Category Archives: Social Networking

Enterprise 2.0

Meet CharlieWeb 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.

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?

How the Internet changed my life

WWWA few days ago I was asked how the Internet has changed my life, apart from it being the reason why I no longer work as a veterinarian. I spent 35 years of my life without having access to the Internet, so there are indeed a few important changes that I can talk about. If you wonder why this topic is worth a blog post you probably grew up with the Net and therefore have no idea how life would be without it.

So how did the Net change my life? Continue reading

Hasbro about to take Scrabulous down

Scrabulous LogoToy 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. Continue reading

Google bought Jaiku

jaikuAnother 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. Lets hope that Google keeps up Jaiku’s good work. Continue reading

Public Facebook profiles spiderable soon

facebook iconI 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.