I’m at a small IBM press event, “The Future of Social Networks” held in the IBM office in Cambridge. They’re talking about 1) Social Nets Analytics, a “solution” [yech, I hate that term — What product isn’t a solution? Can-opener= Your sealed can solution. Plunger = Your crap won’t go down solution] that tracks and analyzes what’s being said about you on in blogs, feeds, articles…; 2) Appliki, an “application wiki” [= JotSpot competitor, = Why aren’t we using Notes for this?]; 3) Jamalyzer, productizing what IBM uses in its “jams,” multi-day cross-company conversations; 4) dogear social bookmarking service [= del.icio.us + “authentication,” i.e. The Folksonomy Torquer]; 5) Fringe, a productiziation of IBM’s internal employee phonebook [ = Friendster without the condoms]; Web Activity Management, what seems to be a portal for tracking all your business activities and communications [ = Big Blue Brother]; 6) Blog and Wiki Central, IBM’s internal blog aggregator. (I’m on a panel on social software at the end.) [Non-disclosure: I’m not getting paid for this and have no financial relationship with IBM.]

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation leads off. He says that Web 1.0 was originally made up of content generated by institutions. [This is my biggest issued with the Web 2.0 meme overall32
: It’s solidifying the totally false idea that until Web 2.0, users weren’t on the Web. In fact, what drove the Web from the first day was the ability of users to speak and connect.] We’re now seeing the rise of collaborative knowledge, he says. KM was “incredibly boring.” Now it’s arising organically, he says.

Irving moderates a panel including Marc Andrews (strategy, content integration, search), Mike Rhodin (GM workplace, portal and collaboration) and Irene Greif (IBM fellow, collaborative user experience).

Mike recommends blogs as a way for leaders to get their messages out. [Oh, yes, I really want to absorb yet more messages from leaders.] He also recommends the Fringe demo as a way of pulling together info spread across directories. Also, real time info sharing has started to shift organizational norms; he hypes wikis as a “new publishing paradigm,” a real-time paradigm. You could open one up to employees, customers, etc. “We’re flipping the model.”

Irene: Why do some things take off and others don’t? Why do people contribute to open source? How does email change social networks? Wikis? Blogs? These are the sorts of questions her group addresses.

Marc: “Collaborative environments like blogs…accelerate the impact of public opinion on businesses.” This makes it imperative that businesses monitor the blogosphere.

Mike: At IBM, you can save an answer on a wiki into the knowledge base.

Q Judith Hurwitz: There’s a dark side. Someone could create a rich environment of misinformation.

Marc: That’s why it’s so important to monitor that.

Mike: We’ve always had this problem. It comes with every medium.

Q (eWeek): How do you balance openness with the desire to control info? E.g., Apple took down some comments reporting on the iPod Nano’s friability.

Irving: It depends. In IBM we figure we have good people around the world and we trust them to do the right thing.

Amy Wohl: At IBM there are 20,000 internal blogs but only a few hundred external bloggers. Looking at the flow of what’s being communicated internally is just as important as looking at what’s being said externally

Mike: Yup.

Next, they go through some demos

Irene: It’s all Web 2.0 stuff. [Ok, the way Web 2.0 is generally being taken up (not just by IBM) is really starting to annoy me. Blogs started in 1999. That’s 6 years ago. And even without blogs, what drove people to the Web were not institutional sites but the ability to talk. The web 2.0 meme makes sense to companies that ignored our voices for the Web’s first ten years.]

Public Image Monitoring. Omnifind-based Public Image Monitoring. Analyzes content from articles, feeds, blogs, surveys, etc. Identifies hot topics and “vocal sources.” Understands the tone and sentiment of the feedback. Monitors what’s being said about competitors and suppliers.

Demo: What are people saying about Honda and Toyota. Looked the thousand most recent blogs that mention them. What other makes and models are they talking about? What issues are arising? Are things stated as facts or opinions? The software graphs the percentage of positive mentions, which topics, etc. Drill into, say, “fuel economy,” and it shows the posts. Or check on specific models and it finds there are lots of negative comments about the hybrid Civic’s fuel economy.

Q: Does it rank blogs?

Marc: This is only the first step. We have a component that determines who is the most vocal. Not yet who is the most influential.

Application Wikis. Extensions to wikis that lets people “easily link together applications and services that are on the Web.” David Sink and Joel Farrell show the QEDWiki demo. They show a table of contacts and then turn it into a database. They do a “mash up” with Google Maps and weather data. Right now, it requires on-screen programming, but they assure us it’ll be much more user-friendly when it ships. [It’s a JotSpot competitor. (Non-disclosure: I’m on SocialText‘s board of advisors.)] It’s php-extensible. It uses AJAX. [Ajax + Google Maps: Your proof that it’s a certified Web 2.0 brand.]

