- Web 2.0 to earn enterprise cred in 2008
- Google employees trade on optimism
- Microsoft's services: More marketing than meat
- Movable Type has delusions of CMS grandeur
- Jive in talks with Salesforce on Clearspace
- News sites get Second Life
- Study: Telework gains acceptance
- Friendster patents social networking
- Plaxo gets HipCal
- MySpace for the enterprise
January 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Web 2.0 to earn enterprise cred in 2008
The majority of IT departments that currently view Web 2.0 technologies as trivial, consumer-grade frivolities will eat their words by year's end and instead lead the charge to implement RSS, mashup, and social networking technologies, according to a recent report from Forrester.
Despite only 24 percent of companies citing Web 2.0 technology as a purchasing priority for 2008, Forrester remains convinced that the people-centric value add these technologies offer will soon make believers of 42 percent who have not yet earmarked a dime for blogs, wikis, RSS, mashups, and social networking in the coming year.
Why the anticipated change of heart? End-user desire for said tools will overwhelm CIOs into admitting that IT is already tapping the fledgling paradigm internally for managing and tracking IT projects. Moreover, "enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be a high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation," according to the report.
In other words, catch the wave before someone else benefits from championing a Web 2.0-influenced move.
Top on the docket, according to the survey, will be enterprise RSS technologies for keeping workers on top of the flow of information at their companies.
At the bottom of the list of currently slated enterprise Web 2.0 projects is buzz-worthy social networking, with 20 percent of companies testing the waters or having a look. But the drumbeat for internal social networking solutions is loud, Forrester contends, and by year's end, such profile-based networking tools "will eat up much of the limelight" of Web 2.0's gala entrance into the enterprise.
Other assertions in the report that could hold up to scrutiny include the potential for enterprise mashups to eat into the portal, search, and EAI (enterprise application integration) markets. Empowering end-users to discover knowledge assets through a mashup framework is certainly a compelling proposition, but as Forrester does admit, the chief obstacle -- other than IT buy-in -- to such technologies is cultural, as process re-engineering, change management, and training loom large as impediments to such paradigm shifts.
Posted by Jason Snyder on January 28, 2008 11:12 AM
January 09, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Google employees trade on optimism
A recently released study of trades undertaken in an internal predictive market in place at Google surfaced a quantifiable can-do spirit among the company's employees.
Analyzing the predictive market trading behavior of 1,463 participating Google employees from April 2005 to September 2007, Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz, economists at Wharton and Darmouth, respectively, along with Google economic analyst Bo Cowgill, found that "internal markets overpriced securities tied to optimistic outcomes by 10 percentage points."
Meaning, in essence, that participating Google employees were, on the whole, willing to pay a 10 percent premium to place a bet on success.
[ PDF download: "Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google" ]
Part of a larger trend attempting to glean insight from the wisdom of crowds, predictive markets allow participants to perform trading-style transactions on the outcome of various short- and long-range conjectures. Participants are given tokens -- in Google's case, "Goobles" -- to place bets. The flow of this currency is believe to provide a credible prediction engine for future events -- more accurate, some believe, than knowledge gleaned from polls and surveys. Much of this accuracy is attributed to the assurance of vested participation in the form of financial compensation for individual participants' predictive accuracy -- for Google, this took the form of a $10,000 prize budget pool per quarter.
[ For a deeper look at predictive markets and crowdsourcing, see "Mob wisdom means business" ]
Google's market, which the authors believe is the largest such company market in operation, has been up and running for four years. Similar markets are under way at Abbott Labs, Arcelor Mittal, Best Buy, Chrysler, Corning, EA, Eli Lilly, Frito Lay, GE, HP, Intel, InterContinental Hotels, Masterfoods, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Pfizer, Qualcomm, Siemens, and TNT, according to the authors of the report.
Conjectures ran the gamut, from demand forecasting (number of Gmail users at the end of a particular quarter), performance (Google Talk quality rating), company news, industry news, decision markets (will users of feature A use feature B more), to plain-old fun (how many rotten tomatoes will Star Wars III get?).
In all, 270 such "markets" were opened at Google, each with between two and five bet outcomes.
Participants in the Google market, who were more likely to be programmers at the Mountain View campus, exhibited a bias toward outcomes linked to a positive outcome for Google. Moreover, the economists found a measurable correlation between bullish predictive market behavior the day after Google's actual stock price experienced a better-than-average boost.
