thoughtexposed

One might argue much of the positive impact of social networking is that of thought proliferation, networking, & idea generation for those fortunate and plugged into techno-sphere. However, one recent positive trend, as observed by this author, is one directly benefiting actual people in need in our society. I call this 'Social Giving 2.0'

The influence of social networking, is wide and deep in our daily lives of today. Technologies offered under blogging & now micro-blogging, has increasingly allowed for open thought exchange, unobtrusive news reporting, and in many cases even political appointments. Take a look at the prime example model of community organizing by the Barack Obama's campaign team that many argue played a significant role in Mr. Barack Obama's seat as the President - "What Businesses Can Learn from Barack Obama's Social Media Strategy" OR "Presentation: Barack Obama's Internet Strategy". On the flip side, there are significant negative impacts of social media in our culture ranging from an addiction of worldly exposure of one's daily minutes of life to confusion around one's internet social identity in a realm that has no established guidelines or monitored rules of conduct. A few of the social networks have also become prime grounds for undesirable people. Regardless the pro and cos of social networking, it is here to stay.

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Web development is popular because it's fast, versatile, and relatively inexpensive.  But that doesn't mean the alternatives don't have advantages and merit of their own, and in some cases the Web's weaknesses might outweigh its strengths.

With the advances of hardware processing power & software functionality, it is viable to re-visit the original reasoning behind developing applications for the web.  In addition, it is viable to also re-visit the definition of web application, especially in the light of increased popularity around Rich Internet Application (RIA) models like Microsoft Silverlight,  Adobe Air, and AJAX technologies - that seek to blend thin & thick client application deployment. For the sake of healthy discussion lets look at some areas where web-based applications stack up against system based programming.

• With the traditional web-application model there is a front-end thin Client UI that functions in the framework of browser. This UI handles rudimentary user input, generic input validation, graphics rendering, display of the output.  The real processing happens in the middle-tier integration layer and back-end database.  With the advent of cheaper processors and memory, even the bare-bones computers of today, can put an enterprise grade machine of a decade ago, to shame.  Thus, we want to ask, is it time we reassessed such traditional model.  Is it viable for us to shift some of the over-burdened processing load towards the front-end. With increased demand of information consumption, more and more load is being put on the integration & back-end layers, to a point where scaling data-centers to meet the demands is becoming challenging.  The middle-tier also suffers from security vulnerabilities both in integration & demand load.

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But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie. Social media, in essence, is bumping up against its own ceiling, no longer able to serve the needs of those living within its walls... Lets face it, social media today is a mess.  I say this with love nonetheless.  Yes I love blogging, yes I admire twitter, and I appreciate LinkedIn. However with so many channels competing for my profile, I am constantly trying to keep up with friends across all the various channels just to exchanges "Hey what's up".   Case in point the advent to several applications that summarized your and your friends' activities on Twitter - Friendfeed, etc.  With so many social networks with so much of social media, our respective online selves are practically encroaching on multiple personality complex.  If you are one who has spread yourself thin across the social media-scape or you are one who is in the business of monetizing on Social Media, readwriteweb, publishes an article, providing glimpse into the changing face of social media.  It points to 10 areas of consideration:

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Like the rest of the world and its processes,  enterprise Innovation Management has also evolved.  Organizations that fail to recognize this evolution has remained in the archained state of innovation, even to the extent of not doing any innovation at all.  The business of Innovation is not an easy concept to grasp for many.  For many, a linear, day-to-day thinking is more or less all that is comfortable.  For those who truly persue excellence in Innovation must also master managing the changing face of Innovation.  To some 'managing Innovation' can be a falacy of concepts.   However, identifying and appropriately fostering the applicable Innovation patterns, in an organization, can be the key to success in innovating.

The innovator's dilemma, ... affects companies whose success and capabilities can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and technologies. There is no more important an issue on the agenda of top management than driving innovation.  

 

Along with the traditional techniques - 'Measure Innovation' , 'The BCG Matrix', ' The 20% free time for employees to spend on any project they like' ; are in need of augementing with 'Crowdsourcing' with specific and relevant context with the right amount of processing and filtering of the ideas.  The below linked article, using namesInnocentive & BrightIdea to be two trailblazing in this space.   The article even points to Change.Gov where our President Obama is using crowdsourced input to facilitate change.

