Communicat.us

I hear a log about "open standards" as it pertains to technology and software. The fear of being "locked in" is great. For the most part, the discussion is greatest when it comes to acquiring new software – especially things that are considered "Web 2.0".

This is all well and this is all great but what could it mean to the non-programmer ?

I recently resolved to take better advantage of my company’s social network. We use Lotus Connections and like all self adopting technology, my usage has grown but mostly in the areas that were tactical to my day-to-day work. What I started to notice was that I was seeing information from colleagues – both current and past – posting status (micro-blogging) which I’d remember days later when I was working on something new. Had I not seen those updates, I’d have missed valuable details which were making my work go faster. I wanted more !

Lotus Connections has a rich web experience for all of it’s capabilities. The problem for me is I like desktop software. I like things to seamlessly integrate into what I already do. The use of standards like ATOM and REST and the exposure of all aspects of Lotus Connections through APIs means different people can have different user experiences to the same set of services. I already knew about the tight integration to Lotus Notes and Sametime as well as seamless extensions to my Symphony, Windows PC, and Office products. Recenlty I also found a number of options for integrating Lotus Connections Status Updates – an internally developed plug-in for Sametime and Lotus Notes, a "hackday" project call Bluto, and Connections Glue, a great 3rd party app that gives the look and feel of TweetDeck.

Here’s my picks for favorite integration …

• Lotus Connections Files into Windows Explorer using the Plug-in for Microsoft Windows
• Lotus Connections Activities into Lotus Notes using the integrated features shipped with Notes 8.5.1
• Lotus Connections Status Updates into my system tray using Connections Glue
• Lotus Connections Communities into my feed reader (using the feed that gives me ">/news/atom/stories/public?source=communities&container=>" href="http://>/news/atom/stories/public?source=communities&container=>" target=_blank>everything new")

What tools do you use every day and where can social software extend your reach and productivity ?

Alan Lepofsky blogs over at LepoLand and recently wrote a great post of the value of publishing your status update within your organization …

This morning I signaled a status update [think twitter] "Generating a list of 2000 fake name, titles, phone numbers, and office locations for our new demo sandboxes."  … one of my colleagues Graham, read what I wrote and replied with "Once you’ve got that list, could you send me a copy?"

… Alan’s entire post is here.

I’ve been in this exact situation myself – building a demo and feeling the need to generate a bunch of sample data. I would be grateful to discover someone else was already ahead of me and just as grateful to see my work get reused. Odds are good there are lots of work items that are small enough that you "just do it" your self but are probably already out there or being done by others.

Deploying a microblogging capability inside your firewall – whether it be Lotus Connections, Socialtext, Jive, or a stand-alone open source option – provides the value of sharing work information while not exposing it to the internet at large. If you prefer the outsourced experience of status updates but still want the privacy of your information, then a cloud service may be your preferred channel.

But microblogging is not the only mechanism for sharing information and reducing duplicate work. A "Shared Files" capability has a similar value. Consider the example above. The producer of the sample dataset may be separated from the consumer by days or weeks. If the dataset is published to an internal file sharing service, it can be found by others, tagged, rated, and more. If the status updates and shared files are linked to the author’s profile, then adhoc expertise evolves and it becomes increasingly easy to find the people you need to work on any given activity.

What social networking software capabilities are you considering ?

From a simple perspective, "analytics" for the end user means three things: Data + Processing + Display. While purists may say analytics is just the processing, the old adage of "garbage in / garbage out" is apt. So too is the recognition  that great data with great processing can still leave you scratching your head if you can see what is important.

All of this is to say I found it interesting to read that NBC has added a live twitter "pulse" analysis for the Olympics. At the moment I would guess it is must another gimmick to generate buzz. However, there could be real value in what it does.

The purpose of Twitter Pulse is to show the relative volume of tweets and the topics they represent.

Data: The data is Twitter but its not clear how they select tweets about the Olympics vs. all other tweets. For now, we will assume its a good data set.

Processing: Next, there is some type of analysis – presumable to pull out key words such as the sport, the interest, some data keys ("video", "medal", etc.) locations, athletes, and so on. All of this data is processed for one metric, "volume of traffic".

Display: the "volume of traffic" metric controls a box size. The other data keys are used to generate some text overlay and to choose a suitable background image. All of this is then rendered "tree map".

