Issues that can be anticipated when using a Web 2.0/social media platform in the Enterprise?

To name a few issues that you would face if you do not enforce policies to control the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise:

• Very difficult for all the systems to interoperate, users may never adopt them - in the real world we have the average teenager using Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Digg.com, Del.icio.us, MySpace, and other tools. These all need to interconnect to make it successful. Take a look at Facebook's ability to have applications talk to it. For example, Twitter can update Facebook's status, and you can show your diggs in your Facebook profile.
• People get bored of them easily - the fad runs away sooner or later, and MySpace gets displaced by Facebook. Blogs get displaced by Twitter. You may experience a boom of one tool that fades away in a few months.
• Employees leaving the company can't take their networks with them - like a computer backup, you'd like to take your social networks with you, outside of your job, and this needs to be simple and possible
• Employees leaving the company can take confidential information - if you make it easy for employees to fully personalize their web 2.0 environment outside of the company, they may take and share internal information
• Since people like to keep pleasure and work separate, employees may not adopt these technologies in favor of leaving them for personal use - if, for example, you were to use Facebook or MySpace for inside of the company, few employees would like to have their bosses as friends in Facebook.
  

Now, here's my disclaimer. I don't favor policing and strictly enforcing control over Web 2.0 deployments for company use. Quite the opposite, I favor the full freedom for employees to utilize these tools as they see best fit. Also, they should be open to the public; not only for internal use, so that productivity may be expanded in all directions: customers, partners, coworkers, managers, friends, and family.

Cisco Live Summary and Highlights

Last week I spent 4 days at Cisco Live 2008, Cisco System's technical conference. In general, this was a great conference about all Cisco-related industries and markets; e.g. Networking, Collaboration, Unified Communications, Service Providers, Wireless, Data Center…

The main topic for the conference was Collaboration. This, of course, translates into ways to increase employee productivity and reduce operational costs, such as travel, by engaging in collaboration practices. WebEx was a big name and the product spotlight was the Webex Connect suite. I personally was very impressed, and can't wait to start testing it. This is a collaboration client for staying connected with coworkers, friends, and customers from a single place. It is the result of mixing the following ingredients: Skype, AOL IM, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and WebEx's online meetings. It offers a space with Instant Messaging, Presence, WebEx Meetings, Personal Dashboard, Team Spaces, and Business Widgets. This was demoed by John Chambers during the conference; check out how it integrates with the iPhone here.

Almost all Keynote speakers addressed the topics of how obvious it is that to increase productivity you have to collaborate in the Web 2.0 era, and to reduce operational cost you have to go green by collaborating more online and virtualizing the workplace. For example, if you know the presence information of a person you need to talk to, you can be more effective at how to reach him. Say you need to speak to Jim about last week's report. If you know that Jim is at a meeting, you avoid calling his desk or cell phone and use IM or Email instead. That's what a collaboration client can do for improving that.

The entire conference applied the collaboration and going green theme. First, this year they did not provide with printed copies of the technical training sessions, but gave out USB thumb drives with 1GB worth of presentations. Second, and more importantly, they incorporated a virtual component to the conference by having sessions at Second Life and a full blown virtual version of the conference called Cisco Live Virtual.

When it comes to the expo, it was called World of Solutions Expo. Big partners had great booths. In my opinion, the best ones were Intel, WebEx, Lancope, and Nokia. Intel showed their advances in Wireless (WiMax and 802.11n) and their 10Gbps interface for servers. Lancope had a great security appliance for MPLS type of networks, and Nokia had the latest mobile phones. Actually, thanks to my Nokia E61i I was able to log on to the conference site, check my calendar of events, reply to surveys, and Twitt my update in real-time (see my posting with my Twitter Timeline)

Finally, some relevant links for further getting what you missed if you did not attend:

• Official Cisco Live 2008 Site
  
• CISCOPR Channel on YouTube
  
• My Twitter Timeline with my real-time update (Blog Summary Version)

