Just saw Google's video on real-time search and there was a comment saying something like "As usual with Google: just a useless BS video , and not a tiny bit of information about how you are actually supposed to use this".
I must disagree with that because the video provides a fairly immersive experience and a good feel for what they mean by real-time search. My comment would be that there is so much Twitter in the video that one gets to wonder when will Google acquire Twitter...
The launch of Google Wave has generated various reviews and left many with a feeling of perplexity or outright rejection because what they saw seemed so little compared to what had been promised (a lesson for every marketer out there IMO). In fact people who've accessed the platform reported several important issues summarized here.
However GoogleWave is indeed completely revolutionary and could well transform the way we deal with information, interactions, collaboration and value creation... perhaps even transactions some day.
This wiki (kindly provided on Wave by my friend David Dossot) is proof of the revolutionary aspect of Wave as it deals with bots, each of which has a special function within the Wave ecosystem allowing it to connect and interact with other formats, platforms, logical spaces, communities and online properties. What's still very much unclear in what I've read so far (not nearly enough) is the security model and the degree to which bots can be configured with standard behaviors but if secure and with extensive ability to configure and string together (with some of these objects providing flexibility analogous to Yahoo Pipes), then Wave could well be the equivalent of the "one ring to rule them all" and probably also "an offer we can't refuse" as the Godfather would say.
On the even more interesting side of things, once adopted Wave becomes a real Complex Adaptive System with a greater potential for structure emergence than the open web because of the existence of rules and constraints that are neither too many (as in collaborative systems like blueKiwi or SharePoint) nor too few (as in the open web). The concept of wave being so open and so flexible provides for an ideal combination of rules and flexibility, which is necessary for CAS dynamics to really operate.
Now this is a first impression and I have not tested this stuff a lot, but if it is what I understand it to be and if it becomes what I imagine it can become, then this thing is not simply big, it's huge.
Just read a piece (see link at the end of this post) claiming that the CRM is dead and that with the advent of the "social customer" there would be a new way of seeing marketing through 5 Ps, the most important of which would be people. The article titled "CRM is dead: Do You Know the Five Ps of Marketing?"claims that CRM is for the dustbins of history. I respectfully disagree with that.
In fact CRM is more alive than ever with ZohoCRM, Salesforce and Siebel powering an increasing number of commercial groups in established companies as well as start-ups worldwide. From sales force automation to marketing campaigns to cross company project teams and integrated marketing analytics, these platforms are providing the means to an end: building rapport with customers who are increasingly social.
In fact:
(1) you need a clear objective in terms of quality, reach, intensity, frequency and intimacy in customer relationships,
(2) you have more than just customers and prospects to deal with especially if you embrace a vision of influencer marketing
(3) you need the technical means to achieve the above and these technical means are CRM systems
Bottom line: today's marketing and sales main challenge is to distinguish between means and ends, using the former to achieve the latter. Increasingly social customers create new requirements in terms of goals and imply the use of older as well as emergent tools and practices. No point in being too categoric about the dustbins of history: the new never fully eradicates the old but rather amalgamate to create something stronger than either of the initial components. That's Darwinian in its truest form and it applies to technology as well.
From: http://ping.fm/aho36
That's quite big as a move! Google is increasingly a dominant provider of network based resources: infrastructure as a service, processing as a service, storage as a service, software as a service, messaging, instant messaging, VoIP telephony, unified messaging... But they're smart enough to see that network based must have local relays, which is why there's Gears, Chrome OS, Android...etc. One has to admire their strategy and crucially its execution.
This move to provide DNS service is a very important one because it's about Google taking a key position in one of the core infrastructures of the web. A position from which they can become indispensable and from which they can effectively influence the future of core technologies powering the Internet. The next step will be for Google to offer different levels of service one of which could be completely secure high availability DNS service for business critical applications, something that would make sense as the network is more and more the computer. Sun was way too early with their vision so someone else gets to do something good with it. There are more casualties in first movers than unfair advantage achieved by being a first mover.
From: http://ping.fm/hpj1H
Excellent piece on how to hire a co-founder at start-up phase; received via @lkratz. The article highlights some of the least common criteria to be considered when hiring at a start-up including dilution, investor relations and effectiveness of governance.
From: http://ping.fm/TqAf9
Experimentation is perhaps the most important attitude for understanding the ever changing landscape of a world constantly reshaped by infotech. From continuous experimentation hopefully comes some experience which can be used for execution of plans; we've got the 3Es of success and the cycle goes on and on.
In this post I'd like to share some thoughts about an experiment that started like all of BusinessQuests' experiments: with a weird question. Today's weird question: is there a way to find out how much carbon dioxide the "2.0" crowd of thinkers and star players is generating just by traveling the world to attend conferences, make speeches, shake hands and send those lovely "tweets" about the weather in Paris or the taste of vodka in Moscow?
The purpose of the experiment was therefore to find out how close I could get to assessing the carbon dioxide emissions of people like Robert Scoble, Peter Kim, Gerd Leonhard, Bradley Horowitz, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig... using only public information that I gathered from the "social web". So this is about using "2.0" tools on the thought leaders and stars of the "2.0" crowd, all of whom are very connected and tend to travel a lot to speak and meet in real life during conferences, not all of them interesting it must be said.
There's more to this attempt to assess carbon emissions of prominent figures of today's web than the results per se. It goes deeper to the question of what uses can actually be made of public information that we publish very willingly as part of our being part of the global networked community of what Richard Florida dubbed the "creative class", what some call the community of the über-connected, the "2.0" bunch.
Whether the results are accurate to the gram of CO2 or not is not that relevant; the fact that the emissions can be estimated with published user data is much more relevant though because it means there is probably a way for people running private intelligence services or marketing organizations (sometimes a nuance without a difference) to do pretty accurate estimates of other dimensions in the lives of the connected crowd from revenues to groups supported to books bought to relationships and addresses... It's food for thought and that's not only for those of use who are active participants to social media and social platforms' permanent beta.
So here are the results (spreadsheets here), using just Google Docs and an amazing gadget called Panorama Analytics for creating pivot tables on Google Sheets. The chart gives average emissions of carbon dioxide for prominent "2.0" figures who were kind enough to allow open access to their travel information on social travel site Dopplr.
For convenience, given that the load time of the Panorama gadget may be long, there's an Excel version of the chart below:
The total distance traveled by each of the people listed here was
broken down into plane, train and car travel making three sets of
assumptions (called scenario 1, scenario 2 and scenario 3) about the
relative importance of each transportation means in the traveler's
total travel distance. The traveler's date of activation of the Dopplr
account was used to calculate the number of months over which the total
distance was traveled and the free carbon footprint calculator provided
by the website www.carbonify.com was used toestimate the carbon impact of each traveler for each of the three scenarios.
From people to industries to institutions, the ubiquitous network and network based applications are profoundly transforming the way things get done. For all the generous talk about the openness, creativity and sharing enabled by social media, the central issue of what public information says about each one of us is getting hotter and hotter even as people from different background converge to bring solutions to address "digital identity", "e-reputation", "brand protection", "buzz", "intelligence", "monitoring"...
Since the very availability of such information and the thought of how it could be used undoubtedly sends shivers down many spines, it follows very logically that the kind of information we processed in this experiment is also information that has real marketing value because it makes sense. It has meaning. Something that is not necessarily true of all the detailed metrics and analysis we get from sophisticated tools that measure visits, bounces, clics, actions, hits, views or deliveries. At the end of the day less may very well be more if that "less" goes more to the heart of behavior tying back to real life of real people with real dreams, hopes, fears, joys and aspirations. That is the real core challenge for marketers today.
