If you missed John Chambers at the Network + Interop check out the ZDnet article
Cisco CEO John Chambers proclaims the future is Web 2.0

“Chambers proclaimed that Web 2.0, which he defined broadly as collaboration, is the future.”

“Consumers are driving business. There are a lot of ideas with social networks, and we are changing the business from a formal hierarchy to informal social network council implementations,”

Great to see Fortune 100 companies not only using but preaching social network software.

cisco, cisco 3.0, social software web 2.0

Social computing in business is something we had been discussing a while back. Mainstream business is slow to adapt to new tools to enable great communication internally, partly from lack of technical knowledge but also from not understanding the importance of latent knowledge inherent in the organisation. A great post over at “The Obvious” got me thinking about it again. Well worth a read.

corporate, enterprise 2.0, latent knowledge social software

Web2.0 Asia writes:

Uberme, a Myspace-like blogging/social networking service from Samsung Mobile, has launched. Featurewise, it’s got the whole pakcage; videos, photos, blogs, groups, etc. But the key differentiator of Uberme might be its focus on mobile: Uberme aims to provide as good an user experience on mobile phones as on the online.

And interestingly:

All in all, the service looks similar to Myspace and Bebo. But then, none of the big name social network services of the US have established a very strong foothold in the Asian market, perhaps except for Windows Live Spaces. This gives Uberme a chance to become a big player in Asia.

There’s a reason why Myspace and Bebo aren’t big in Asia, and it’s certainly not for the lack of trying. IMHO, it’s because there’s no way to provide a generic social-networking service for such a heterogenous region. Much love to Samsung and all, but when your audience is fragmented into at least 5 major language groups (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean and English) it’s unlikely they will all ever be able to interact. And to do language-based segregation (ala Wikipedia.org) is only solving part of the problem. The main issue, in my mind, is that you can’t ever just do a direct translation if you really want to connect with your audience. There are too many language nuances that you have to eschew in favor of portability, and you lose the distinctive local flavor that you would have otherwise achieved had you focused on a smaller target.

Granted, services like Friendster have done reasonably well in Asia (at least, in the Philippines) although I believe that that was more due to the fact that there were no compelling alternatives out there at the time. Of course, when enough Filipinos had jumped onto Friendster, there was no turning back—it was standard Tipping-Point-type stuff.

Fast forward to now, and Samsung has a tough journey ahead of them. They have to somehow reconcile the multi-cultural tastes of a vast Asian market and still provide an experience that is Myspace-but-better. Perhaps using a Germanic word as the name of this Asian Myspace-killer wasn’t the best idea though, I don’t know.

There’s an interesting article on Ars Technica today about search engine startup Powerset, which is reportedly proprietor of “the most sophisticated natural language technology known to man” (developed at Xerox PARC).

On his personal blog, [Powerset CEO Barney Pell] argues that keywords [the traditional search method] are the equivalent of studying a foreign language for a year: you can get around, but can’t communicate with much richness. Searching for “book by children” and “book about children” should produce greatly different results, but search engines today generally throw out the prepositions and treat both queries the same way.

The article goes on to talk about another startup currently laboring on a similar offering, called Hakia, which is already up and running. If you try the “book by children” / “book about children” combo on Hakia, you get similar results so one could say that Hakia isn’t quite there yet either. (Interestingly enough, neither of the two results pages Hakia returned were more useful than the ones Google returned.)

The implications of natural language search technology are only as significant as the number of people that adopt them, of course. In other words, if this catches on, it’ll change the face of the search industry. Why? Because SEO/SEM will be completely screwed. I have a little bit of SEO knowledge from watching our search team at syndeo::media work, and I’m always startled by the sheer number of keywords they have to manage. If a traditional SEO gig runs to a few hundred keywords/keyphrases, try to imagine what would happen if you had to optimize for keyword+preposition combinations as well (which is what natural-language search optimization implies). Your phrases would increase exponentially. In terms of volume, I think this will render SEO too complex to be handled by mere mortals, and SEO houses will eventually have to replace personnel with big proprietary algorithms.

Whether or not that’s better for the rest of the world is not for me to say, but if the search technology truly is headed in the direction of natural-language, it’s going to be a trick for the SEO industry to survive unscathed.

