Web apps I use

Following our conversation, Vladimir Oane raises the question: Who actually uses all these shiny new web apps (rounded corners and all)? He only uses a handful, and these have been around for some time or tend to come from giants like Google.

His question reminded me of this earlier post where Dan Berte wrote about web apps that didn’t work for him. Indeed, of the half dozen new projects that show up on Museum of Modern Betas every day, how many do we really need? They might be built to be bought; but, if it is indeed “the same million people” using all of them, how many will this million of us use?

The mainstream media is shaking its head at the cash-happiness at the top of the Web 2.0 pyramid.
(See The Skype hyper in The Economist’s Oct 4th edition:

“By buying Skype, the internet phenomenon of 2005, eBay started a
bubble. Google, with its purchase of YouTube, the cyber-star of 2006,
inflated it further. And Microsoft and Google now appear tempted to add
more froth by investing a silly sum in Facebook, the latest big thing.
All three—the internet telephone firm, the video site and the social
network—make almost no money. EBay’s disappointment with Skype is a
timely reminder of where this fad might lead.”)

As a first pass at an answer, I’ll tally my web app usage as well. Our position as
early, enthusiastic adopters in Eastern Europe is somewhat more
equidistant than adopters in the Valley. Without personally knowing too many of the
developers, we evaluate web apps quickly
and decide in the first few seconds whether we’ll use something or not.

What are the ones that I use?

1. del.icio.us – closing up on 1000 bookmarks. The problem? When I try to retrieve, as often as not I had actually just starred the post in Google Reader. Or done nothing at all to save the page. Google Web History usually kicks in as an emergency solution.
2. Flickr – essential to my peace of mind since my HDD died and took all of my photos with it
3. Google Video – mostly for the excellent content from the Googleplex
4. Google Notebook and Google Docs – for research support and collaborative document authoring with my team
5. Twitter – micro-social-networking
6. Stikkit - now used as a GTD inbox for anything web-related. I had high hopes for this app. It could have become my inbox to the internet – intelligently feeding my travels to Dopplr, my goals to 43things, etc. It now looks abandoned in favour of IWantSandy. (Guess what? I DON’T want Sandy. I want a more integrated Stikkit.)
7. LinkedIn – would use actively if I could set up customized RSS feeds for Questions on subjects I can authoritatively discuss
8. Facebook – mostly to keep in touch with the people I met at the Office 2.0 Conference
9. coComment - tracking comments posted on other blogs (though very dissapointed with its performance, I’m not aware of a better solution)
10. More recently, specific social networks such as Social Media Today
11. Tumblr – for a personal blog / journal
12. Mindmeister – almost any project I start these days begins as a mindmap. If I need to collaborate with anyone else, I’ll use Mindmeister to share mindmaps without forcing people to install software or to edit the map together in real time.
13. Dopplr – while I’m not yet enough of a frequent traveler to make this immensely useful, I’m quite enchanted with its simplicity and the most seamless integration I’ve ever seen.
14. iUseThis – voting for the Mac apps that we use. This has become my no. 1 destination when I need Mac software. Would love to see a similar proposition for web apps
15. Picnik – for my very occasional image editing needs, a simple and sweet solution.

I had great hope for these, but now only use very seldom:

• Last.fm – there’s just not enough of a support for classical music – let alone the contemporary classical that I listen most of the time.
• Plaxo 3.0 – I cancelled my Premium subscription to this very promising re-iteration of the rather spammy Plaxo. It’s supposed to be a solution to the Syncing problem. At the moment, it just doesn’t sync what I need.
• 43things – occasionally used to collect random goals.
• iGoogle – promising, but I’m quickly losing patience with how long it takes to load / switch tabs

A couple to which I never gave much of a chance:

• None of the social news sites. I need highly selective filters to counter information overload. I need to fight the “too much input, no output” syndrome. No way am I going to add lots more input.
• Pownce, Jaiku, Ziki
• MySpace – useless AND ugly.
• Joost – I have no use for watching pocker games.
• These are the ones I remember. The rest? Hmm….

