In the 1990s, Lotus Notes gained notoriety, in part, for the nifty collaboration features it brought to corporate e-mail. IBM's CEO at the time, Lou Gerstner, was so impressed that he paid a premium to consummate what began as a hostile tender to buy Lotus in 1995.
Notes went on to become an unqualified commercial success with some 145 million users around the world who use the product. Still, Lotus hasn't quite secured for itself the reputation of offering the must-have enterprise collaboration technology in the age of the Internet.
What with the proliferation of competing Web-based technologies targeting that market, it will be tough for any one company to claim that moniker for itself. But Big Blue will stake its claim with its upcoming entry--courtesy of its Lotus division in Cambridge, Mass.--with a cloud computing angle.
The work comes out of a project that got under way at Lotus last fall to develop an Internet-based collaboration and social-networking service. In Web 2.0 parlance, the idea was to meld social networking with business-collaboration tools in a way to make it easier for corporate users to use and share information. The project was to culminate in finding a way for users to tap the Web to access applications such as instant messaging or document sharing.
So it is that IBM on Wednesday will announce a service called LotusLive Engage, what it bills as an integrated social networking and collaboration cloud service. You can go up on the Web site today and take a tour, but this is a teaser test run. Although the official announcement will take place at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference, which opens in San Francisco, LotusLive Engage becomes commercially available on April 7.
Brendan Crotty, program manager of LotusLive said the project, initially geared at the small to mid-size business market, benefited from often frank feedback by beta testers who told IBM what they liked and disliked about the interface. In the hour-long demo I had Tuesday afternoon, it appeared that IBM's designers had taken those comments to heart. The console layout was lapidary and intuitive. Enterprise users who previously worked with products like Notes or Microsoft Exchange shouldn't have any trouble figuring out what does what.
LotusLive Engage's communications and collaboration tools work both within and beyond the corporate firewall so that employees can interact with clients, partners, or suppliers. IBM's phrase to describe what's going on is "extranet collaboration." The short list of the features include profile and contact management, online meetings, file sharing, instant messaging, and project management capabilities.
Any information warehoused on LotusLive services will live in a cloud managed by IBM. Pricing will range from $10 to $45 per user.
I don't think the question is so much whether the product's bells and whistles will spark the same keen interest evinced by the corporate world when Lotus Notes debuted. Cloud computing may be the buzzword du jour, but let's take a breath. Fact is that enterprise customers are still in the tire-kicking phase. There remain myriad questions within IT about security and the guarantee of up time for companies which rely upon the cloud.
But the fact that this is coming out of IBM helps account for the approximately 30,000 businesses that were involved in the pilot program leading up to Wednesday's announcement. Let's make no mistake about it: here's one case where size really does matter.
The fun thing about looking over the shoulders of computer scientists doing product demos isn't necessarily the technology they're pointing to on their computer screens. So many beta programs wind up on the cutting-room floor that it's impossible to predict with much confidence which ones ultimately will transmogrify into hit products. But more often than not, you can find clues about the direction a company wants to head.
Mashups for use in collaborative medicine?
(Credit: IBM)So it was that while getting a look Thursday in San Francisco at what IBM Research's been working on, I heard the phrase "social networking" mentioned so often that it sometimes sounded like a Web 2.0 revival meeting. No worries. I have it on good authority that IBM is not planning to hatch a microblogging competitor to Twitter. (Imagine the ensuing bloviation-fest if the TechMeme posse got its hands on that tidbit. Happily, we'll be spared that spectacle.) Instead, IBM is putting serious effort into finding ways to use aspects of social computing for more collaboration among enterprise users. The big idea here being to make it easier for businesses to share corporate data in more useful fashion.
"Our perspective comes from business," said Rod Smith, a computer scientist who is in charge of emerging Internet technologies at IBM. "There are many ecosystems inside the enterprise and we're seeing how they want to expand those connections. So, we're looking at how to do that."
Thus, it was show-and-tell time at what IBM dubbed its "Smarter Web Open House." The labs folks were offering a peek at a cross-section of collaborative Web technologies--mostly in early beta stages and likely to need a lot more fine-tuning in the months ahead. Here are my notes of the highlights:
• Play-by-Play: Collaborative Web browsing via instant messaging. You can connect your Internet browser to someone else's browser and you're co-browsing with somebody else. What's particularly nice is a re-sync feature that lets the person on the other end of the connection replay the sequence of Web pages you visited. That's an idea which many a help desk would find handy.