Jamalyzer. IBM holds 72-hour company-wide conversations periodically. In one there were about 53,000 participants. Jamalyzer analyzes the data and shows various clusters of info. It uses their “eClassifier” technology. “The social network is embedded in this implicitly.”

dogear. Del.icio.us for inside the firewall. It’s a research prototype now available throughout IBM. David Millen demos it and shows that the suggested autocompletions for tags include the number of other people using that tag, a way of quickly driving a folksonomy [although it also encourages the downside of folksonomies: conformity]. Within IBM, there are almost 17,000 bookmarks (generated in 2-3 months), with only 10% of them private. The tags retain an association with the person who made them. It shows people who have the same tags as you, deriving a social network from a semantic one. You can import bookmarks from del.icio.us. There are group bookmarks as well, something del.icio.us is working on adding. At IBM someone did a Firefox extension so that searches in the Firefox search box first do a query against dogear bookmarks and then does the search on your choice of engines. As a result, you get the high-quality tag-based results first. [I’d like that plugin: Show me del.icio.us tags and then Google results.] [If del.icio.us were interested in the enterprise market, it should be worried about this not-yet-product.] [Note: AT IBM’s request, I have corrected “DogEar” to “dogear.”]

David also talks about Fringe, a directory crawler that looks for relationships among people. It incorporates DogEar tags.

Unified Activity Management. Dan Gruen of IBM Research talks about “activity-centered collaboration.” It’s a type of project collaboration system, similar to eRoom and Open Text. [Disclosure: I’ve consulted for both those companies and was a VP at the latter. In fact, my kids are going to college on Open Text money.] It has a set of steps for the project on the left. In the main area, it has an “activity thread” that associates documents, emails etc., with the various steps. Oooh factor: Drag and drop steps from previous projects. Beneath it is a Semantic Web idea: An ontology of task semantics expressed in RDF, with REST APIs. [Notes shows up as an example of something you can link into. And that’s it for Notes.])

The panel is pure Q&A. I’m living blogging it, which is slightly embarassing. On it are the estimable Bill Ives, Steve Sparkes (a CIO from Morgan Stanley), and me.

Steve from Morgan Stanley is a happy user. He says collaboration used to rely on the informal network, mutliple phone calls, etc. An expertise search effort failed: The data got stale and it was extra work. They’re having more luck mining people’s activities. He’s excited about what he’s seen today.

Q (Judith Hurwitz): This sounds like the evolution of the portal. How does this impact the SMB market, e.g., firms that collaborate with a Toyota or a Wal-Mart?

Bill: Positively.,

Q (Amy Wohl): Do companies use blogs as a substitute or an addition?

Bill: Both.

Me: Email replaced memos and meetings, to some extent. Wikis will replace reports to some extent. Blogs will replace home pages. (Yes, that was an exaggeration.)

Q: How do blogs fit with Sarbanes-Oxley?

Stephen: Complementary. Social networking analysis helps us meet those obligations.

Bill: “Unless you’re trying to hide something, it makes it easier.”

Q: If conversations are occurring in email, blogs, wikis, etc., doesn’t this have a chlling effect because everyone can see them?

Bill: It has the opposite effect. Because people know it’s public, they try even harder.

Stephen: We have private spaces for senior groups. You need to be able to produce sufficiently differentiate pools…

Q: How do we trust blogs?

Me: It’s a conversation. We figure it out. [I gave a longer answer. Damn live-blogging.]

Amy Wohl: You have to look at blogs by category because they’re very different, e.g., a political commentator, a researcher, etc. The blogosphere is good at sorting out trust issues.

Bill: There are many little blogospheres. With any of those, in my experience, there are usually about two dozen top ones. It’s pretty easy to filter out the interlopers and the pretenders. It’s not like you’re filtering millions. [Tags: delicious ibm SocialSoftware]

[The next day:] As commenters have pointed out, this post reads nastily. I’ve posted a comment apologizing and clarifying. What I meant to be snarky teasing may come across as relentless criticism. The morning was actually quite interesting, several of the products/technologies look promising, and it was exciting to hear IBM promoting the virtues of decentralized social software. (I’ve modified a phrase about Web 2.0 to make it clear that IBM’s use of the phrase is a common use; my testiness about it is not directed at IBM.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw