8 posts tagged “google”

Taking advantage of the new web in business - after all it's ultimately about the bottom line for business - is increasingly important. Forrester thinks that E2.0 could be a $4.6bn industry in the next five years. [Correction - make that $1.8bn - thanks Niall]

Enter Google - the world's biggest brand and cool enough and relevant enough to be more than a verb: Google links Gen X and Y. The former know its the de facto search engine, and for e-mail and maps, and the latter for a host of innovative applications and mash-up fodder.

Google has launched a new sandbox for iGoogle - and Scott Gilbertson believes it looks suspiciously like a proto-type social networking site. Scoble called it earlier this month, when he wrote how Google's five year plan to get into Enterprise was taking shape. Microsoft won't be too far behind.

Facebook has a real threat as heir-apparent to becoming the default social media homepage.

Now that Google has demonstrated with OpenSocial just how social networking can become mainstream, what does it mean for E2.0?

1. The landscape has changed before many businesses have even gotten to grips with the current reality, Always in beta.
2. The big vendors have arrived en mass, and they appear to have a plan. And that, contrary to what some might suggest, is definitely a good thing because the more ubiquitous the methodology, the more time to focus on the conversation.
3. Understand, plan and move on. Removing obstacles to the free flow of information, be it inside the company or outside, has reached a milestone, but many more remain.

Update 05/11/07: Shel Holtz gives hs views on OpenSocial and communications.

A lot of coverage for Twitter lately - one of the leading microblogging systems - and rightly so. While people prevaricate about Facebook-style options for the enterprise, microblogging is making progress and should appear on more corporate radars soon.

Does it have a future? Google thinks so, and has bought microblogging system Jaiku.

Hopefully, this will increase awareness about the potential of microblogging in the enterprise. Not just in an emergency, but in everyday business life.

Microblogging provides straightforward communication to employees through mobile phones, PDAs or a computer. So that covers most staff.

More so than other social media systems, microblogging offers internet human buzz, not least because systems such as Twitter and Jaiku are simply chat rooms with the "permanence of blogs and the spontenaiety of IM and text messaging". And it doesn't have to be a text update - it could be a recorded message, and include a link to more information.

Scoble talked recently about how Twitter fits into the flow of information, and increasingly microblogging is the start point of many conversations. With Google helping to legitimise microblogging, maybe more enterprises will start to talk about it too.

Enterprise2.0 will not go mainstream until Microsoft, IBM, Sun and Google come together. Fat chance? They already seem to skirting around the edges of late. As Steve Larsen said to Shel Israel @Demo; "Constraint spawns creativity."

The E2.0 constraint is  the fear, uncertainty and doubt that the agents of calcification are using to delay the inevitable. Meanwhile, the behemoths sense an all-out land grab may not be a zero-sum game. Enter open source.

Gartner says that open source is impossible to avoid. That will bring the behemoths together and that will deliver Enterprise2.0 solutions that the vast majority of companies will see as the future of choice. For now, as uplifting as the E2.0 success stories collated by Bill Ives are, it is only the start of the beginning, as all these examples are despite what happening with the big guns.

Microsoft may finally have woken up, although it might be ganged up on by the others (and copying them) while tryng to deal with an operating system that is, says Hamish Newlands, a "late, bloated and unpopular failure".

Meanwhile IBM is giving away Symphony to rival Office, Google is some way off from a PowerPoint alternative, though it shows it's social creds with Shared Stuff, and there's excitement about the Flock social browser from Firefox.

If open source can get them main players to come together, maybe we can soon look back at some point in the future and say that that was the tipping point for E2.0.

One or three recent posts caught my eye around the topic of learning.

First, Jim McGee talks about knowledge management equating to the environmental conditions for learning. Seems a fair point to raise, and with the abundance of social media systems now, shaping that environment has never been easier.

Second, a point made by Chris Brogan about the importance of attitude:

Learn. Learn More. Learn Fast: Truly, at the end of the day, you are your own best product. The more you put into yourself, the more opportunity you’ll have to be useful to the universe. But no matter what, DISRUPT your patterns, learn NEW not what you already know, break it open. Do it again. Do it new. Repeat nothing for too long. Move beyond it.

Finally, an example of social media and the right attitude writ large by our very own NHS! While Google might be entering health care, the sheer scale of the NHS makes this an important example in demonstrating that Web2.0 is right here, right now.

Some may think Web2.0 is over-hyped. Others say they know what it means (okay - helps if you actually gave birth to the phrase).

Then there are those who may be uncertain yet want/need to give the impression that they know what it means. Talking to a Baby Boomer recently who compared Web2.0 to eLearning, I suggested that, imho, this might be a stretch.

Btw, there is another group - those who are are open to what Web2.0 means.

Update: It seems that Google's Eric Schmidt can boil down Web2.0, while elsewhere on FastForward it's all about connections.

First rule of Blog Club - there are rules! The most important, clearly articulated by Euan Semple: Don't be stupid.

And what happens when you break that rule? Scoble picks up the story of a Google blogger (I thought they didn't encourage blogging?) who broke the rule. It happens, whether it is a blog, an e-mail, a telephone call, or a casual conversation that's overheard.

As the June Harvard Management Update says: People permit themselves to issue destructive comments under the excuse that they are true. The fact that a destructive comment is true is irrelevant. The question is not, "Is it true?" but rather, "Is it worth it?"

So Bliin have developed a concotion of GPS, Google Maps and social networking to produce something that allows you to see where you/your friends/your stalkers (according to Radio 1) are. It's billed, rather unimaginatively, as the next step in social networking. So I signed up this morning, read up a little, downloaded stuff and got ready to see where I was. But got stopped dead in my tracks as neither my computer, BlackBerry or modile phone had GPS!! So close. So far.