Play-by-Play:Web browsing via instant messaging
(Credit: IBM)• CoScripter: Using some of the same back-end technologies as Play-by-Play, CoScripter puts an encrypted chronological history of your computing day on your hard drive. Again, it's a feature you can deploy to share information--in this case, they call it a script--with someone else inside the organization in need of a quick answer to a question. You'll also be able to publish the scripts on Facebook or on a blog. It's obviously still rough but I could see where it might also have possibilities in the development of a corporate-wide knowledge base.
• Privacy-aware MarketPlace: The syllables don't easily roll off the tongue, but hey, it is IBM, after all. This is a download to which privacy purists will cotton. Say you're on Facebook and receive an invitation to join a group. Privacy-aware MarketPlace basically acts as a security index. The analogy IBM uses is your credit score. Before connecting with someone, you get a glimpse at other peoples' so-called privacy scores and it recommends settings. This may be of particular utility to any of you out there fond of dissing your boss to others on Facebook.
• SaND (Social Networks and Discovery): This project comes out of IBM's Haifa, Israel group and hails back to an earlier information retrieval project called Sonar. The idea here being to bring together documents, tags, and other relevant identifying bits of information to find relationships between people. The idea is to be able to find disparate information--ranging from blogs to what people post on their social-networking apps--through keyword search. IBM's handout is cute: It plugs SaND as a way to show "six degrees of separation." John Guare may have something to say about that. Self-serving hype notwithstanding, it represents a start about how to think about building a framework for applications such as recommendation and personalization systems.
• Blue Spruce: IBM's been going down this path for the last several years. The goal is to turn the Web browser into more of a collaborative platform and let people do something more important to mankind than recording what they just ate for lunch. Part of this is what IBM describes as its "massive mashup" technology, which would offer ways to allow several users to huddle over Web pages and interact in real time as participants mark up the page. The example offered by IBM was the obvious one: a virtual medical room where physicians can review and comment on test data. Doctors have been notoriously slow to embrace Web 2.0 technology but this idea merits more discussion from the medical establishment.
I wish they had something like this after my discharge from the military. But that was years before the Internet had gone mainstream.
(Credit:
CNET News)
So it is Tuesday that a couple of nonprofits--the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and the Ad Council--debuted a social-networking site where veterans can get questions answered and reach out to others who have served.
Great move and long overdue. The generation that serves in Afghanistan and Iraq grew up online and if some sort of virtual community can help speed veterans' readjustment to civilian life, more power to it.
"It allows us to reach the service members on a medium that they are very accustomed to," the Associated Press quoted Todd Bowers, director of government affairs for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
In announcing the Web site, the Ad Council noted that 20 percent of the soldiers returning from the two conflicts suffer from mental health problems "ranging from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as a result of their service."
When I spoke with Priscilla Natkins, the executive vice president at the Ad Council, she correctly noted that no veteran returns from war unchanged and the idea was to smooth the transition to peacetime.
She pointed out to me that during World War II about 12 percent of U.S. citizens served in the military. These days it's just one half of 1 percent of the population.
"Vets feel isolated and alone," she said, adding that what they yearn for is a forum where they can talk with each other. Thus the idea for an online site about and for veterans.
True enough. And so my question is this: seven years after we first sent troops into combat in Afghanistan and five years after the Iraq war began, why didn't the federal government think of something like this earlier? I tried to contact someone at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, but, because of the holiday, had no luck getting a live human being to return my call before posting this. I did, however, note that the VA Web site carries the following notification:
Warning! Our goal is to respond to your inquiry within 5 business days. If you are experiencing a medical emergency or in need of immediate crisis counseling, please go to your nearest medical facility Emergency Room or call 911. If you are in need of immediate crisis counseling, please contact VA's suicide hotline at 1-800-273-TALK; counselors are available 24/7 to help.
Think about that. On Veterans Day, that's the best we can do for the men and women who stand on the front lines? Thankfully, some folks in the private sector have a clue.
HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--What if you organized a conference panel about digital advertising and nobody mentioned Google?
Yeah, duh.
Well, Fortune magazine almost accomplished that feat. During a session at its Brainstorm Tech conference devoted to the state of advertising in a softening economy, the three participants--Tom Bedecarre of AKQA, Lynda Clarizio of AOL, and Microsoft's Brian McAndrews--managed to get through three-fourths of their discussion without uttering the "G word."
