Social Glass

A few days ago I got a request from my Managing Director (Partner) asking if I knew of anybody in the Enterprise 2.0 blogosphere who’d like to join our firm as a consultant specializing in Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 in Australia. We have the go-ahead to bring onboard 3 such consultants at varying levels of seniority.

Most of the work we do is strategic in this space, but we’re gaining a lot of momentum, and I’d be surprised if we’re not part of several E2.0 implementations next year.

If you’re interested or know somebody who might be, send me an email at jeremy.thomas at socialglass.com. I’ll respond with more information about the firm and the opportunities at hand.

Wikipedia defines a reputation system as “a type of collaborative filtering algorithm which attempts to determine ratings for a collection of entities, given a collection of opinions that those entities hold about each other”. On the web, companies like eBay and socialpicks use reputation systems to let users make informed choices about who they buy products from or who’s advice they follow. Socialpicks, in my mind, is the most interesting of the two, as an investors reputation improves with accuracy. If, for example, a given investor rates GOOG as “buy”, and Google’s stock price subsequently goes up, he’s considered accurate.

Enterprise 2.0 applications like Clearspace have reputation systems that rate users on a number of factors including comments and document contributions, but I have yet to see an application that allows a company to create reputations for people they do business with.

Imagine if a realty like Remax had the ability to rate all of the realestate brokers from other agencies it does business with (in the US the buyer and seller both have realestate agents). Over time, Remax would gather a rich amount of valuable information about individual realtors - information that could help Remax make informed decisions about making an offer on a house based on the reputation of and past experience with the seller’s realtor, for example.

Perhaps this is where Enterprise 2.0 becomes a bit too “big brother”-like, especially if the business partner doesn’t know his activity is being analyzed by a reputation system. But I think with proper disclosure, a system like this could definitely add value. Think banks and mortgage brokers, suppliers and distributors etc.

Most people who read this blog are probably familiar with Wiki Patterns - “…a toolbox of patterns & anti-patterns, and a guide to the stages of wiki adoption”. One pattern I find intriguing is that of the Wiki Gnome. A Wiki Gnome is somebody who’s detail oriented and makes cosmetic changes to wiki pages, improves information flow, fixes punctuation etc.

We use Confluence for sharing project information, and it’s amusing to see wiki patterns in action. My project is based in Australia and is staffed with Australians. Yet the other day I noticed an edit to one of our pages by somebody based in Washington D.C. A wiki gnome.

The change was minor, but it made me realize that my project’s activities are visible to and grab the attention of a wider audience across my company. After all, wiki gnomes have to read wiki content before they decide to modify it. So perhaps the presence of wiki gnomes is an indicator that an enterprise wiki is accomplishing its task - diffusing knowledge and connecting people.

I remembered reading about Dapper last year when they were profiled on Techcrunch and thought I’d check it out again to build a demo. Dapper provides a web-based wizard tool that exposes data from virtually any website as a service (which they call a “Dapp”). For example, I’ve created a REST interface with Dapper that returns the latest information on fires burning in Victoria (it’s fire season in Australia), which you can see here, by parsing the content from the table on the Country Fire Association’s current fire page. I can now programmatically overlay this data, which includes fire severity, the number of fire trucks on scene, and fire location, on a Google Map without the CFA having to invest in creating API-based services.

And that’s the value of mashup tools like these - companies can exploit their web-based information assets without having to invest heavily in backend systems integration. Contradicting my recent post where I said companies must have a good SOA strategy before deploying enterprise mashups, “Dapper for the Enterprise” could get us a long way toward achieving the mashup dream without such an investment.

I’m feeling more optimistic about this whole enterprise mashup thing now.