It's good to see that James Enck is blogging again at EuroTelcoblog. For quite a few years, I enjoyed reading James' blog largely because he provided this North American writer with some perspective into telephony/telcos in Europe and also because he wrote about Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) a good bit and I learned from that.
Then in April 2007, after about 3 years of writing, James just... stopped.
How do you see "social networking" and "social media" changing communication within companies, enterprises, etc.? How do you think blogs, wikis, etc. will change enterprise communication? What about Facebook and other similar sites?
What would you say on this topic to an audience at VoiceCon Orlando this week?
That's the task ahead of Irwin Lazar and I as we talk with Eric Krapf and Fred Knight in a keynote "conversation" from 10:30-11:00am on Wednesday. The panel, called "Social Networking Meets Enterprise Communication"has this for a description:
It's no secret that world of enterprise communications is undergoing a transformation; IP Telephony and Unified Communications are changing the nature of the game. Now new forms of interaction, which began in the consumer/personal communications market -- blogs, wikis and online services like Facebook are migrating into the enterprise. Where do these social networking systems and mindset fit into the enterprise communications landscape? Join us for a discussion about what's real today and what's likely to happen in the future.
Obviously, this is a topic about which I am rather opinionated and have been writing about in my various blogs for years (including this blog, as well as on Disruptive Conversations and in my reports into For Immediate Release), so I'm very much looking forward to the session with Irwin on Wednesday.
We've already got a long list of points we can cover... and obviously won't be able to cover them all in only 30 minutes (and we've got a hard stop at 11am as what's next is a presentation with Al Gore and Cisco CEO John Chambers!). But I thought to myself - how can I do a keynote panel on the impact of social networking in enterprise communication if I don't somehow include social networking into the prep for that panel?
So here's my question for you all -
What do you see as the top one or two ways that social networking / social media will change the ways in which people communicate within enterprises?
Both internally among employees and also externally between the company and its customers and partners?
To perhaps get the conversation going, here are a few of the topics that Irwin and I already have in our list:
interest in the opportunities to improve collaboration among employees, especially virtual/distributed
interest in the opportunities to improve collaboration with customers and partners/vendors
concerns over enterprise usage of public sites/services, i.e. what security is there for corporate data out on these sites?
challenges with rolling out these services internally (from a deployment point-of-view as well as business case, who owns it, integration of different systems, etc.)
expectations of new generation of incoming workers
What do you think? How do you see social apps/services changing enterprise communication? (Or do you take the contrarian view that it won't?) Your feedback is definitely welcome... (thanks in advance)
The world is a bit darker tonight. Oliver Starr relayed the tragic news that Marc Orchant passed away earlier today. I've sat here tonight saddened... with my thoughts very definitely going out to his family... especially at this time of year.
And then, as a writer, I feel compelled to write. It seems really the only way to honor Marc's passing.
By most measures, I did not know Marc well. We never met face-to-face. I did not work directly with him. He had not ever interviewed me, nor I him. We had not participated in any joint projects. But in this crazy world of interconnected social media, it sure felt like I knew him. I'd been reading his ZDNet "Office Evolution" blog all along up until August when he left to join Oliver Starr in starting up us.blognation.com. There on blognation I enjoyed his writing and followed along as wrote about the latest Apple happenings, talked about how he liked his Kindle reader and ultimately how he removed himself from Facebook. Since he occasionally wrote about Skype, something I cover here as well, I did pay attention especially to those posts.
Marc and I did "meet" virtually through Robert Sanzalone's "Pacific IT" Skype groupchat, where Marc participated for a few months this fall. He pointed me to what he considered the best mobile VoIP handset around. We chatted about the new MacBookPro's. He sent me a Jaiku invite when I was looking for one... the kind of ordinary things that happens in such group chat rooms. He was helpful, kind, courteous... a consummate professional.
Perhaps why his death strikes me so hard is because he was one of us... a "tech blogger"... a writer... a storyteller.
He used words to help try to make sense out of the insanity that surrounds us on any given day. He tried to educate... enlighten... de-mystify. He wrote well and with an enjoyable style. He told stories.
And now he is gone.