Thankfully, one of Fortune's own, the ever-excellent David Kirkpatrick, asked from his seat in the audience whether anyone believed Google's current dominance in online advertising will continue or even might get extended to other forms of advertising.
I didn't expect either Clarizio or McAndrews to take the bait and they didn't disappoint.
"At the end of the day, this industry will be a scale game," Clarizio said. "I think the industry will be well served by competition and competition from several players."
Brian McAndrews, Microsoft senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group
McAndrews acknowledged that Google had "clearly created a great mousetrap with search" but pointed out that digital search, as important as it has become, does not define the entirety of the advertising market. "If you look across all their assets, we're much stronger in the display space," he said, adding that newcomers will face challenges.
The bigger surprise was a comment from Bedecarre to the effect that Google's new challenge is to reach out to marketers. He suggested that the company's most pressing future struggle would be to convince digital advertisers that there's real value clicking past the home page to the increasingly lengthy list of features and products it offers.
"They're having a real struggle trying to engage advertisers with everything after their home page."
Lynda Clarizio, president of AOL's Platform A
Considering the shape of the U.S. economy, that's probably the kind of struggle most companies in the digital advertising business would happily settle for. Especially in these times.
McAndrews offered a tempered view of the digital ad landscape. He said the economic slowdown in this country has had the expected impact on advertising and forced adjustments in expectations. "To pretend that it has had no impact would be wrong," he said.
One topic that's getting a lot of attention here is the potential for digital advertising in social media. That still remains a work in progress, largely because of the reluctance of advertising to jump into a segment they still don't fully understand. Indeed, Clarizio noted the "very large opportunity" presented by social media, but allowed that several advertisers remain uncomfortable about advertising in social media.
Bedecarre echoed that opinion, pointing out that advertisers haven't caught up to the viral popularity of social networks with choice demographic groups. The problem is the uncertainty and potential loss of control associated with putting up an ad on a social network, he said. "They're uneasy...I'm very bullish about where it's going. But the people who spend the really big bucks have to get used to letting go."
Sometimes, change is so imperceptible that you don't notice what's different until very late in the game. Is that what's going on in the world of social networking?
Could be. Even though it's become such a mainstream part of the Internet, social networking may be changing in important ways. Indeed, Joe Kraus of Google gave a talk on the very subject at the SuperNova conference. Webware editor in chief Rafe Needleman, who was on hand, later joined me for a recap.
In the latest bloviation-fest (see Techmeme) over how to integrate user profiles and friends lists from social networking sites, Facebook's getting creamed.
So much for being everyone's darling
(Credit: Wikimeida Commons)If feels like almost yesterday that Leslie Stahl was cooing over Mark Zuckerberg. And how about the crowd rallying behind their boy when Sarah Lacy tried to ego-hog his keynote interview at South by Southwest.
But that's ancient history now and Facebook is coming off badly since it began blocking Google's Friend Connect last week. And just to make sure that we didn't forget that Google was on the side of the angels, the company's put up a detailed primer over the weekend of how its code doesn't do any evil. (We're from Google and we just wanna help.)
Google: Google Friend Connect only reads a small amount of user data from Facebook, and does so using Facebook's public APIs. We read the Facebook numeric id, friendly name, and public photo URLs of the user and their friends. We read no other information.
All the while, Facebook's mostly missing in action. After issuing a vaporware post briefly describing the features Facebook's leadership has remained in a veritable bunker while the blog echo chamber continues to scream with rage.
Even a Microsofter like Dare Obasanjo is getting into the act with a sniffy comparison of the (apparently insufficient) approaches adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Google. (You know things are getting bleak when a guy from Microsoft starts tut-tutting about interoperability.)
Steve Gillmor makes it plain in the first paragraph of his post about this novella:
Facebook finally has a real problem to deal with - an exceptionally rational and well-thought-out strategy by Google that puts the leading social media cloud in the path of a wave of angry users. The only thing Facebook has going for it is that said users don't yet know they're angry.
He's got that right. I don't have a dog in this fight, but it's plain to see that Facebook is letting the conversation slip away. We've seen this before. This is just another chapter in Silicon Valley's endless saga of power grabs and some guys are getting painted with white hats, others with black hats. Right now, COO Sheryl Sandberg ought to be holding her lieutenants' feet to the fire. When billion-dollar enterprises like Google or Microsoft have no trouble painting themselves as being on the side of the people, you know you're in trouble. Meanwhile, yesterday's fan fave is now widely portrayed as a clueless bully. As Loren Feldman's sock puppet send-up is wont to say, "fascinating."
