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.

First of all I was surprised that he is an IT manager, so the IT department brought this project forward, not Marketing, not Communications. I guess it would not have been possible otherwise because there was no social software available in the organisation, Simon’s team simply set up a LAMP open source environment using Drupal and hooked it to the network. Nobody but IT can do this in a company where everything is running on Microsoft technology.

Simon had an interesting story to tell about the difficulties of kicking off enterprise 2 (”Who gave you permission to do this?”), marketing the new “corporatepunks” culture, and getting their blog known to UK and international colleagues to make it a lively communication medium.

You can find out more about Simon.

Definitely check out the “Meet Charlie” presentation created by an IT colleague of his.

Now that Sharepoint 2007 is running more and more corporate intranets, enterprise 2.0 is easier to implement, at least technology-wise. Sharepoint supports blogs and wikis, not feature-rich but good enough to get started. What are we waiting for?

So how did the Net change my life?

Information retrieval

Google – Technorati – RSS Feeds

I have not been in a library since a long time. When I did the research for my doctoral thesis, I spent several weeks there. Not only provide search engines and online directories instant access to a huge amount of information, they also let me ask questions that I would not have asked back in 1975 simply because it was too difficult or impossible to find the answer. You either had to know someone who knows, find a book, or search a library. Try that with a question like “Who can share his experience with this cassette player?” or “How can I make food for the tadpoles that I just brought home?“. No answer was available for the first question so I had to buy the player and hope for the best. After searching hundreds of index cards I finally found an answer to the tadpole question in a library. Today I would just go here and here and enjoy the rest of the day listening to the player while watching the tadpoles eat.

Shopping

I shop online. Books, CDs and DVDs, electronic equipment, computers and other hardware, furniture, printer ink, freezer, fridge, washing machine, clothes, you name it. The lesser the need to actually “see and feel” a product, the more likely I order it online. The actual buying process is not the important part though. Searching and selecting products takes most of the time, and this has become much easier since user recommendations, product reviews, and price comparison engines became widely available on the Web.

Banking and payments

I have not been in a bank since years. I recently changed my bank account because the old bank cached in some 120 Euros per year for basic charges and money transfers. My new account is at an Internet bank, including online trading, and 2 credit (actually debit) cards for me and my wife. It all comes at a very competitive price. No basic charges, free transfers, and no fees for the cards. 0+0+0=0. No bank counters anymore, but I don’t miss them anyway. If I still need a “real credit card”, I can get one from eBay or elsewhere at a better price than my local bank can offer.

For my online shopping I use PayPal whenever possible, and if the amount is small, I have a Click&Buy micropayment account which I use for things like iTunes.

Communication

What would I do without email, instant messaging, and VoIP? Probably I would talk to friends and family less. Communicating over the Internet is free, fast, and convenient. Needless to say that I never want to go back to letters and regular long distance phone calls.

Social networking

I’m still experimenting with “the social”, but given the amount of time I spend on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook it has definitely changed my life. There is no easier way to keep in touch. If only more of my friends and relatives would use these sites.

User protest

It was only a matter of time when online Scrabble fans would start fighting back. Even though I do not believe that public pressure will impress Hasbro, there is already a new Facebook group called “Save Scrabulous! Give us Scrabulous or Give us Death!” with more than 2600 members on January 16. A Scrabulous petition can be signed on ipetitions.com, with about 300 signatures as of today. Customer service links on Hasbro and Mattel web sites were posted on the web so that Scrabulous supporters can utter their protest directly.

Copyrights, copyrights…

Hasbro (US, Canada) and Mattel (other countries) own the intellectual property rights to Scrabble worldwide. Since I joined Facebook, I have become a big Scrabulous fan and I had already asked myself whether this application was licensed from Hasbro, a company that took action against competitors in breach of copyright before. I am convinced that Hasbro’s legal claims are 100% vaild, and a disclaimer notice like this one will not let the makers of Scrabulous get away with breaching copyrights.

Talk, don’t sue!

Are take-down-notices and legal actions the right things to do in this situation? No information is available on the Hasbro and Scrabulous web sites, so we do not know whether the companies had entered into discussions about working toghether before. I would hope that Hasbro isn’t one of those non-flexible monopolic giants who prefer suing over negotiating.

Hasbro is missing out their biggest Scrabble promotion opportunity ever. Since I play Scrabulous online, we are again playing the Hasbro original game in our family. Fortunately I found the dusty Scrabble box in the attic, but if I hadn’t, I would have surely purchased one on Amazon.com.

This case shows again that many companies still don’t seem to get it. Either they adapt to the new princples of marketing, involving online marketing and – in this case – social networks, or they will soon be in serious trouble. It was estimated that the two Indian brothers cash in about 25.000 dollars each month in Scrabulous advertising revenue alone. Of course Hasbro as the rights owner to Scrabble needs to get their share of the pie, and the Agarwalla brothers would be stupid not to cooperate. Another big opportunity for Hasbro lies in promoting their hardcopy version of the game on the Scrabulous web site and Facebook application. With millions of users playing the game, Scrabulous built an amazing marketing machine for Hasbro. But rather than seeing their revenue opportunities, they are trying to kill it.

Helloooo! Hasbro! There is money to be made! Scrabulous is promoting your product! Just talk to them about working together. And let me continue with my current game please, I’m about to win…

Internet retailer reports

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. Instead, Google sees it as an API for developers to build widgets that access personal data, friends, and activities from supporting online communities. Since it’s a standard, OpenSocial widgets can easily be ported between different social network sites. For example, have you ever wanted to find out which of your LinkedIn contacts attend the conferences you go to? Now its possible. LinkedIn will offer an event calendar widget using OpenSocial to get your contacts’ events and highlight all event dates that you have in common. I would rather want an Upcoming widget on LinkedIn. Why enter all my events on LinkedIn when Upcoming.org is my place for sharing event information? But if LinkedIn opens their site for developers, OpenSocial would makes this possible, too.

OpenSocial certainly is a big step forward. However, a social networking API should also help me save time when I register my profile and friends at a new online community. This should really be the next step. The API was built to retrieve personal and friend information after all. So why not use it to do just that when you register a new account? I want to register my personal profile and my friends at a trusted site of my choice (sorry Google, it won’t be you). OpenSocial could then work like OpenID, with one server to return my info. And just like with OpenID, I could even set up a server of my own and allow Facebook to send me OpenSocial API calls for my updated profile.

I am sure that we will soon see sites that register social networking profiles and make them available to online communities using APIs like OpenSocial. Actually MySpace should share their user profiles with Facebook that way

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

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.