Ridiculously busy again these past two weeks, so just a quick post to point out a (lengthy, and altogether rather self-indulgent, I’m afraid) email interview I did with PinoyWebStartup.com, a TechCrunch-esque blog about the local tech entrepreneurship landscape by pigmata media. People who read my blog gv regularly will probably not see anything new, but otherwise, check it out and send the pigmata guys some love.

social software startup manila

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

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

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

We’re inching ever closer to a real live beta with the mobiuslive music social network project and I’m personally having a lot of fun with the final set of modules, i.e., the playlist manager and Flash jukebox. As you can probably tell from their names, the playlist manager allows users to “star” their favorite tracks around the site similar to the way you would represent a given email’s importance in GMail.

(The icons on the right side mean “Has Video”, “Has Lyrics”, “Is a Favorite”, “Buy This Track” and “Preview This Track,” respectively.) Marking a track in this manner appends it to your personal playlist, which you can then manage via a funky little drag-and-drop interface built using the scriptaculous javascript library, shown below:

You can add tracks manually using a simple form below the list (although obviously these will not necessarily be playable by the jukebox). In either case, any item you add to this list can be dragged and dropped for sorting, regardless of whether it exists within the mobiuslive library or not.

The jukebox application itself is based on the very excellent XSPF playlist specification and web music player.

To get everything to work together, we created a dynamic XML file that pulls the relevant user tracks from the database, formats it according to the XSPF specification and feeds it back into the Flash player. I had to spend a little time tweaking the player itself to be a bit more in-line wiith the mobiuslive look, but other than that, it was a fairly straightforward process.

ajax, design, flash, social network, Social Networks social software

A new report named S–Commerce: Beyond MySpace and YouTube (PDF) talks about two challenges with social commerce.

Traditional advertising is not as affective on social networks and the barrier to market is quite high for creating “branded socials networks”.

“The average online socialite
currently frequents three social networking sites;
when polled, these same socialites stated they would
consider participation in up to four communities. Social
saturation clearly poses a challenge for marketers
considering launching their own online social network”

Specific context and purpose is what will drive those socialites to participate.

Is MySpace without a context and purpose?

online communities, S commerce, Social Networks, Social Saturation social software