Cisco Live 2008 Twitter Timeline

[This is a collection of my real-time updates of the Cisco Live 2008 event via Twitter]

leoboulton Getting ready to go home. Had a great time, learned a lot, and met new people. 08:29 AM June 26, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Returning from the Customer appreciation event. Even though the "blue man group" was a fiasco, we ride The Mummy about 5 times... 12:45 AM June 26, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton @padmasree Great presentation this morning. i missed the funny guy during Jim's demo though :) 04:33 PM June 25, 2008 from web in reply to Padmasree     

leoboulton Going back to hotel to get ready for tonight's event: Blue man group. I hope I can see some of my customers. 04:28 PM June 25, 2008 from web     

leoboulton At the Intel super session, under a major thunderstorm. Talking about wireless, security, and mobility 03:07 PM June 25, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton They have booths around the expo to do vloging... Video blogs. 02:41 PM June 25, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Http://www.cisco.com/go/efficiency 10:43 AM June 25, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Answering to polls while she speaks.... She encouraged us all 10:30 AM June 25, 2008 from web     

leoboulton Attending the Cisco CTO super session. I like the SMS use for answering questions on the board 10:11 AM June 25, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Nokia Throws Open Mobile Software http://snipr.com/2ooiy 09:55 AM June 25, 2008 from twitterfeed     

leoboulton You can gain access to the main presentations thru Cisco-Live Virtual. It's an online space created for attendees 08:36 AM June 25, 2008 from twhirl     

leoboulton Attending my first session of the day: Interconnecting Voice and Video Networks with CUBE http://www.cisco.com/go/cube 08:19 AM June 25, 2008 from twhirl     

leoboulton Just left the Network World super session. Going back to hotel to pick up my car for dinner with customer. 04:21 PM June 24, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton At the Network World panel about collaboration. sitting next to Ramesh 03:36 PM June 24, 2008 from txt

leoboulton The AXP session was very good. Explained the entire development process, how to package software, and the Cisco needs to sign the app. 03:15 PM June 24, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Now... back-to-back Developer track with the AXP Session. Looking forward for this one!. 01:59 PM June 24, 2008 from web     

leoboulton
Now... back-to-back Developer track with the AXP Session. Looking forward to this one!. 01:59 PM June 24, 2008 from web     

leoboulton The MeetingPlace and Presence API session for the developers track was very high-level. It was biref and concise; but too high level. 01:52 PM June 24, 2008 from web     

leoboulton Now: Learning about Presentity, Watcher, and Notify. In other words, Presence API. 01:12 PM June 24, 2008 from web     

leoboulton After lunch, I spent somre more time on the Expo Floor. Great booths at Intel, Lancope, and Nokia. Was disapointed with Fluke 01:11 PM June 24, 2008 from web     

leoboulton @CiscoLive it does rock... 10:59 AM June 24, 2008 from txt in reply to CiscoLive     

leoboulton Webex Connect demo with John and Jim 10:48 AM June 24, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Listening to Chambers: "why would you invest on IT? Only if you trully believe that a collaboration wave is coming to raise productivity" 10:25 AM June 24, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton There is a full track of MPLS for those who want to deploy an MPLS infrastructure. "MPLS is a technology for delivery of IP services" 08:15 AM June 24, 2008 from web     

leoboulton Off to the first breakout session: Intro to MPLS 07:18 AM June 24, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Great day 1: orientation was informative; solutions center expo had great partner booths (Intel, IBM, and GlobalKnowledge standed out) 10:30 PM June 23, 2008 from web     

leoboulton Having dinner with some engineers in downtown disney 07:28 PM June 23, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton At the expo. Not that big, but great booths.... Check out the Emergency response vehicle 06:10 PM June 23, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Registered. The convention center is pretty large. Got my bagpak and lots of notebooks and other goodies 02:56 PM June 23, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton It appears that the Customer appreciation party will be at Universal Studios on Wednesday. 02:56 PM June 23, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Riding the bus from hotel to the convention center. My room wasn't ready, so I will register and then figure it out. 02:10 PM June 23, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Arrived early. Will go to hotel first, and take the shuttle 01:21 PM June 23, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton If this is your first time at networkers, attend the Cisco Live Orientation today at 4pm at Chapin Theater. 12:30 PM June 23, 2008 from txt     

leoboulton Done... now printing (on PDF) directions. I'm planning to leave around 11am. It will take me about 4 hours. 07:42 AM June 23, 2008 from twhirl

leoboulton Before we start. I'm filling my Cisco Live Connect profile to collaborate with attendees. You can look for me: leoboulton. 07:20 AM June 23, 2008 from twhirl

Top Twitter institutional accounts to follow

I found out that Cisco-Live, Cisco's annual conference, will broadcast updates via Twitter. I added it to my list of top institutional Twitter accounts to follow:

1. The Wall Street Journal - http://twitter.com/WSJ
   
2. NPR News - http://twitter.com/nprnews
3. BBC News Tech - http://twitter.com/bbctech
4. CNN Breaking News - http://twitter.com/cnnbrk
5. Cisco Systems - http://twitter.com/ciscosystems
6. Network World - http://twitter.com/NetworkWorld
7. Cisco RSS Adivsors and updates - http://twitter.com/CiscoRSS
8. Webex Green - http://twitter.com/WebExGreen
9. Red Cross - http://twitter.com/RedCross

Please send me yours....

