Living in the Facebook Downline

Just ran across this NY Times article on an emerging trend in social networks where Facebook and Twitter are openly and actively encouraging third parties to consume their services and re-purpose their content. The article then covers several startups who are feeding off of this social knowledge ecosystem.

With regards to this ecosystem, what I have seen in the wild are three patterns. A lot of UGC sites now permit you to post non-anonymously via some kind of federated login system. The second pattern is publishing content in multiple places such as micro-blogs on both facebook and twitter. The third pattern is profile synchronization across multiple social networking sites.

With federated login (sometimes called single sign on), you don't have to register at every site that requires registration. Instead, you can participate on a site as a registered user by logging in to an already existing account that you have. Under the covers the system, where you have an account, shares some knowledge about you with the system you are trying to use. Both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems tried their hand at federated login over a decade ago. Both failed miserably. Today's big players at single sign on are Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. Google and Yahoo use the OpenID technology to carry this off while Facebook uses its own Facebook Connect technology.

In the second pattern, you post some content and the system provides a way for you to immediately promote your content on the various popular social networking sites. Originally, this was called Viral Marketing where the system would volunteer to spam your friends if you would let it access the address book or contact lists from your main-stream email accounts. In this iteration, you are presented with options to send facebook notifications or tweets.

The need for the third pattern has risen only very recently as people start spending a lot of time updating their profiles on all of the social networking sites that they use. This trend is still fairly recent but two examples that come to mind are Disqus and Gravatar.

As to the startups referenced in the original NY Times article mentioned in paragraph one here, I would be a little nervous in investing in these companies. After all, they use the facebook and twitter back-ends as their main entre whereas these other companies see it more as the icing on the cake. I mean, what are they going to do if Facebook ever decides to shut down their free API?

The Whuffie Factor

I just ran across this great talk at last year's Web 2.0 conference by Tara Hunt on a knowledge management blog that I frequently visit.

She talks about how the leveraging of the feeling of reciprocity and social capital and the nurturing of a gift economy in the design of your product or web site's user experience is the most efficacious way to promote your message. She calls it The Whuffie Factor which is a term inspired from a book written by Cory Doctorow called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

She also contrasts this approach to traditional PR and shows how The Whuffie Factor is a logical extension to the prosumer approach of establishing authentic conversations.


The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities (Tara Hunt) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo.

Oracle to Acquire Sun

Sun Microsystems has been on the ropes since the first decade of this millennium when some of the largest Internet properties (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon) switched from Sun's Solaris to GNU Linux. That, and the two most recent stock market crashes, have really beaten this server hardware vendor and inventor of the Java programming language and platform down from a share price of $233 to $3.

A few weeks ago, it looked like IBM would be the one to purchase Sun. Now, it looks like database vendor and services company Oracle is stepping up to make the purchase.

This could be of particular concern to the large number of web companies who use MySql as their database. MySql is owned by Sun and will fall under Oracle's control once the acquisition is complete. Will Oracle poison or sunset MySql in order to make their own database product more compelling? Oracle has tried to acquire MySql before and has acquired one of MySql's back-end storage systems so you can't tell me that they aren't thinking about it.

That's the big news. Oracle makes a few other tools that compete with Sun tools too. Will Sun's NetBeans take a back seat to Oracle's JDeveloper?

May Update: Sun shareholders sue to block Oracle Acquisition.

June Update: Oracle fails to get regulatory clearance by the deadline.

September Update: DOJ gives Oracle approval to proceed with acquisition. Only barrier now is EU Commission approval.

IBM Virtual Worlds Conference

I just got back from a two day conference that IBM hosted on Second Life called Beyond Blogging which is a conference billed as by IBMers primarily for IBMers but also open to the public. I believe that this conference was organized by IBM's Seeking Business Value from Investment in Virtual Worlds on the 3D Internet group.

The first day of the conference was more about how cool Second Life is for consumers. My own interests in Second Life are more towards how the enterprise can use virtual worlds as an affordable way to telepresence for remote teams to web seminar with a back channel, all in an easy to use HUD. That is why the second day of the conference held more interest to me. They billed this as "virtual worlds behind the firewall."

The first speaker of the second day was Neas Bade (Sean Daque) who is a developer for OpenSim which is a 3D Application Server that can be used to create a virtual world which can be accessed through a variety of clients and on multiple protocols.