I’ll follow up with a post on what’s missing in Web 2.0 apps.

Office 2.0 apps and usage in Romania

Last week, I was invited to talk about Office 2.0 applications on the IT&C show at the Money Channel. Their archive seems to lag 1-2 months behind their live show, so don’t hold your breath waiting to see the show :D

I took advantage of this opportunity to add to my understanding of apps in the Office 2.0 area that are being developed and used in Romania. Here’s a round-up of the people I talked to and our discussions:

• Mircea Goia put together a vey well-researched round-up of Web 2.0 presence in Romania on Read/Write Web. The article was written mid-June, so it is still fairly up-to-date. This was my starting point. His focus was mostly on social networks, while I was more interested in enterprise collaboration. Two of his apps fit my profile: Metromind’s BluoCMS and Soft32’s ZuluWriter. I contacted both of them. I also wrote to Mircea, who was very responsive… but, unfortunately, in a different timezone on the other side of the globe! I couldn’t get his input before the show, but look forward to discussing in the future.
• Vladimir Oane of Metromind was a joy to talk to – a wealth of ideas. We wondered why Romanian customers prefer paying a large amount up-front in order to own the product rather than going with a subscription-based model (even when the software they pay for will be outdated long before their investment pays off!). He insisted that the limiting factor in usage of Office 2.0 in Romania is culture, not technology – a point with which I fully agree. East European education methods and work ethics have been strongly individualistic and competitive for a long time. Collaboration has always been present, but more in the form or familism or cronyism (for ex. “suflatul la ore”) than in the form of open cooperation. However, “we build our tools, then they shape us“, (to quote a favorite Stowe Boyd theme). Our culture has been determined by the tools we have been encouraged and allowed to use, as much as by the assignments we have been given and the results we have been measured against. How quickly can culture cange when you introduce new tools? It is very likely to depend on how assignments and evaluation change, as well.
• Lucian Todea of ITNT/Soft32 has one of the more interesting projects around: ZuluWriter, an online word processor and document manager. Gotta love their homepage! Unfortunately, the project seems to be dormant at the moment. The functionality as hinted (not yet implemented) seems to be quite promising in the tagging and content sharing area.
• Zoltan Lorincz of Mindomo has the only fully-developed Office 2.0 application that I am aware of at the moment (in Romania, of course). He is based in Timisoara, and he openly told me he doesn’t expect Romanian client anytime soon. Mindomo is a (feature-rich) mindmapping application, and mindmapping itself is somewhat of a novelty to most Romanian corporate settings. A pity.

Office 2.0 – GTD with Office 2.0

We’re getting a 3-minute demo of the following apps:

• Vitalist – created in Poland, looks nice; but I’m so happy with the way OmniFocus is coming along that I’m unlikely to be moving to an enterprise 2.0 tool myself.
• Smartsheet – this looks wonderfully cool, going way beyond what you can do with Excel. The permission structure is very granular – people can be able to only edit some portions. This looks to me one of the most promising apps here today.
• Nozbe – also looks nice, love the paper integration as well. The integrated timetracking is something that I’ve been trying to obtain for some time.
• PlanHQ – GTD for company planning. Looks great!
• Ismael shows how he uses Salesforce for GTDing contacts.

The discussion from this point on became very interesting to participate in, so I couldn’t blog anymore :D

Office 2.0 – Enterprise collaboration

Dan Farber just started a very lively panel discussion asking Gafni from SAP if they use Zimbra. Sam Lawrence has the approach that the most important is to make it very simple to work with people you work with and new people. Focus on making it very easy. Oliver Marks of Sony hosts a worldwide collaboration platform online for Sony PS developers – offering a lot of support. Paul Pedrazzi of Oracle says that the siloed apps was that way for a reason, but is shifting the approach towards an app lab. They launched a social network, putting the person at the center of everything – by giving others the ability to see the entire picture of a person. Simons of BEA touches a sensitive point: web 2.0 needs to plug more into what already exists, whereas fun is what we usually think about re 2.0.

