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 – 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 – 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 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.

More on Meetings on a Wiki

Bill Ives of the FASTForward blog adds some very insightful comments to my earlier post on holding meetings on a wiki.

Bill has an interesting point regarding notifications:

I would add to also allow this [notifications] to go somewhere besides the email inbox. I am not excited when a heated discussion on an email group suddenly drops twenty messages in my inbox. Take advantage of the common workspace here and do not drag in the sins of email spaghetti with its overlapping tangled mess.

I fully agree. I love RSS. I would, however, approach it in a differentiated manner depending on the lifestage of the wiki and people’’s level of familiarity with it. If participants are not used to RSS, I’d rather give them updates via email than wait until they learn to use RSS. After they get smothered in email, they will also be more likely to see the use for RSS :D

Stewart also comments:

One suggestion with the point about structure – it’s important to be careful to use as little structure as possible, and make sure people know that they can change the structure of a page if it makes sense to do so. In other words, the flexibility of the wiki is what makes it such a great event planning tool.

Yes, the simplest structure will usually work the best. Once a community has been using a wiki for some time, structure can be very sketchy and free-form. I find that with a community that has only just started with a wiki, an empty page will not trigger participation. Populating the page with some content – breaking the ice, as it were – gives the discussion the traction needed to get going.

Wishlist: RSS of LinkedIn “Questions from my Network”

I love LinkedIn’s Q&A feature. It consistently delivers genuinely useful answers from amazingly qualified people.

I also want to contribute with answers to questions from my network. But who has the time to manually check the “Questions from your Network” page?

Why doesn’t LinkedIn feed me questions via RSS?

How to export LinkedIn connections to Facebook

Facebook looks tantalizing, very easy to populate with the content I am already producing elsewhere – but I was struggling to start using the “social” part of the latest social computing fad. This quick tutorial on importing LinkedIn connections to Facebook filled in this need:

We do know of an easy way to get your Linkedin Connections into Facebook in 2 minutes flat.

• Click on Contacts (after you have logged into your Linkedin account)
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “export connections”
• Download the file as a CSV (Outlook) and save to your desktop
• Login to Facebook
• Click on Find Friends
• Click on “email Applications” and upload the saved CSV file

If you have any contacts on facebook from Linkedin, facebook will find them and display them and give you the option of inviting them to be your facebook friend; and send them an invite for you. Works like a champ! It will also invite all the other people that are not yet members of facebook from your Linkedin connections…

Source: Linkedin on Facebook?… At least there is a Linkedin Facebook Group
at FaceReviews.com: Facebook Application Reviews, Facebook Widgets, Facebook News
Address : FaceReviews

Get real with LinkedIn!

Looking through my LinkedIn connections a few days ago, I realized that I only knew about half of those people. The rest had extended invitations, and seemed interesting people, so I had accepted – but I did not know them! I sent off emails inviting them for a short conversation via Skype or IM.

It was amazing to see that all of the persons I invited responded within a few hours. I have already had great conversations with a number of them, and am likely to meet others within a couple days.