What does it mean ? OR more important to a company, what use is it ?

The resulting data could indicate what people are interested in seeing and thus influence what what content is broadcast as well as what types of advertising will have the highest impact. If this were trusted, then it could impact the cost of advertising as well as the size and demographic of the audience.

However, we need to remember the data set – Twitter. So perhaps this is not a sufficiently accurate sampling to make changes to broadcast content. But, what about using the data to change web content ? It could be a good predictor of web site traffic and thus advertisement selection and placement as well as to focus content.

As an aside, I found it interesting that over the 30 minutes or so of watching the Twitter Pulse, the sport of Curling rarely dropped out of the top 1/3rd of the graph’s boxes.

My observation of "analytics" is that success requires all three disciplines working in concert and more often than not, there are three distinct skill sets – data management, processing, and visualization. If you are interesting in the display component, you might be interesting is looking at "Many Eyes" which not only provides visualization of data set but also lets users share their discoveries – a kind of "social data processing" capability.

When I was in college, companies often donated hardware and some software to universities. This was a mixed blessing. The donation was great but it also meant that the college had to use their limited IT staff to manage the systems and the new equipment was always vying for limited raised floor lab space.

Here is where a cloud service could be a huge win for both the corporate sponsor and the university.

IBM announced it will make portions of its software portfolio available in a cloud computing environment to more easily allow professors to incorporate technology into their curricula and students to focus on development vs management of the systems they require. The initiative is called the Academic Skills Cloud and provides the software and system capabilities at no charge and without the need for students or faculty having to install and maintain it themselves.

Here are some additional resources:

• full article -> Academic Cloud to Speed Delivery of Technology Skills to College Students
• more about  IBM Cloud University Initiatives 
• recording of the live webcast

IBM Events – Agenda – IBM Smarter Cities Virtual Leadership Forum

By 2050, 70 percent of the Earth’s population will be living in cities – growing from 3.3 billion people today to a breathtaking 6.4 billion. This wave of urbanization presents enormous challenges and opportunities to all of us.

The Smarter Cities Leadership Forum on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 will begin at: 10:30 AM EST/9:30 AM CST/7:30 AM PST.

Join IBM for the Smarter Cities Virtual Leadership Forum, where forward-thinking public and private sector leaders converge to explore how our cities are getting smarter, driving greater innovation and transformation for competitive advantage while meeting the pressing needs of engaged constituents.

From the comfort of your office, discover how leaders from across North America are transforming their communities and businesses.

Full article and registration >>

In my morning “digital mail bag” was a pointer to The Register’s article on Oracle, Sun, and the departure of their CTO for cloud. In the article, they describe Lew Tucker as “former vice president of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange applications market place; had been with Sun for less than two years and was handed the role of building out Sun’s hosted cloud.” You can read the whole article here.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with representatives from a number of government agencies and much of the conversation surrounded cloud computing. What was evident were a few things:

• nearly everyone is investigating cloud options
• “cloud” is an over used term and means everything from raw CPU and storage to hosted custom applications to hosted commodity services
• most of the use cases were for cloud versions of traditional solutions – aka the cloud was just a different deployment option
• traditional thinking means traditional requirements and hosted clouds do not always meet those requirements
• exploiting cloud computing to its fullest will occur as new programs are designed and fulfilled but there are starting points today

The common thread was that having flexibility was critical. Some commodity capability could go into a public cloud. Low risk capability could go into a hosted cloud. By far, the private cloud has the lower threshold of adoption (independent of cost or complexity) as it is easier to trust.

While “cloud” may be an over used term, it is clear there are both current use cases and new thinking for solution design to take better advantage of flexible options. The silver bullet of a “cloud” is it’s ability to smooth out load. The larger the cloud the more balancing that can take place. This starts the balancing act. A private cloud will be smaller than a public cloud. If the private cloud is only servicing one type of solution, then it is likely to surge and idle all at once. However, a service cloud is quicker to leverage than an infrastructure cloud.

• Software as a Service clouds benefit from large diverse user populations
• Platform as a Service clouds benefit from lots of diverse applications
• Infrastructure as a service clouds benefit from lots of diverse compute requirements

So, what do you need your cloud to do ?