According to the economists, such optimism is akin to what is known as the "entrepreneur's curse," in which "firms are started by those most overly optimistic about their prospects." Such optimism, the authors conjecture, is desirable for leaders and employees in such environments, as it generates motivation, leads to risk-taking, and "makes employees cheaper to compensate with stock options."
Optimism, according to the study, was correlated most prominantly with more recent hires, as experienced employees tended to be less likely to overspend on optimistic outcomes.
Also of note from the study was a correlation of like-mindedness with physical proximity, as strong correlations in trading were found among employees with 10 to 20 feet of one another in a shared office setting, suggesting that being on the same page means being in the same environs.
Moreover, trading correlations were also found among employees sharing the same "three-levels-below-SVP" manager, which at Google, usually means working on the same broad set of products, according to the authors of the report.
Analysis of holdings and trading activities is used to determine how an organization processes information.
Interestingly, the authors did not find friendship to be a strong correlation factor in Google's predictive market. Apparently, work-farm architecture and workforce organization have a demonstrable effect on siloing information.
Organizations looking to foster cross-departmental collaboration, take note.
Posted by Jason Snyder on January 9, 2008 01:41 PM
October 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft's services: More marketing than meat
It’s official: Microsoft wants you to know it’s serious about this whole hosted software thing. Today they will articulate a long-overdue roadmap for "software plus services" -- a hybrid approach that embraces both old-school boxed software and the flavor-of-the-month hosted services model.
The announcement itself has the trappings of a big deal. In fact, it's more a case of rearranging the furniture and adding a light coat of paint. Specifically, all MS services will be divided into two distinct families: Live (for consumers and SMB) and Online (for enterprises and business that require high availability, scalability, security, etc.).
So we're mostly talking about a rebranding here. The services now designated as part of Online -- Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Office SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online -- already exist elsewhere in the MS hierarchy. As before, they're available as conventional software on premises or as a software-as-a-service offering hosted either by Microsoft or a Microsoft partner.
The Live family announcement is made a bit more exciting because it includes a new product: Office Live Workspace, a personal storage and collaborative environment in the cloud. You can store anything for free, but document collaboration works only with Office documents. Preregistration starts today at the Office Live site.
The company also announced Exchange Labs, an R&D effort that will supply Exchange as a hosted service to universities and other large facilities that want to innovate around Exchange. And they're launching a new version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM (code name Titan) to a limited number of customers. In keeping with Microsoft's strategy, Titan can be run on premise or hosted. Significantly, the next-gen Dynamics CRM is multitenanted, an architectural approach that is essential for real, robust SaaS. Many other Microsoft service offerings don't support multitenancy.
For all the elements in this announcement, it's hard to generate much enthusiasm. Microsoft's big splash feels more like a little ripple -- a dutiful set of launches and marketing moves designed mostly to prove that MS "gets it." Plus, Microsoft's insistence on keeping one foot firmly planted in the boxed software world (remember, it's "software plus services") indicates their embrace of Web 2.0 is fairly tepid.
Still, if Microsoft was slow to grasp the importance of the Internet, they'd like to prove they aren't asleep at the switch when it comes to SaaS and Web 2.0. Office Live Workspace may be a key piece of the puzzle here, but Microsoft is undoubtedly late to the party. Google has been making hay with its hosted suite, and other competitors are springing up all over the place.
Don't forget, though, that Microsoft has a built in advantage: a massive installed base of MS Office. A wholesale move to hosted services would undercut that still lucrative business. Despite the Web 2.0 enthusiasts and cockeyed optimists who are penning obituaries for conventional, non-browser-based software, Office isn't in any danger of going away anytime soon. Software plus services is really a play to hold the line and maintain the status quo, even as it seems Microsoft is embracing the newest software models. Smart, very smart.
Posted by Steve Fox on October 1, 2007 12:01 AM
June 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Movable Type has delusions of CMS grandeur
Ubiquitous blogging platform Movable Type launches the beta of version 4 today, with a new architecture, a slew of Web 2.0-ish features, and the stated intention of standing in as a full-blown (if lightweight) content management system.
(Full disclosure: InfoWorld is a customer of Six Apart, Movable Type's parent company. I am writing this posting in Movable Type, an oddly reflexive exercise.)
Concurrent with the beta, the company announced the Movable Type Open Source Project, an open source version of MT due in Q3. Six Apart is already an open source proponent, having contributed OpenID and other OSS in the past, so this piece of news is welcome but not surprising.