Gaining Twitter Followers Experiment

I started an experiment with Twitter last week to prove one hypothesis: The more often you post messages to Twitter, the more followers you gain. Or in other words, you can gain followers just by posting lots of messages per day. Here's what I did:

1. I Installed a Twitter client in my home computer and work laptop. I like twhirl a lot.
   
2. I Set-up my Smartphone for Twitter updates. Only had to add the mobile version of Twitter to my browser favorites.
   
3. Then, I post everything I'm doing, when I have a chance. There is a limit of how many updates per hour you can post on Twitter (70 requests per hour). I did only about 12 updates per day. Some of the people I'm following do about 30 updates per day.
   
4. Then watch how people start following.
   

I've been doing this for the last week. And so far, I have added 14 people to my followers list. I don't think that they are very relevant to the people that I want to have as a follower. Most of them are generic company or project names, not individuals. Also, most of them are probably seeking to get more followers by following people (there is another proved theory that if you follow people, they will return the favor and follow you).

Anyway, the only complain I've got is from my wife who can't understand my work related Twits. I will continue with my experiment and update this post in a month or so.

/// Update ///

I'm up to 59 followers, and I have not requested to follow anyone else. The interesting fact, is that I'm being followed by people that have obviously no interest in reading my twitts. THey only want me to return the favor by following them. These are companies and startups. For example, onlineincome, workathome8, and debtconsolidation are following me. In conclusion, the list of followers augment, but the quality diminishes. Still, the technique of following people in an attempt to being followed is more effective.

/// End of Update - April 21st 2008///

RSS Feeds for your LinkedIn Network

LinkedIn now let's you track updates and connections across your LinkedIn network via RSS Feeds. LinkedIn is growing up!.

read more | digg story

Twitter in images

5 Things to look for in a Telepresence System

Telepresence is hot: This week, Al Gore and Cisco's CEO, John Chambers, had a TelePresence presentation at VoiceCon addressing how to get greener in business. The bottom line is that TelePresence is getting all the hype these days. Here are 5 things to look for in a Telepresence system, to ensure that you get the best meeting experience:

1. High Definition Quality Video – It has to be realistic video that looks a lot like a real person, not a binay version of one. Look for scale of the other party and make sure it is real live scale and not a smaller (or larger) version of the person. Have the individual show you his/her wrist watch, you should be able to read it from your end.
   
2. Quick and easy to forget technology – when you are in the meeting, you should forget that you are in a Telepresence meeting in 5 minutes tops. It is supposed to feel like a real meeting, not a Skype call with a webcam.
   
3. No Echo – people tend to talk when others are talking. It's human nature to interrupt the other party. Make sure that there is no echo, reverb, or other annoying effect with the sound.
   
4. Spatial effects – if someone on the right opens a can of Coke, the sound should come from the right, not from the center of the room.
   
5. Not affected by outgoing speakers – if someone likes to move a lot and use hand gestures, these should come to the other end seamlessly, without any delay or effect on the video quality.

Amazon’s online forum could be a great tool (part 2)

Last time I posted about how valuable a web 2.0 tool can be for almost any business. In particular, I gave the example of Amazon's Forum, and praised how it brings customers and company closer by giving a more human service. In specific, I tell the story of how an unreleased product that I ordered early December has been pushed several times while an Amazon employee keeps us all eager buyers updated in the forum.

Well, the story got so much more interesting in the last couple of days. One morning, all posts of such Amazon employee where removed from the forum. At that point, we all started speculating on whether the employee was real (I got a comment on my post to prove it) or if he got in trouble for telling us that the product was going to be released in late February. Some aggravated customers went ahead and wrote letters to the manufacturer directly, while others wrote about the most effective way to file a complaint with Amazon Customer Service. A great one came from a user called "M. Halstead". He posted a summary of all the posts that were deleted from the Amazon employee (I guess he looked in his archive and put it all together for everybody to read). On my end, I decided to post on the blog again and let my readers and everybody know.

The bottom line is that, today, everybody is upset with Amazon and the manufacturer. Some people blame the manufacturer for taking too long; others defend it because they want to release a quality product. I take the side that puts the blame on Amazon.