What remains is his family (donations are being collected by Oliver Starr) and, of course, in this era of Google and seemingly infinite disk farms... his words:
And undoubtedly many more places than those I've listed here. Technorati also pulled up this video of Marc in 2005 explaining what a blog is:
There are perhaps more of those out there as well... and undoubtedly pictures in Flickr and other such sites.
Now, for the rest of us, all we can really do (outside of donating to Marc's family) is to remember him. Consider this my entry in building that collective memory... in helping in some small way to tell Marc's story. I've seen posts already from Alec Saunders, Aaron Brazell, Tris Hussey (on blognation),Robert Scoble... and I'm sure we'll see many more in the hours and days ahead.
No mere words can ever replace a loved one, but perhaps in some small way they can offer some degree of solace to Marc's family to know that he was valued by others... that what he did mattered... and that the world is a better place for him having been here.
Rest in peace, Marc... thank you for all you shared.
Today at Fall VON in Boston, Jeff Pulver hosted a special version of his Pulver TV show where he interviewed a number of people from the conference including me. First up was Jason Calcanis of Mahalo fame. Next was James Tagg, Founder and CEO of TruPhone. I followed and then the show wrapped up with Bob Frankston who is perhaps most widely known as one of the inventors of VisiCalc.
My part of the show starts at 14:30 and goes until 23:24. (When I nicely leave the stage without taking off the lapel mic! Oops! Sorry about that... ) We talked about my presentation at VON (on Thursday), application platforms like Facebook, my new role with Voxeo, social media in general and much more. It was a good bit of fun to do and I have to thank Jeff for giving me the opportunity to participate.
The company already offers premium, subscription-based versions of MySpace through AT&T Inc. and Helio wireless services. Those versions include special features integrated into specific handsets, such as uploading cell phone photos directly to a user's profile page.
The new version set to launch Monday will work on all U.S. carriers and will allow users to send and receive messages and friend requests, comment on pictures, post bulletins, update blogs, and find and search for friends.
At first I went along with the headline but the more I read it the more it made no sense whatsoever. There was no mention of phones... rate plans... or anything else. Gradually it dawned on me that while the AP headline was this:
Myspace to launch ad-supported cell phone
what they really meant was this:
Myspace to launch ad-supported cell phone version
Oops!
And here I was getting all excited that News Corp. was doing something truly stunning and had figured out a way to use advertising to drive the costs of all calls to $0 and give away all the phones and minutes for free! Given the huge community of MySpace users out there, they would probably have immediate pickup and would truly disrupt the industry.
Ah, well... the truth appears to be that they are just making it easier to use MySpace on web-enabled cell-phones without paying for the subscription version. Commendable... but not even remotely as exciting.
Let's see how far people run with the "MySpace to give away free cell phones" theme today!
Interestingly, there was no event inside of Facebook for the ACUTA annual conference that I referenced in my last post. Continuing my ongoing exploration of Facebook, I thought that perhaps because ACUTA is the "Association for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education" there might be an "event" already created in Facebook. There wasn't one, so naturally I created an event notice. If you are going to the ACUTA conference this month and are also a Facebook user please feel free to join that event.
ACUTA?
Creating this event caused two discussion threads in my brain. The first was about ACUTA as an organization and the question of perhaps why there is no mention of ACUTA within a search inside Facebook. While my co-workers involved with education sales have been involved with the organization for some time, I personally had not heard of it prior to being asked about speaking at this conference. From the corporate FAQ (and university FAQ), it seems very obvious that ACUTA comes from the telecom side of the house and is looking now at the larger "communications technology" space. I would think for the folks involved, all of these social networking services will play an increasingly larger role in the future. One of the talks I'm interested to hear at the conference is "Millenials Go to College", which looks to be about how communication is changing with the younger generation. Will ACUTA members be inspired to delve more into Facebook after that? (Will the talk cover Facebook? One would expect so...) We'll see.
Facebook events and corporate choices?
The second discussion thread in my head was about how Facebook still needs to adjust to being more than a college/university place. For instance, let's look at the choices I have when creating an event:
First choice... a party! Woohoo! But wait... there are even many individual types of parties! (Do Facebook users actually schedule a "Night of Mayhem"?)