Openness in enterprises? Sony is prepared to pay handsomely for the source code but won’t consider anything hosted. Companies are starting to look at the possibility of sharing, looking at what other companies are doing.

What are people doing to implement? SAP trying to understand what can be transparent in an organization and what cannot? Zimbra has a real estate agency client who has no way to share content quickly among each other, share presence data – but know they can have competitive advantage by making this underlying data available.

The notion of “people-centric”; the social web is however very challenging for companies. Farber asks what are the experiences of the participants. Pedrazzi decided to not ask for permission, but just build using the same login and using the HR data. Just sent an email to launch, propelling from 3 to 8000 people within one day. What triggers implementation – improving communication so that the friction goes down. Social networks allow people to focus.

The sales cycle of social computing adoption into the enterprise – you need to get an approver at the enterprise management level.

If customers are being exposed to the technologies – what are the vendors doing to satisfy that need?

Probably the greatest question: suites OR interoperability? People will do what they want anyway; the power is swinging to end users. If you design the applications right, users can integrate very easily. The consensus seems to be on mashable modules rather than suites.

What’s still missing? More and more content types. Time zones are still a problem. It is also much easier to consume than to create – in Oracle, wikis are already adopted, but blogs are only now being explored.

Of all of the people on the panel – Oracle, SAP, Sony – nobody is at all excited about videoconferencing. Confirms what I have thought for a long time – videoconferencing gets much more media attention (on account of being so sexy) than it pragmatically deserves.

Office 2.0 – Mindmapping

I have been live mindmapping the session on MindMapping here. Later in the day I’ll try to upgrade to a pro account so I can actually embed it here, but for now, the MindMeister map is public.  MindMeister very generously made a gift a a pro membership to me… but WordPress flushes out the embed code when I try to place it here. If anyone has a solution, please let me know.

Enjoy!

Office 2.0 – Online communities

Finnern told us the key to having a large number of community participants is to give out iPhones :D

The first question: where do we start? We are in a different place than we were; we’rea learning how social communities work. The rise of social web is driven by its utter simplicity – driving enormous growth. Most of the content is created by “us”, propelling the peer production model. The blogosphere is the biggest conversation in the world.

Self-formed communities – ex. KatrinaList. CafeMom is a sample of a real-people social network vs. SV network. Average people in an organization will not have time to adopt these tools. This is something that we have not yet found a solution for.

Problems: the 2% troublemakers; the 9x problems (new tools must be nearly 10 times better for people to have incentive to switch – Harvard research). Many are concerned that 2.0 will decrease productivity [and we're all so excited about how they increase productivity?].

Diane Davidson – found that when people say bad things, approaching them directly solved the problem. After some time, WebEx found people asking “can we do this in a community?”

Robert Duffy – Intel is opening up, looking at social media to make sure they keep being relevant. Participating not just internally but also going out to other places where discussions are going on as well.

Mark Finnern – finds that most of the growth on SAP’s communities for business processes consulting comes from word of mouth.

Josh Hilliker – when launching Intel vPro, wants to talk to the people within partner organizations who are bloggers passionate about silicon. Research is moving from talking to individuals in enterprises about what they want – to talking to the community as a whole.

Mike Walsh – talks about companies outside of the usual adopters (hi-tech industry) looking at online communities and obtaining great benefits?. [This is something that I am very interested in. Does anyone know of a company in the construction industry using enterprise 2.0?] Mike gives two interesting examples that I will have to look at: Dwell.com and Autodesk communities. I wonder

Comment from the audience: “Community can be a nice way of saying that we are shifting the burden of tech support unto our customers.” Diane sees it more as broadening of what gets done, a win-win situation. Offering joint ownership of our products [Apple, where are you?] Josh makes a good point that community is faster than support.

Audience asking for 5 tips on how a start-up can build a community. Answers:

• start with a great product
• one-on-one relationship
• listen and react so people feel heard
• hire your top contributors
• set your goals so people internally are on the same page
• find your greatest advocates
• market the community
• keep it open as much as possible (a minimum of private areas)
• reward people for providing good content and participating

What resources to allocate for launching a small community and growing it?