How Can Web Tech Help Enterprises with Innovation Management? by Bernard Lunn

Other Related Articles: Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators

A host of providers including Amazon (AMZN), Salesforce.com (CRM), IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), and Microsoft are helping corporate clients use the Internet to tap into everything from extra server space to software that helps manage customer relationships

An article on BusinessWeek.com posts yet another article of the 'Cloud Computing' trend in the technology industry.  The article points to some of the SAS giants in the industry along with exposing the newer growth trends of cloud computing into, 'Hardware as a Service' (HAS?).  All these services in their core are "all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers". The article points to Merrrill Lynch's projection that cloud computing will surge to $95 billion over next three years in the global market. Microsoft ('Software-plus-Services'), HP, and Dell are already moving forward aggressively to provide such computing in the cloud to its public and corporate customers.   In this model a company essecially is outsourcing the physical real-estate, disaster & recovery of data, and maintenance of their technology to third-party.  At the onset this may seem scary, but supporters of cloud computing point to the reduction of $8 out of current $10 in operating costs for maintaining technol ogy.  They also point to an exponential maturity in relaibility of these technologies.  In addition, these technologies provide an a-la-carte pricing model allowing for strict expense control, a very attractive pricing proposition in this economy.  The naysayers on the other side, point to various goverance around ownership of data and complication surrounding such, if hosted on third party systems.  They also point to the virtual nature of such real-estate and the fact that server clusters maintained by 3rd party could not be under rigorous control as their own.   Needless to say this technology is gradually emerging, the enterprise use of this technology currently remain limited to non-vital data systems.  In 2009 this one is a very interesting development to keep a keen eye on, especially, heavy hitting companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP, and Amazon rapidly getting on the band-wagon.   How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World by Rachael King Related Entries: Cloud Computing to become mainstream in 2009 Other Related Articles: Sun Microsystems Acquires Q-layer To Expand Cloud Computing Offerings In Cloud We Trust Cloud Computing Begins to Gain Traction on Wall Street The Cloud is the New Dotcom  Latest cloud storage hiccups prompts data security questions

Yahoo and Microsoft will finally strike a search deal, video advertising on the Web isn’t working, retail bankruptcies could actually help e-commerce companies, and that M&A activity will pick up in the second half of 2009 (but the IPO market will be dead until 2010).

An article on Techcruch.com publishes 2009 Technology predictions from J.P Morgan & Barclays Capital analysts. There is a common theme of strategic partnerships and advancements in mobile and search technologies.  The author, Eric Schonfeld, summarizes the predictions from the two analysts. 2009 Tech Prediction Faceoff: J.P Morgan Vs. Barclays Capital - Eric Schonfeld

 "Your best friend with instant access to all the world's facts and a photographic memory you've seen and know."  Mayer describes the concept of the ideal search engine

In a post in techradar.com Marissa is described to oversee about 150 product managers with 10-12 product pitches every month (whom each get 10 minutes of her undivided attention), including reviewing about 1000 - 2000 outside projects. Some say she uses rigid process of critiquing and approving new features with a dubbed name "the Marissa Gauntlet".  She explains her method involves observing the innovation factor mixed with the strength of the project team. This in her mind produces a high degree of success factor for the product and its growth.  Marissa Mayer uses her '20 per cent time' (the time Google apportions its employees for personal projects) to figure out how the search giant can continue to innovate as it builds new products. On the future of Google search engine, She speculates, "Maybe the search engine of the future will know where you're located," "Maybe they'll know what you know already, or what you learned earlier today. Or maybe they'll fully understand your preferences because you've chosen to share that information with us. We aren't sure which personal signals will be most valuable, but we're investing in research and experimentation on personalised search now because we think this will be very important later." "We really need to harness people's friends better to understand which news to direct them to, which local events to direct them to… these are all things that we think are intriguing." Mariss Mayer (Google's vice president of search products and user experience) o the future of Google by techradar.com Related Article: The Future of Search - Official Google Blog

But we're clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where web technology is headed. Indeed, it looks like we've arrived at one of those giant inflexion points - where one web era is usurped by another.

With terms like "now is the time for innovation", "a re-focus on the bottom line of your business is key", and "take more advantage of open source technologies and cheaper cloud computing infrastructure"; this article on ReadWriteWeb.com makes its predictions on future of Web technologies in light of the current economic crunch and disasters in the financial markets.  What are your predictions for Web technologies in 2009.  Where do you feel these technologies should invest? "What's Next after Web 2.0" by Richard MacManus

Working for praise! This online business model has Americans happily toiling for attention on for-profit sites that don't pay them money. 

BusinessWeek.com  features an article into the recent rise of a work force who give sites like thisnext.com their time, talent, and effort; just for recognition and get paid nothing. Such a lucrative labor model has its pros and cons.  This article provides an insight into the psychology of such labor, research being done to better understand how to leverage this pattern, and how some of the sites on the inter-web are successfully cashing on this labor force.  What do you think?  Is this moral? Is this a model that we should explore and expand?  What do you feel to be the strengths and weaknesses of this model?

"Will Work for Praise: The Web's Free Labor Economy" by Stephen Baker