An online forum is a great way to keep your customers close and have a friendly tone with them. Especially Amazon, a famous-for-supply-chain store can benefit greatly from it. Myself and others are still hanging in there and approving the pushed forward dates, mainly because there is quite an amount of activity in the forum and R.C., the Amazon employee in trouble, was updating us on the process and his/her talks with the manufacturer. We, as customers, deserve to be informed by Amazon, the intermediary between consumer and manufacturer, on the status of our orders. Instead, we've been getting automated emails of "click here to approve a delay in your shipment"… I wonder why the company decided to put a web 2.0 tool in place, and not use it appropriately…

My next step: a letter to Amazon's customer service, and a template of it to share with the forum. It's worth telling Amazon how to use a forum most effectively.

Amazon’s Forum – A personalized service

As I was reviewing a delayed purchased from Amazon, I decided to do some research as to why my order got delayed for the third time in the last two months. At first, I thought that Amazon was pushing back out of stock products on their highly automated systems. Then I thought that the manufacturer delayed the release of the product (in case you care here's the product I'm buying). Therefore I decided to Google delays related to the product. To my surprise, the first link that pops up is the very same Amazon product page. I click there and notice, at the bottom of it, a forum post about delays in the release of this product. That's right, Amazon offers a forum service, and several angry buyers like me were expressing their frustrations on it.

What a great form of "service personalization"! Amazon, and other online stores and service providers, are using forums, chat-with-a-representative and other web 2.0 services to be more human. In particular, in this forum post, an Amazon representative is keeping everybody up to date with the timings of the release of the product. He is even going the extra mile and asking for feedback about offering free one-day shipping to everybody. For the last weeks, hundreds of eager buyers like me, have been chatting directly and expressing our concerns with a real Amazon sales person (or supply chain manager, who knows the exact title). The fact is that we all feel much better about it than just getting automated emails.

Definitely technology advances like collaboration services (e.g. forums, blogs, twitter, and Facebook) as well as Unified Communication applications (e.g. Chat with a representative, call-me back buttons, and Web-based support systems) are getting business the competitive advantage of becoming more personalized, human and quicker to react.

The best business application of Web 2.0

A post on Twitter's blog reveal what I consider the most useful application of Twitter for businesses: keep track of customers complains on twitter, and fix it quickly.

Of course, ideally you should also keep track of all complains in Web 2.0: Facebook, MySpace, public blogs, digg, rss, etc. Wherever there's a public space where people can complain, they will leave an online footprint. That gives you the opportunity to quickly react and address the problem as soon as you can to increase customer sat.

In my humble opinion, this the best business application of Web 2.0 that I've found of so far.

read more | digg story

Cleantech Blog Post: Flexible Workforce

A well written article on what companies are doing and should be doing to reduce the carbon footprint... run down topic, but worth reading because of the literary quality of it.

read more | digg story

Use Social Sharing To Extend Your Message

There is, after all, a business use case for social websites and services. This is a great blog post on how to leverage that. The funniest thing is that I got to it, from following the author on Twitter. Click bellow for the post.

read more | digg story

URL shorteners. Are URLs too long?

Now that I find myself tweetering constantly and announcing my presence information to the world, I discovered that 140 characters are very limiting. Not so much to give out specific presence information like what I am doing, but rather when you want to embed URLs.

This brought to my attention, the general practice of using online services to create short URL aliases. The top services that I've found are Tinyurl.com, Snurl.com (a.k.a Snipurl.com), and Decenturl.com. According to Wikipedia, these are URL Shorteners. They come very handy for tweeting, and even emailing URLs to friends, blog posts, and SMS text messages.

The fine print is that the real URL is hidden, similar to a regular phishing attack. By clicking on them, you are going somewhere, you just can't tell where to. As a general practice, when in doubt, I read the URL before clicking on it. In other words, I look in the status bar of my browser, where the link is going to take me. This does not work with URL shorteners.

Let me give you an example of the usefulness of the tool. There is a great article on some new tools in the Cisco.com website. The URL for the blog post is http://blogs.cisco.com/webexperience/2007/11/sneak_preview_new_tool_to_help.html , 80 Characters in total. However, the shortened versions from two of the three services above are http://tinyurl.com/3btbkr (25 characters) and http://snurl.com/1ueg7 (22 characters). How can you tell where the two last links are pointing to? The only way is to actually click on them.

These service providers are aware of this, and they are introducing work-arounds to the issue. For example, TinyUrl offers a small link for a preview of the real URL. In the previous sample long URL, the preview is http://preview.tinyurl.com/3btbkr and it shows you where it is pointing to.

