Social Glass

I was searching for a Google Reader notifier the other day when I stumbled across Google Alerts (I ended up using this firefox extension for the notifier). I read the FAQ and could instantly see the value something like this could add to the “Signals” aspect of the Enterprise 2.0 SLATES meme. Here’s how it works:

1. Enter a search term for a topic that you’d like to be notified of (i.e. “Enterprise 2.0″).
2. Select how often you’d like to be notified.
3. Google will then send you an email with content items pertaining to your topic (videos, blogs, news articles etc.).

Very simple. Very powerful.

Within the enterprise, search is a very under-exploited capability. Why not take advantage of enterprise search and augment the signals capability to do exactly what Google Alerts does - contextual notification. Instead of creating an RSS subscription to the tag “marketing” or to a knowledge worker’s marketing blog, why not let the search engine do the work and determine what is “marketing”? In this way the user does not depend on other user’s tagging ability or new blog posts on the topic. And the powerful algorithms already trusted to deliver relevant search results will be the same used to keep the knowledge worker up to date on a topic in near real-time.

I was talking with a colleague the other day about a major project that had been deployed to Production a few months ago for one of his clients. The solution is a “standard” J2EE application” (EJBs, JMS, Struts, JBoss etc.) and is used both behind the firewall for CSRs and on the internet for online order handling. While it is stable, there are a few quirks/bugs with the online component. Some of these bugs are discovered by testers, but interestingly the majority are discovered by “an industry community” which details them on a forum.

My colleague said the feedback they get from this forum is invaluable and has lead to many incremental system improvements. And best of all nobody has to pay an army of testers to find these holes in the system.

Talk about leveraging the longtail for business benefit.

I read Rod Boothby’s IT Flower whitepaper today (and it’s definitely worth a read). I’m not going to comment on it at this time. Instead I’d like to highlight a guideline for successful Web 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0) solutions:

Build applications that get more valuable as more people use them (network effects) and work out ways to let end users contribute to your application, customize your application and extend your application, thus encouraging even more value to emerge over time.

Well stated I’d say.

Avenue A Razorfish was one of the first companies credited with attempting Enterprise 2.0. They based their solution on mediawiki and made modifications to the codebase for Wordpress and Active Directory integration (AD integration is a great way to avoid the hassle of registering users manually). They also encouraged their employees to use a certain tag on delicious when bookmarking links. The solution then automatically presented newly bookmarked items on the home page by invoking a delicious API to retrieve all bookmarks tagged with that tag.

Avenue A Razorfish is now evolving their wiki to include more features. I’d like to direct you to their blog post which contains an embedded slideshare presentation that explains their approach. They’ve definitely got some great ideas.

1. Visibility = recognition
2. Knowledge workers compete for recognition.
3. Competition fuels participation.
4. Participation –> more quality information assets –> increased probability of innovative ideas surfacing.
5. Innovation = increased economic viability = happy enterprise.