Sometimes there are words that really reverberate with people. What Thomas Jefferson wrote in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution is one. I think Barack Obama's disquisition on race in America is another. I'm curious to know how the smackdown Billy Bragg delivered to the social-networking moguls is going to be received.
If history's any guide, his New York Times op-ed on Saturday called "The Royalty Scam" will fall on deaf ears. Still, it's worth a serious hearing.
Best as I can tell, Bragg isn't a technophobe trying to turn back the clock. Rather, he's concerned about the livelihood of his profession and he wants to know how musicians will make a living in the cyberage.
"The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.
What's at stake here is more than just the morality of the market. The huge social networking sites that seek to use music as free content are as much to blame for the malaise currently affecting the industry as the music lover who downloads songs for free. Both the corporations and the kids, it seems, want the use of our music without having to pay for it.
The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?"
He doesn't answer the questions he raises. But Bragg does recommend the creation of rules of the road to let artists "decide how our music is exploited and by whom." Rules? Consensus? Hoo boy, I can already hear the outrage, punctuated by dismissive peals of laughter. Too bad. He deserves a serious hearing. Now it's your turn.
Update 12:50 p.m. PDT: Over at Rough Type, Nick Carr has a good take on the topic that's worth reading. Especially this zinger toward the end:
"Exploitation is exploitation, no matter how lovingly it's wrapped in neo-hippie technobabble about virtual communities, social production, and the gift economy."
I'm one of the 20 million-plus members of LinkedIn but would be flummoxed for a good answer if you asked me why. The truth is that if I didn't need to keep tabs on what's new and groovy in the tech world, I very much doubt I'd bother.
Why? It's as captivating as a sack of russet potatoes.
The site just doesn't inspire or engage and I have no reason to visit other than to answer requests - usually from perfect strangers--to become "linked in." But reading about the rollout of the beta version of LinkedIn's business directory and I'm intrigued by the idea. To wit:
"Over 150,000 companies and organizations are indexed in the directory, working it into a Hoovers-esque database that ties into LinkedIn's social features.A LinkedIn Company Profiles page includes a number of basic statistics pulled from BusinessWeek's database, such as company size and history. But for the most part, the rest of the business' page consists of information from employees of that company who have LinkedIn profiles, like a list of "new hires" (LinkedIn members who have recently added a current affiliation with that company) and recent promotions, other businesses that have seen people hired from that company, and demographic tidbits like median age and education information."
Now there's something in it for me, either as a prospective job hunter or simply as someone keen on searching out pertinent data on a company. The social network that specialized in boring users to tears finally makes a move worthy of notice. Good job, guys. More of this and who knows? Maybe one day your CEO--quick, anybody know the name off hand?--will become as much a household name as The Zuckerface.
I wanted to repost this reader response to my Monday blog about a slowdown in venture capital funding for Web 2.0 start-ups.
"tehrani625" as he or she is called, comes off as thoroughly unimpressed with the status quo and says it's time to go beyond the conventionally stale thinking about social networks. Take a look and let me know what you think.
"I am bored of all the new social networks it would be nice if some one took something like open id and attached a friends list and then you would manage the thing from a central home page. That would give all the social aspects you need. Because you would add the various apps kinda like a face book page. Then it would connect to a storage service and some sort of email service. Then you would have all your games synced to this account."
"You would create an avatar that would work with all the virtual world services. Then you would have all your other type of productivity apps attached. So then everything would be integrated. So if you make a document on your computer and it auto syncs to the online service and is automatically added to your online word processor. All these services are available but all of them are all over the place. Why can't they all be integrated? More or less.
"It would be nice to have an account and then not have to create an account every time I want to post on a certain forum. But that's just what I think. It would also be nice to have integration into ones cell phone with a reasonable access fee instead of the $5 you have to pay on Verizon and then some and you don't even get mobile web. If anything it would be nice to have better more available virtual words that are more usable."
Of course, isn't that pretty much the promise (or threat?) of OpenSocial plus the social graph API? (Apropos, check out Rafe Needleman's interview with Google's David Glazer on the future of OpenSocial.)
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