Walter Soldierer’s Blog

Web 2.0 hit company intranets, too. In 2006 the term Enterprise 2.0 was coined to describe the implementation and use of Web 2.0 technologies (”social software”) in an enterprise. Working in a big international cooperation involves lots of communication and collaboration. Some of the social tools offer great solutions to facilitate the working together.

At a conference last week I met Simon Revell, a Pfizer UK employee who had successfully helped implementing enterprise 2.0 in his organization, mainly blogs and wikis. Very interesting presentation.

(more…)

Toy makers Hasbro and Mattel are trying to shut down Scrabulous, the most popular online version of Scrabble today. Scrabulous was created by Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla and attracts about half a million users per day. The game can be played on scrabulous.com, but most Scrabble lovers play it on Facebook, where Scrabulous is one of the top 10 applications installed. In december 2007, Hasbro sent a cease-and-desist notice to Facebook for breach of copyright.

(more…)

Internet retailer reports that Amazon has launched video reviews. Amazon customers can publish product reviews and demonstrations in various video formats. With video and product reviews both being central elements of social networking, it was only a matter of time before the big online stores would offer this feature.

The term “Social Researcher” was first introduced in the “Social Shopping Study 2007“, conducted by the e-tailing group for Power Reviews. Facebook’s latest move to “Social Ads” is another example how to exploit this trend. Recommendations and personal reviews are becoming an important part of the online shopping experience. I’m sure that retailers who are still afraid of getting negative reviews will have to support them sooner than later, too.

If you, like me, have opened a number of social network accounts, you have entered your personal profile multiple times at different web sites. You then have to again search and select your friends. Isn’t it annoying to go through this process over and over again?

When I heard about Google’s OpenSocial initiative, I thought that this had finally come to an end. OpenSocial will make the web a better place and social networking will be much easier than before, they say. Great! Google will enable us to register our profile and friends only once. We would then simply give Facebook our OpenSocial URL and OpenSocial password and they would use an OpenSocial API call to rerieve our personal and friends info. If we add a new friend, we would only have to do this once for all online communities that we participate in. What a wonderful virtual social world this would be…

But… this does not seem to be OpenSocial’s main purpose. (more…)

Another smart acquisition by Google, proving that miniblogs are considered an important social networking phenomenon by big influencial organisations, too. I was wondering which of the miniblogs would be bought first. Twitter lost. With its strong mobile integration and RSS capabilities, Jaiku obviously was a more interesting acquisition target for Google. Here is the announcement. Lets hope that Google keeps up Jaiku’s good work.

I was wondering why Nokia had not bought Jaiku already. The Jaiku founders are former Nokia employees, and Jaiku works great with mobile devices, with special client software for Nokia phones. Also, Nokia is building the OVI interactive portal as the next step in “connecting people”, with music and games. Jaiku’s social networking features would have nicely complemented this service. For more information about Nokia’s OVI site see my on-conference blog post.

Jaiku is great. I let it import CSS feeds from all my social networking sites. Webvet.jaiku.com is the easiest way to track me online

I just saw a new privacy checkbox in my Facebook account settings:

[ ] Allow my public search listing to be indexed by external search engines (ex. Google, Yahoo, MSN)

In about 2 weeks, public profile information (only image and name) will be spiderable. A good idea. Most social networking sites already allow search engines to list their user’s public profile pages. This is a logical next step now that anyone can seach people on Facebook without having to sign up first . More info is available on the Facebook blog.