Leopold Tolstoy begins the classic Anna Karenina with the wonderfully sticky line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (If you’re wondering how I came to be reading an Oprah’s Book Club selection, I wasn’t. I was reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which mentions this line as well.)

The line basically means that in order for a family to be “happy”, it must approach perfection on every front which, when viewed from the proverbial 50,000-foot level, makes every happy family virtually identical. Conversely, it only takes failure in any single aspect of familial relationships in order to make you all categorically unhappy. Because this single point of failure is often unique to every family, you could say that each unhappy family is distinct or “unhappy in its own way.”

As I was ruminating on this wonderfully concise nugget of wisdom, I realized that you could apply this reasoning to practically anything in life, but particularly in business. In order for a company to succeed, it must get many, many things right. In order for it to fail, it only needs to get one thing wrong. It’s like a minefield out there; it only takes one misstep to get your leg blown off.

The upside is that every decision you make that doesn’t kill you (or hurt, maim or paralyze you) brings you one step closer to business success. I’m a firm believer in the fact that perfection is inevitable on a long enough timeframe. Granted, not every judgement call has immediate, obvious repercussions, so you could be dead for a long time without really realizing it. Generally speaking though, if you made a call, and you survived the backlash (if any), then congratulations, it was very likely the right one.

I think about this now in the context of the next few months (which, believe me, is one of those subjects that can really keep you up nights), and have a million questions on my mind. We’ve already established that our financial situation is not particularly stable at the moment, so our options are limited by circumstances.

syndeo::media exists to build its own, internally-spun web products, but we’ve come to the conclusion that our current resources will not be sufficient to properly support all our ideas. The strategy now becomes fairly obvious: over the next few months, we continue looking for client work and refining our process. Once the appropriate resources present themselves, we can apply all our learnings to our own brands.

It’s a long-haul kind of strategy, but I can fake patience as well as the next guy. Certainly, funding from a third-party would be very helpful and we’ve already got a long list of things we want to try if and when an investment is manifested. For now though, we’re a young services company with a very thick idea folio. Feel free to hop on anytime

There’s a certain allure to starting over from scratch, when things have gotten all muddled and nerves are frayed and ideologies have gone off in completely different directions. Logically, it makes sense to just tear it all down and rebuild, but emotionally, it’s another story entirely. Our previous startup, a social software design house with dreams of world domination, was just barely getting off the ground when we collectively decided to call it quits, and to say that we were upset about the whole situation would have been a major understatement.

But those are the kind of decisions that have pretty much defined us from the very beginning—nobody in this company is here because of the perks, or the coolness factor of working in a tech startup, or the allure of a big fat IPO in the undefined future. We’re here because the work that we do has become such an intrinsic part of our beings that doing anything else would be a disservice. We help people find what they’re looking for, and we build software that brings them together. Our work is, quite literally, our lives.

In keeping with this singularity of vision, this blog will focus on the things this small band of rabblerousers find interesting. We’ll talk about the social software revolution in all its shapes and forms, what other companies are doing, and of course, what we’re doing. We’ll talk about real-world social software development, real-time search marketing techniques and real-life business strategies.

Our collective skill sets make for some interesting opinions: I come from the DIY school of social software, a screw up-prone, home-brewed approach involving four online communities that I have been slowly developing since 2001. Hunter, in contrast, led the design team at AOL Australia for several years before dropping out to work full-time on the software platform that would eventually bring this company together. Hans was a search-engine specialist who made a living bending Google and Yahoo’s search results by (what certainly seemed like) sheer force of will. Also on the team are Raymond Brown, Tom W. Lee, Kaye Inigo, Kai Rivera and Jasper Bautista, each of whom continue to amaze us both with their resilience, their dedication and their unwillingness to believe that we have no clear idea what we’re doing.

But in many ways, that’s kind of the point isn’t it? This industry is so young, and the various proponents are so pioneering, that to stand up and say, “We’re the experts in social software design” would be optimistic at best (and delusional, at worst). We’re not the experts. At this point, nobody really is. But we’re enthusiatic, we’re young and we’re not afraid to make great, big, embarassing mistakes.

We’re here to learn. We hope you are as well.

Luis Buenaventura II, Hunter Nield, Hans A. Koch, Raymond Brown, Tom W. Lee, Kaye Inigo, Kai Rivera, Jasper Bautista

October 2006

company, introduction, mission vision