Next up is "Causes"... with a sub-type of "Fundraiser, Protest or Rally". So where do you put a "conference"? I thought perhaps "Education" might be a choice, but that gives me these choices very clearly targeted at higher education:
The answer would seem to be under the fourth choice of "Meetings":
where, sandwiched between "Club/Group Meeting" and "Dorm/House Meeting" there is... ta da... "Convention".
Now, I realize that Facebook came out of college/university roots and that certainly parties are a major focus with that age range, but as Facebook tries to capture more "business" users... or at least more "professionals", one wonders if over time they will re-write this a bit to adjust more to the type of events that people within the business world usually attend. Or perhaps at least re-order the priorities a bit (or let you do so).
They may not be able to easily do so, though. They really have different audiences to which they need to cater. One group is looking for social events and the other for more business focused events. It's also not entirely clear to me that "business users" would actually want to use Facebook as the calendar for their events. But if you buy into the vision of Facebook as your end-all and be-all portal (I'm not there yet, personally, but I can see that as the vision of FB.), it makes sense to think some of those meetings might migrate here as well.
Although I could not earlier find many Facebook apps that I considered true "VoIP apps" that linked out to the PSTN or larger VoIP world, we are seeing more apps emerging. Two notable new entrants:
Dean's a friend who runs VoIPUser.org (and provides the SIP voicemail box for Blue Box comments) and he's been experimenting with the Facebook API. This is the first of what he says will be a series of Facebook apps. Dean says this one is "SIP meets Presence meets Google Maps" and provides this on the Facebook apps page for a description:
"This application shows within your profile if you have a SIP device currently logged into the VoIP User server and are available to take calls. The application page also shows a Google Maps mashup page showing your current location."
This one does the rather obvious and lets you see the Skype presence of your other Facebook friends (provided they have installed the application). With a tagline of "skype meet facebook. facebook meet skype." the developer says on the FAQ:
"SkypeMe is a Facebook application that links with your Skype account and lets you make calls right from inside Facebook. You can see which friends are online, make calls, and even buy SkypeOut credit from Facebook."
It appears to work primarily by getting the web presence of each of your friends and making that available to you, which means, naturally, that you need to enable Skype web presence inside the options of your Skype client.
There's actually two parts to it. On your public profile page visible to everyone else, there is a box like the image shown on the left that lets another Skype user initiate a call to you. On the internal page inside of my Facebook account for the applications I have installed, there is a page with a screen like the graphic on the right that shows all the Facebook friends I have who have also installed the SkypeMe Facebook application.
This Facebook app was announced in the Skype Mashup public chat. Actually, I think it was really the first I saw announced (but then again, I wasn't really watching the chat last week while I was off).
One of the things that continues to fascinate me is the "mashup culture" we are in today where the whole "Web 2.0" (ugh! how I dislike the term!) motif is that you can mix and mash output and input from various services to come up with new and interesting integrations. Anybody who has at this point NOT seen some mashup with Google Maps should probably stop reading this post now. (In fact, turn off your computer and just go outside... you obviously haven't been paying attention, anyway!) The programmableweb site lists now over 2000 mashups. There's a wiki of Twitter mashups. Mashable.com reports daily on more and more services that are very often new remixes and combinations of existing services. It's a crazy but intriguing world we're in right now.
Today Skype joined the fray with their "Mashup Contest" calling on developers to join in building mashups that use the Skype API. The contest will run until September 12th when they are having a "Skype Developer Days" conference in Prague. From their announcement:
Judges will be from across Skype, eBay and Paypal, plus external judges. The winner will be chosen and announced on Sep 12th in Prague based on the following criteria: innovation, usefulness, cool factor, usability and a dash of weirdness.
It will be very interesting to see what evolves. Having been in the Skype public chat that started initially to talk about mashups with Twitter, I'm fairly sure that we'll see some integration with at the very least Twitter and Facebook. (Will Skype be the first with a Facebook VoIP app?)
Should be fun, at least... I'm curious to see what people do that involves "a dash of weirdness"! :-)
With the recent release of Facebook's "Platform" for applications (see here for more info and links), my first thought, naturally, was... so what VoIP apps are in there? Given that Facebook is being used as a email/IM/messaging platform by so many, the linkage into voice seems logical. Oddly, when I went to Facebook's "Application Directory" and searched (using the "Search Apps" box) on either "voip" or "voice" I wound up with no applications! However, there clearly are some voice applications in there. Through some browsing, I discovered these (note that the first links on each line will only work if you are logged into Facebook):
WalkieTalkie - private voice chat for a Facebook group. If everyone in the group installs it, they can all participate in a group "conference call".
