The reason I like Google Alerts, is that when I get behind on my blog reading I still get pushed information via my inbox.

Check out what come into my inbox today.

Social Network Poem.
“There are no social networks. There is only one social network. My social network…But your site is not my social network. It’s just part of the online social ecosystem.” see the full post at The Man in Blue

Also, check out a new IDC document that came out about Social Network Advertising.
Social Networking Services in the United States — Popular, Yes, But How to Monetize Them? Price $3,500.00
“Operators are only beginning to learn how to monetize social networks. Advertising will eventually be big”
Exciting stuff, reminder… keep reading blogs

social ecosystem, social media, social network, Social Network Advertising, social network portability, Social Networks social software

It’s always a happy day when some of your hard work gets a little recognition. Ross Dawson over at ReadWriteWeb had compile an interesting list of the Top 60 Web 2.0 Apps in Australia.

3eep managed to make a Top 20 spot (coming in at number 19). Congratulations to Nick and Rob. A little recognition for all the hard work never goes astray.

We’ve been working steadily improving 3eep since its launch, adding lots of great features and improving user experience. It’s really only the beginning though. We are looking forward to helping push 3eep to greater heights in the coming months with lots of exciting things to be added.

For those with an eagle eye, you’ll probably notice we didn’t make the top 60. We don’t have any of our own syndeo::media branded Australian web2.0 apps, something we are planning on rectifying. While we don’t have anything to announce today, stay tuned for some interesting local apps coming soon.

3eep, social media, top 60 web2.0

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

This weekend kicked off a successful BarCamp in Sydney. A first for Australia. For the first one it had a good turn out with a number of interesting discussions. A few heated debates, a few talks about the startup life and one talk that cruised pretty well over my head. Congrats to Russ and everyone for putting it together. I’m looking forward to the next one.

For those who came (or those interested) I have uploaded the presentation I had put together on Identity 2.0 and OpenID. It’s brief and only intended as an introduction so I was happy to see a good debate around it. There seems like a lot of sceptics although certainly not surprising being so important to the online experience. Download the PDF (3.55Mb)

barcamp, barcamp sydney, identity 2.0 openid

Its been quite a while since I last posted but I thought it was fair time to add something. Luis had posted briefly a few days ago about the launch of 3eep our latest project that has been keeping us busy since December but as project lead I didn’t get a chance to update.

3eep is a sporting community that enables fans, players, coaches and managers to communicate, manage their teams or show their passion (even if they don’t play). We are very excited to let it see the light of day (as of course are the team over at 3eep too), for me it is something close to my heart being a rather passionate volleyball player.

For us the 3eep site is the first live implementation of our new social software platform. The platform – media::core has been under development for the past few months, taking the key elements in most social networks (blogs, forums, user management, etc) and putting them together into a solid system based on Ruby on Rails. Months ago, we started from a blank slate and so could build it directly off the cutting edge code base for Rails that became the new Rails 1.2 (luckily it went final before the launch of 3eep). This gave us great set of core functionality with things like REST web services, easy RSS/Atom integration and of course all the other features that make Rails such a joy to work with.

The 3eep site extended off this core platform and integrated all the things you see in the 3eep site. Teams, Clubs and Sports, along with the member management in MyZones. We had a lot of fun (and hard work) putting together the initial functionality for the beta. Like most of the sites we develop, it is just one point in the evolution of the site, one we are looking forward to continuing.

So what are you waiting for… stop reading this post, head over and start sharing your passion.

3eep, clubs, mediacore, ruby on rails, social media, social networks, sport teams

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.

Joshua Porter over at Bokardo has been writing some excellent posts lately. A common thread seems to be surfacing that the current method for designing sites is now not suiting the needs for a social web. Social interface design (which I covered previously) is becoming crucial.

Information Architecture now needs to adapt to also suit the changing environment.

Joshua’s recent post on Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture has some interesting thoughts coming from some of the big names in IA. These names realising the changes that are coming and the need to react to them (although not liking the change).

With the growth of things like folksonomies and search, the structured (preplanned) web is becoming less important. Things like the perpetual beta and understanding desire lines are changing the way that sites are developed. Developing a completely resolved site that is locked in, unchanging from day one does not work. Only through adapting, fine tuning and understanding the desires of the users of a site, that a site can be constantly relevant.

I think the “death” of IA is a little too strong. Like the sites that we are now building, it too has to understand and adapt to the changing environment.

information architecture, relationship architecture, social interface design, social media social software

Social interface design is becoming very important in the current development of the web. We are really only now discovering that our old assumptions are not always correct. As the web matures we start seeing that we have to look at our users differently. Its not just an individual but a whole ecosystem around that individual that needs to be considered.

Bokardo has a great post with gives a very clear idea of the changing landscape…

Gone are the days of traditional usability testing. Almost all testing assumes that 1) people want to use your software and 2) people use your software alone. Each of these things is becoming less true every day. There’s so much software! A much bigger problem, at this point in time, is how to get people and the social groups of which they are a part interested and keep them interested in your software.

You’re not convincing just one person, you’re convincing one person and all their friends.

design, new media, social interface design, Social Networks, usability web2.0