He talked about the Open Source Metaverse where you can create your own simulator and connect it to a public grid for free. He talked about some EAI for OpenSim such as LDAP and web integration. When asked about integrating virtual worlds with cloud computing, he referred to a small group of analysts called RedMonk.

The second speaker for the second day was Rufus TT Horsefly (Neil Cats) who talked about how IBM asked Linden Labs to bring up an instance of Second Life within the IBM firewall on their blade center hardware (they had 250 users per session) in order to host their AOT Conference. Some of the lessons learned here was the importance of identity for attendees including the use of realistic avatars and the need for helpers and for training including help with installation of the HUD and with getting voice chat to work. He also talked about integration with their Domino product and an offering of theirs called Sametime 3D.

From this conference, I definitely get the sense that IBM is anticipating increasing corporate interest in virtual worlds as a way of mitigating travel expenses for remote teams to work together and as a way to reach out to customers in a way that is more affordable than the traditional conference model.

June Update: Now it's official. IBM's New Meeting Platform is Based on Open Sim.

Dyson Cool on Global Warming

It seems to me that global warming has become as much a hot button topic as Cuba, abortion, evolution or the Holocaust. That is to say, there are people on both sides with apparently deep convictions who make claims that strongly contradict each other. I counted myself on the side of believing that global warming was real and an apparent and compelling danger, that is to say until I read this past weekend's NY Times Magazine article on Freeman Dyson.

I have always had a lot of respect for this venerated icon of the scientific intelligentsia. I have put him up there with other greats such as Richard Feynman and Bucky Fuller. Even his daughter, Esther, is a well known and respected intellectual. So, when this article told his take on global warming, it gave me pause to reconsider my opinion about it.

You can read the article for yourself but here is my short take away from it. This is in my own words and not a reflection on the thinking of Freeman Dyson. Global warming has become politicized to the point where there is very little good science behind it. Global warming has become for the liberals what terrorism is for the conservatives, that is to say a rallying cry and red herring for distracting public opinion away from more compelling topics that need discourse and public attention.

I'm not saying that global warming is just some liberal revisionist's wet dream. But Dyson's position does motivate me to revisit Al Gore's Inconvenient Trust with a more critical eye.

IBM to Acquire Sun

Whoa! My world was rocked today when I picked up the NY Times and read about yet another decline in the stock market. Even more upsetting is that Sun Microsystems is in talks with IBM to be acquired.

This acquisition shouldn't really be all that upsetting. It does make perfect sense for IBM, which has always prided itself on its servers, to want to acquire the other technology company who also pride themselves on their servers. I'm sure that those two companies have competed head-to-head for years.

Sun is also the founding company of Java Technology which IBM is now heavily invested in. IBM has shown a lot of commitment to Open Source over the years with their development of a major OSS IDE called Eclipse and their endorsement of Novel's SUSE on the desktop and Red Hat for servers. So, when Sun Open Sourced Java, that most probably made Sun that much more of a desirable acquisition target to IBM.

The Sun blade servers have always been very respectable hardware from an engineering standpoint so I hope that IBM doesn't just retire the line to get it out of the way of their own similar offerings.

Maybe what is really the most upsetting part of this news for me is to have to see Scott McNealy down play his hot headed nature to be more compatible with IBM's more staid Sam Palmisano.

Or maybe it's the fact that the article clearly ties the reasoning behind this move to the faltering economy.

April Update: It looks like IBM has withdrawn its offer for now.

Harnessing the Collective

If you've spent any time in I.T., then you have most probably heard of Forrester Research, Inc. They are a $391M tech and market research think tank. They are kind of like an upscale Gartner Group. Like the Gartner Group, they release these extremely high priced executive documents. Today, they released a document (hey, it's only $2G so be sure to pick up an extra copy) called Vendor Landscape: Innovation Management Software. What used to be called workgroup software has passed through the adolescent stage of Knowledge Management to bloom into full adulthood as Innovation Management Software which has grown from the intersection of idea management, threaded discussions, and Web 2.0 concepts like voting and ranking.

This is how organizations will leverage the growing Web 2.0 trend of collective wisdom. I believe that the release of this research paper heralds the transition of this trend from early adopter to mainstream.