen Enterprise 2.0 initiatives finding them being used in entirely unexpected ways. Enterprise 2.0 enables a rich canvas for workers to think about and construct their information landscape and anything is possible.

Conclusion

It’s still quite useful to read Nine ideas for IT managers considering Enterprise 2.0. Almost exactly a year later, all the advice still rings true despite what we’ve learned in the interim. Nevertheless, we’re just now beginning down the road of Enterprise 2.0 and an enormous amount has yet to be learned. The increasing pervasiveness of the tools and knowledge of Enterprise 2.0 will continue to have a growing impact on our businesses for better and worse. Success stories will continue to emerge as well as the first major issues such as information spills, IP theft, and other potential problems when so much critical business information is made so much more leveragable. How to access the benefits while minimizing the risks will continue to be a major topc in the Enterprise 2.0 community.

In the meantime, I’d like to try an experiment and extend the SLATES mnemonic a bit. My biggest issue in using it in its present form to communicate Enterprise 2.0 is that it doesn’t itself capture the social, emergent, and freeform aspects that we know are so essential and so I’ve added these. I know SLATES is supposed to be capability based but it also needs to convey the intended outcomes clearly, and social capability in particular is missing. Thus, I’ve used an anagram generator to create another (hopefully) pithy mnemonic, FLATNESSES, which itself captures yet another important aspect of Enterprise 2.0, its egalitarian nature. FLATNESSES is depicted in the diagram below containing these three key aspects added to SLATES as well as a fourth which I discuss below. I hope you find this a useful conception to discuss the vital elements of Enterprise 2.0 in your efforts and would love your feedback.

Finally, I’ve also added one more capability to the new mnemonic, network-oriented, to reflect that all these aspect of Enterprise 2.0 must apply not only to applications that are fundamentally delivered over a network but that their content be fully Web-oriented, addressable, and reusable. The atomization and portability of information, such as what RSS has enabled, has been vital to the successful growth of communities like the blogosphere and one vital point about Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 that many organizations don’t yet fully understand: Our enterprises are NOT the Web. And to get the full benefits of the Web 2.0 era, we must begin adapting our organizations and their information and IT resources (with suitable enterprise context) to this network-oriented model that has worked so for us globally on the Internet these last 15 years.

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Significant workplace inroads for Enterprise 2.0?

By Dion Hinchcliffe

According to a random poll I recently conducted on Facebook, just over a quarter of 300 respondents — 27% of them in all — answered in the affirmative that they are provided with an easy way at work to post on a blog or put information on a wiki. I often ask this same question to gatherings of people whenever I get the chance these days and have been getting roughly the same answer for the last few months. Businesses are apparently starting to take Web 2.0 for a more serious spin.

A year ago, accessibility to blogs and wikis in the workplace was less than half this number in my informal sampling. The growth trend seems clear and appears to be increasing. So while this data might be fairly unscientific, I suspect the number is pretty accurate, and social media, aka Enterprise 2.0, is finally making some measurable inroads in the workplace despite a few open concerns about these mediums.

Facebook as a measure of social media in the general workplace?

Of course, Facebook users in general are probably more digitally literate than the average population, will look for blogs and wikis on the local Intranet to use, and thus some say they may be more likely to gravitate to workplaces and jobs that would provide an environment with familiar tools. However, one odd breakdown in the demographics of the poll is that the youngest group, 18-24 year-olds, reported the least access to social media. Perhaps it’s because this group also includes a great deal of students or that entry level workers don’t have as much computer access as workers farther up in the hierarchy.

Poll respondents were also pretty sure when they weren’t being provided with these tools with only 21% reporting that they didn’t know if they were being offered them. A whopping 52%, just over half, said that they had no social media tools offered to them in a way they could access.

The poll question was also carefully posed to uncover if tools were being “brought in the back door” by workers using the hundreds of free social media platforms out in the Web with their browser at work, or if the workplace itself was providing enterprise blogs and wikis. In my opinion, this makes the 27% “yes” number almost surprisingly high. But, while some respondents may not have parsed the question clearly, the trend is strong enough to stand on it’s own:

Blogs and wikis may finally be seeing fairly widespread “business approved” adoption in the workplace.

Getting good business outcomes from social media while managing downside

While blogs and wikis continue to show the potential to greatly improve collaboration, create higher levels of knowledge retention, and generate more reusable business information over time, it’s also probable that in attempts to access the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, these new platforms will incur some issues that IT departments and the business will have to deal with, particularly if these platforms are exposed outside the organization.

What are the business benefits and issues of social media? The diagram above depicts the world of traditional software and native PC applications with expanding access to the “2.0″ generation of new software models and platforms. Here’s a more detailed run down of the pros and cons that will have to be balanced in most organizations when deciding on providing access to these types of social media tools to their workers.

Notes: Social media is just one important aspect of Enterprise 2.0, but the one most likely to see near-term, widespread adoption. Also, the diagram above clearly shows the social media is a new aspect to the enterprise and will more likely to enhance existing IT systems over time rather than replace them outrighte with the possible exception of enterprise content management.

Reported social media in the workplace benefits:

• More ad hoc collaboration between employees who can find each other’s work and team together.
• More globally persistent, discoverable business information is made available over time.
• Social media tends to capture more institutional knowledge that’s reusable.
• A deep hyperlink infrastructure begins to form, built by continuously by workers using social media. tools to forge links, making business information more discoverable.
• Tagging and other emergent organization methods allow business information to be organized and cross-referenced from every point of view.
• More efficient access to information as more business information becomes available internally and externally via syndication.
• Potentially higher levels of innovation and productivity as more previously unavailable enterprise thinking is available to be accessed, repurposed, and built on top of.
• Increased efficiency in conversations: social media scales up to mostly resource and time friendly conversations among thousands of asynchronous participants, yet excludes those uninterested in them, unlike e-mail distribution lists and conference calls.

Reported social media in the workplace issues:

• Productivity: Users employing social media tools for non-productive purposes such as socializing.
• Security: Information that should be under tight control appearing on publicly via social media, either accidentally or intentionally.
• Control: The level of control over what appears on an organization’s Intranet will decrease with the rise in use of social media, for better or worse. Also note that unlike e-mail, control of social media can be more successfully retroactive.
• Outcomes: Ensuring that social media tools are generated pre-defined, specific goals is difficult when the the extremely freeform platforms of social media can be used for everything from managing projects to tracking a department’s fantasy football game.
• Another silo: Right now social media is primarily a consumer-side invention, like many aspects of Web 2.0. Consequently, most enterprise blogs and wikis don’t have good access to feeds of enterprise data and this can encourage cut-and-paste publishing of information from traditional enterprise IT systems into social media, creating another silo of data.
• Trust: How can the usefulness of the content in social media platforms be trusted. The Web has partially solved this with techniques such as inbound link counting, but reputation and voting systems are starting to appear, often as plug-ins such as the highly capable new comment and reputation add-on release from Intense Debate, for social media tools. Despite this, until the tools become mature, trust will likely continue to be an issue for many uses of social media in the workplace.
• Not-enterprise ready. I’ve talked plenty about the enterprise context for blogs and wikis last year. The good news, many of these issues are starting to be addressed in the latest crop of Enterprise 2.0/social media offerings.

I’ll continue to run this poll on a periodic basis going forward and see what we can learn about the adoption of social media in the workplace. In the meantime, please share your stories about blogs and wikis at work in Talkbalk below.

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