I think they offer a great service, but be careful and aware of the threats.

Help! Too many social web services

People spend every hour of their lives in online social sites. There are too many popular ones: Facebook, MySpace, DIgg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, orkut, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter, Jaiku, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Xing, YouTube. Which leads to the question: which ones do I sign in for? All of them? Do I do it systematically?

One answer is to sign up for everything, but there are scalability issues: you will not be able to keep up with all the sites, especially today when we have competition between social services (e.g. Orkut, Facebook and MySpace). The correct answer is to be selective, to learn to say no to some friend's requests, and to resist the temptation.

Before signing up for anything, think about what you want to achieve first. Do you want to post your thoughts to the world, do you want to inform your relatives across the world, or do you want to share your photos with friends? Once you know what you want to do, then you must narrow down to the appropriate services. For example, if you are looking to share pictures with friends and family, you can use Flickr, Ofoto (Kodak Gallery), or even Facebook's photo application. Then, you should consider the impact of the service to your target audience. Do they have to sign-up for the service, or can they access the content without having to register? Would they mind registering, or not? Usually people don't mind registering to one site; but they do if they are already registered with a competing one.

The bottom line is that you have to be selective, and stick to it. Otherwise, you will not be able to keep up with all the new services coming in the next couple of years of Web 2.0. One last thing to note is that with social sites, there is a requirement for positive feedback. That is, the more users, the better it is. That is why these sites experience explosive growth.

Blogger's fake to check facts... that's good!

I stumbled upon a blog post on Digg regarding the consequences of failing to check sources. It was fairly interesting, the note talked about a case where a magazine article on new developments for car paint led to the rumor that Nissan will release a car with chameleonic paint controlled by a button.

My thought around that is that I don't see that as a flaw of online collaboration. There is much more value in the speed (or as I call it, time-to-market of the information) than the fake news itself. Collaboration is self-healing, meaning that people will detect the flaw and correct it immediately, fixing the issue in the spot. I love the Wikinomics example. When Wikipedia and Britannica go head to head for accuracy and they find more mistakes in Wikipedia than Britannica, Wikipedia can say, thanks for finding the mistakes, they have been already corrected, test for accuracy again.


read more

Twitter: follow me around

Twitter is another collaboration tool of the Web 2.0 wave. The concept is called micro-blogging. You have 140 characters to post on the web what you are doing, or whatever you want to post.

The idea came from all the people changing their status constantly on Yahoo Messanger and MSN Messenger. Facebook and MySpace offers a similar capability to change your status. For more information, check out Wikipedia's entry on Twitter.

Twitter is dedicated to just that. People can follow you, and you can follow others to see what they are doing. Moreover, you can update Twitter from different avenues: directly on the website, your cell-phone via mobile Web or via SMS, or you can even have RSS applications and desktop applications that interconnect to Twitter.
you can follow me at http://twitter.com/leoboulton and check out all the potential of it.

It sounds scary to have everybody seeing what you are doing... bear in mind that you can set up privacy settings so that only your friends can follow you, and you are also free to post whatever you want: if you post your credit card information, you are the only one to blame for that.

Top Green Blogs

As I was updating my blog today, I saw a post from the blogger's blog (the official blog for blogger, called The Buzz) summarizing top Environmental Blogs. Some blogs are indeed very tree-hugging hardcore environmentalists, but others blog about technology and advancements in the so called "green technologies". It is worth readying and subscribing to a couple of those.

Just as my other posts about news and referring other blogs: Follow the yellow-brick link bellow

Blogger Buzz: Environmental Blog Roundup

Careful with what you Web-2.0 about...

When engaging in Web 2.0 in your company, be careful with what Web 2.0 services you enroll to. The idea of getting your company into the big Web 2.0 wave, may get you off track and forget about security sometimes. You may safely use internal tools when constrained inside your company; the ones that you have to be careful with are external tools on the Internet that employees may use.

Some examples are:
• Del.icio.us – online bookmarking: careful when bookmarking internal and confidential sites in public sites that share bookmarks
• Blogger, etc – online blogs: careful when blogging about proprietary information and information that is not publicly available to the rest of the world.
• Netvibes or Google RSS - Online RSS aggregators: careful when aggregating your company's internal feeds, you may be sharing internal and proprietary information with everybody.
• Facebook or MySpace – Social networking: Again, just like blogs, careful with what you post about the company.

Like all security practices, common sense is the best defense. Think twice before posting something for everybody to read.