Tag - from the same developer as WalkieTalkie, this is for one-to-one voice chat and leaving messages.
Chatterbox - lets other users leave a voice message on your Facebook profile.
VoicePlayer from Snapvine - let's users leave voice comments on your Facebook profile
Msg-Time - same idea... you can leave voice messages
Free World Phone from Jaxtr - call-back service that calls users on their existing phones... also includes voice messaging and ability to keep your phone number
There is also an app listed for Jangl that doesn't seem to be available if you click on the link. But again, this is another call-back service that lets you keep your number private and use your existing phone.
All of these are interesting in various different ways, especially to me the WalkieTalkie and Tag apps as they would appear to be actual VoIP, but there does seem to be something missing here:
Where are the VoIP apps that go outside the Facebook walls?
Now, maybe I missed them (and feel free to leave me a comment telling me so), but it seems to me that it would be a logical thing to allow people to initiate voice conversations from within Facebook to various VoIP services, similar to what Xing is already doing with both Skype and also with regular phone numbers (through a conferencing service). Skype is one obvious choice, but an app that did straight SIP (hmm... "Gizmo for Facebook") would be very interesting as well. Or connected to one of the other IM services that include voice (Microsoft WLM, GoogleTalk, AIM, Yahoo!Voice)... or that played well with open source VoIP like Asterisk... or that connected to one of the enterprise VoIP or consumer VoIP services.
The question really is... who will be the first one to offer an app that lets you use your existing VoIP services from within the Facebook walls? And through those services gives you PSTN connectivity? We'll see...
I have not really written about Jaiku here at all... I have been meaning to explore it a bit more, but just haven't had the time. What limited time I have had lately has been more focused on Twitter, Facebook, Skype and the evolving mashups of all of those.
But Ken Camp has been writing and advocating Jaiku, and is starting a series of posts with his one today: "Unveiling the new Jaiku Client for Nokia - Part 1" Ken is going to talk more about the new client for Nokia S60 phones. But this part of his first post is perhaps more revealing:
First, if you aren’t a Jaiku user today, you need to understand that Jaiku is what I call a lifestream aggregator. When you build your profile, you have complete control over what you wish to share of your lifestream of information. For many, that’s simply their Jaikus. Using this approach, a used can share brief snippets of information - current status, pose a question, leave a thought - for others to see.
Digging more deeply into Jaiku, we find you can also import RSS feeds of all flavors into your lifestream. For me, this means if you read my lifestream, you see blog posts from three different blogs, Flickr photos, blip.tv video posts, even Twitter posts. I’ll explain more about why I think this approach is revolutionary and exciting in a post tomorrow or Friday. It’s taken me a while as a Jaiku user to develop an appreciation for just why this is apprach to aggregation is really important. I think it’s positively revolutionary from a social networking perspective.
I agree with Ken that this type of "lifestream aggregation" represents a direction in which social networking is evolving. The challenge, I think, really comes back to where you do that aggregation. Jaiku would like to be your aggregator. So would Twitter (which can bring in RSS feeds through sites like Twitterfeed.com). And so indeed would Facebook which now includes an RSS application as part of its platform.
So which do you choose?
All are, to varying degrees, walled gardens of some sort. Ken can't follow my status updates because I primarily use Twitter. Alec Saunders does most all his updates within Facebook. We do need to have some kind of common aggregator. We need to tear down the walls so that we don't wind up in isolated islands of communication.
But in the meantime, if you want to read about how pretty and nice it is inside of the walled garden of Jaiku, head on over to Ken's post to read more. This is Part 1, with the others to follow soon thereafter, I would expect.
How do you see "social networking" and "social media" changing communication within companies, enterprises, etc.? How do you think blogs, wikis, etc. will change enterprise communication? What about Facebook and other similar sites?
The world is a bit darker tonight. Oliver Starr relayed 
In what looks like a classic case of someone leaving a critical word out of a headline, the Associated Press this morning came out with 
