Brilliant Thinking

Social media - when applied to the web and mobile technologies - is a collective term for any place where dialogue can occur. This dialogue is generated by members of the community where the interaction occurs and could be text, pictures, video or audio, or any combination of these. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

Although there is a huge buzz about social media currently, social media has been around for a long time.

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The Mashable article below is interesting in that in these days of visual browsers, graphical interfaces, visual layouts and all the bells and whistles, a company is experimenting with a command line interface for the web.

As Mashable suggests “the concept is far more interesting than the execution…”

Although Kwyno is looking to offer a command line to the web, it still is tied to the way information is presented at present. The brief outline from Mashable suggests that you are essentially configuring your account to set up your own preferred sources - e.g. CNN for news, etc - and then issuing short commands (i.e. text messages) to the service to return information packaged for your device.

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I have been using mobile phones for years, but innovation seems limited to design, convergence and being able to access the web, stream videos, download music, access Facebook, MySpace, network, etc, etc. The basic way we use phones as a voice tool hasn’t changed, and sadly hasn’t been challenged until now.

However, there are enabling technologies out there that can make the dated mobile telephone more accessible.

One is already in place - visual voicemail on the iPhone.

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Image via Wikipedia

A few years ago I listened to analysts talking about the “virtual business.” They envisaged a world of mobile workers who could tap in to their corporate networks from anywhere. There wasn’t much substance on this future vision, and certainly not to the extent that mobile workers now enjoy with technologies enabled by Cloud Computing.

Back in 2001 when I set up my first web company, it was always my ideal that the company should be truly virtual and not be tied specifically to any physical office space. While it is important for people to come together to build ideas, this can be done in any space that provides the correct tools - which for us means whiteboards and notebooks.

I still value physical interaction with people for certain meetings as you get a visual feedback which you cannot get on the Web. You can see all of the participants’ body language, and it is much easier to be completely inclusive in such arrangements. Virtual meetings - using Skype and whiteboarding technologies - are OK in some situations, but not all.

However, these meetings do not make up the bulk of the day to day work - this is spent with the computer either writing, desigining or programming. And, as long as the computer is present with the right tools, this can be done anywhere. As long as the files are there also.

This is where the Cloud comes in (see also previous post: Cloud Computing vs Dedicated Servers). continue reading »

According to ReadWriteWeb: This means that when you tell people you write, read or listen to blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks and online video - if they give you a funny look, it is now officially them that’s a freak, not you.

The Web is evolving.

In the beginning we translated our physical brands - literature, logos, typographic style, grammatical style, imagery - directly on to the web. Our online presence was a mirror of our offline one. For larger corporates it was a very controlled environment and anything outside this permitted representation was stamped on.

However, the Web allows people to be people. It allows them to interact in ways and with tools that are not available in the physical world. The Web is a very different place. Blogs, podcasts, tweets and all manner of social, human expression have found their way into our way of life.

Already today, companies are being identified by their personality on the Web - through such posts as personal blogs, tweets, videos, podcasts, etc - which puts a human face on the organisation. And in time, a company will be known by the sum of the facets of its presence on the Web instead of just a corporate site.

If this will be the case, will we need a corporate/company website? And if so, what would it look like?

Putting my scrying hat on, I think the corporate website of the future will effectively be a mashup of the different facets of its personality on the web, with judicious filters and content aggregators applied so that a visitor to the “official” website of the business - suitably branded of course - gets to see the one-page corporate marketing spiel (a summary of what the company actually does) and contact details, plus different streams of information that, in themselves, identify the company (provide the digital fingerprint) to people interested in interacting with it.

The filters exist not to hide information, but to heuristically select the most relevant content from the multiple facets and present them to the site visitor. The filters therefore build a stable version of the fluid facets of the brand which becomes the corporate website. If we look at the number of Twitter conversations, blog posts, video casts, social media site posts, etc, that could be happening at any one time we can very easily become overloaded with information, especially minutiae, and we would not want people visiting our “official” virtual home to be overwhelmed and confused. Therefore, we filter to provide them a virtual tip-of-the-iceberg insight into our company.

Should the visitor wish to dig further, they can follow links to all the relevant streams. The filtering technology we use will also be dynamic, and would self-learn so that it adjusts according to what people are looking for - our websites would in effect be self-aware and shift according to the preferences of our visitors, dynamically adjusting filters in quantum steps as patterns of interest change.

This is Web 3.0. And it’s already happening.

You can integrate your Twitter posts with Facebook so they appear in your profile. You can plug in your Twitter posts to Wordpress (I have), and you can grab the RSS feed from anything and parse it to reproduce the content elsewhere - as an example, see our company home page which has the last 5 blog posts. Twitter also lets you track key words so that you can filter updates and receive relevant information - not just everything.

We’re still in the early days of Web 3.0, but there is a quantum shift on the horizon and we need to be ready for how pervasive this shift will be in our physical lives, and ready for it in our organisations digital ones. There is a lot of research being conducted into the role social media will play in our corporate future and I will be following this to see how close to my vision Web 3.0 comes.

We live in interesting times!

Go further:
Does a digital business really need a corporate website?
6 Emerging Trends CIOs Should Care About