Tag: socialnetworks

Freebase enjoyment

Early indications are that Freebase is going to be a whole lot of fun. In his walkthrough Tim O’Reilly calls it addictive, and explains why. Because the system thinks in terms of relationships among types of items, a single act of data entry can produce multiple outcomes. Tim’s writeup gives a couple of examples of what that’s like. Here’s mine. I found a record for myself in the system, sourced from Wikipedia. I updated it to say that I’m the author of the book Practical Internet Groupware. Then I added that Tim O’Reilly was the editor of my book. That single edit altered the records on both ends of the author/editor relationship. My book’s record now showed Tim O’Reilly as its editor, and Tim’s record sprouted a Books Edited list that contained my book as its first item. Nice. This is just a Hello World example, of course, but it has the feel of something that people will be able to understand, will want to use, and will enjoy in a social way.

wow, if we can trick people into enjoying metadata creation, the sky is the limit. but beware metacrap

Don’t brag about Facebook

A Goldman Sachs trader named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent over 500 hours on Facebook in a 6 month period. That works out to 4 hours per day.

Unwisely, Charlie posted the warning email on his Facebook account, saying “It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.”

social networks are the new unions

Continuous Partial Presence

Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question, “what are you doing?” A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence — and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.

good analysis on twitter. i haven’t tried it yet, but maybe i should? looks like a big time suck

Enterprise Social Analytics

We leave a trail of breadcrumbs with every enterprise search query, request for information from a colleague, email, or other declaration. Who are we talking to, about what? Who are the smartest people in the company, and who are the most helpful? where are groups that agree with the strategy, and are acting accordingly by sharing relevant content? In an information economy people are the real life-blood. Information is only as valuable as the network it supports. But how do you follow the breadcrumbs we find in our system logs?

IBM has discovered SNA