• do you want to build your own platform or buy? integrated or best-in-breed?
• WebEx had almost no resources internally
• need to find people internally who are willing to change the way they work
• Intel has a few positions of “Community Manager” (Josh’ position). Very very nice!
• Josh also makes the point that launching communities in Intel is very much like a start-up
• Intel has a goal of shifting the content to the community and ultimately spinning it off

Very nice panel, thanks to all the panelists!

Office 2.0 – Knowledge Worker 2.0

Stephen Collins has an interesting point about the KW 2.0 being cross-generational. They wnnt to know how they can give and get value. This is perceived as a lack of loyalty – when it is in fact just looking for value. They will then walk out the door with a wealth of unshared information.

How to make sure they are engaged? Give them a community – let them collaborate will colleague. Need for awareness; these people love to share. People get demoralized at work when the effort they put in doesn’t get recognized. It is very important to have a Learning organization culture. Silos kill knowledge sharing – you need to kill walls. KW 2.0 dont’ have respect for authority: this derives from knowledge rather than power. Need to have management validate the new working style. The metrics around what you’re doing need to be changed: the output should count, not the number of hours they spend there.

Office 2.0 – Death of the app

Live notes

Killing off the idea that an app is selected by the IT group. The boundaries of a personal app vs. a company app is on its way out. Apps are dissapearing because you no longer think about the app itself, only about the things you’re trying to get done. Focusing on the end user. .. with each one being different in the way they accomplish their work. All the apps that are half-baked… they all need databases to run on. The economics of innovation have changed.

We have lots of little apps… will it continue? Will users have to integrate them? Or still the buy and consolidate platform?

If users don’t care about the app anymore, is it becoming a commodity?

We don’t really say it, but I see that everyone is wishing the IT department to be dead.

Etelos iPhone application for Office2.0

Some quick thoughts on the very nice platform that Etelos has provided for Office 2.0:

• The profile asks for our blog RSS, but automatically puts an http:// in front of it, rendering it useless.
• If the blog RSS can be fixed, where can we watch everybody liveblogging during the conference?
• The business card replacement is absolutely marvelous. Yesterday, at the Unconference, I flinched every time I had to exchange business cards. However… where can I see a list of the people to whom I have sent my information? Edit: within a couple of hours, Etelos solved this.

Office 2.0 Unconference – continued

Ah, the tyranny of bloggers. I’ll post more about the panel discussion on emerging economies on BusinessIdeas.ro.

At yesterday’s Unconference, I participated in the following discussions:

1. Introducing disruptive technologies
2. How can Office 2.0 vendors make money
3. Does the virtual enterprise really exist?
4. Enterprise 2.0 in emerging economies
5. Productivity in office 2.0

Interesting takeaways and further questions:

• Once a Web2.0 product “succeeds”, it quickly loses coolness (see graph). J. C. MacDonald said that once Groove sold out to Microsoft, it “feel off the cliff of coolness”. If coolness (“Whuffie“) is the currency of choice in the Web2.0 world, and monetary success quickly brings a coolness penalty, what are the long-term options for 2.0 business?
• Disruptiveness is relative. I fully agree with Neil Raden’s point that (paraphrasing) “disruptive” is a coward’s synonym for innovation.
• Dave Mosby raised the very interesting question of how to raise pain awareness. Self-protective denial keeps people sane (“We manage just fine with email!”). I look forward to exploring this question throughout the conference, maybe in the Culture and Technolgy panel later in the day.
• Robin Carey shared some very thought-provoking ideas on the way social media could be used in NGOs and for social issues reporting. I will certainly follow up on this theme, as I find it tremendously promising. This recent Economist article is a good introduction (also covered in more detail by the excellent Humanitarian.info).

By the way… Twitter is still down. Very bad timing for me, as I was looking forward to twitterring through the conference.