But back to Movable Type 4: It's wildly ambitious. Not content with being the social software of choice for everything from one-man megaphones to major corporate sites, it now wants to function as a content management system (CMS) for whole Web sites. Two years ago, this would have been laughable. Today, it may not be. Blogs are at the center of many major sites, and a basic template approach to everyday Web pages (not just ones we think of as blogs) is viable. That assumes, of course, that MT 4 is still a competent blogging platform -- a reasonable assumption, given the quality of both the current MT3 and MT Enterprise edition 1.5. InfoWorld will put the beta through its paces over the next several weeks, though we'll be doing so gingerly. "This is a real beta, not a Google-style beta," according to Six Apart EVP Chris Alden; in other words, beta testers should not think about running MT 4 in a production environment.
The dev team's most far-reaching decision is the introduction of a "plug-in" architecture. The new base platform rolls up the code base of MT 3, MT Enterprise 1.5, community-contributed enhancements, plus some core technologies from hosted blogging platform TypePad and consumer lines Vox and LiveJournal (all part of the Six Apart family). Feature packs will sit on top of MT for specialized functions and community-based add-ons, ideally avoiding code bloat of the base platform. The architectural change is intended to make MT more flexible and scalable, a primary development goal of the new release.
The laundry list of new features is long and needed: installation Wizard, new UI, system dashboards, better image insert feature (yes!), redesigned template management tools and WYSIWYG editor, and so on. Even more significant, assuming they work, will be community-management tools for managing readers' comments. Readers who wish to respond to a blog will be able to join the Web site's community (through MT tools) and post their own photos, videos, audio, as well as text.
Exciting stuff. Still, I don't foresee many large, complex sites dumping their industrial-strength CMSes anytime soon, no matter how solid the new MT may turn out to be. The fact that it's even a consideration, though, proves how far blogging software has come.
Posted by Steve Fox on June 5, 2007 12:01 AM
January 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Jive in talks with Salesforce on Clearspace
Jive Software has begun talks with Salesforce.com to bring its forthcoming Clearspace enterprise collaboration suite to AppExchange, CEO Dave Hersh said.
"We met with them two days ago," Hersh told InfoWorld on Thursday. "That's next for us."
He said Jive was also open to a SaaS partner for Clearspace, initially to be an on-premises solution.
If Jive and Salesforce identified shared customers, they might strike a further SaaS relationship, he said.
Clearspace, which melds wikis, blogs, document sharing, and forums under one enterprise-class architecture, was on track for general release by the end of February, Hersh said.
However, before AppExchange and SaaS comes Jive's plans to integrate its Wildfire real-time collaboration system with Clearspace the first quarter of 2007. "[Wildfire] has lots of traction" with mainly SMB users.
At about the same time, Jive will make Clearspace an external, or public, collaboration system, which would then open doors to it becoming ready for CRM, Hersh said.
Clearspace had "all the next-gen tools that people need" to fill the gap between Microsoft's Sharepoint and the one-off Web 2.0 players, Hersh said.
"With 90 percent of collaboration people do, we'll cover them."
Jive, which survived the dot-com bust, "had been through the wringer" and now had the stripes that the growing number of Web 2.0 players did not, Hersh said.
Clearspace was designed over a year with its key Forums customers, leading to a user-centric, tagging-based user interface, he said.
Posted by Mike Barton on January 19, 2007 08:10 AM
October 16, 2006 | Comments: (0)
updated | The news agency Reuters has followed CNET News.com with a beachhead in the virtual world Second Life.
CNET News.com gots its second life last week, "modeled loosely after CNet's San Francisco offices, complete with an amphiteater where CNet reporters can do interviews, give talks and stream media."
InfoWorld's Jon Udell had his virtual reality run-in recently:
A well-known company issues a press release inviting reporters to witness its online debut. The year? Not 1994, but 2006. The company? Sun Microsystems. I had to pinch myself when I read the announcement: "Please join John Gage for a special event in Second Life." It's been a while since I got one of those.Once upon a time, you only had to put up a Web page to be able to toot your online promotional horn. Now you have to build a 3-D environment in Linden Research's metaverse and populate it with avatars and virtual tchotchkes.
[read on]
Update: I missed Jon's screencast from today, In search of non-gratuitous 3D, a 3-minute video report on IBM's event Greater IBM Virtual Block Party.
So, why in the virtual world would anyone care? CNET News' minimalist redesign is in full contrast to the CPU-taxing virtual world, but there's no doubt sites are reaching out to Second Life's 900K users are attractive, as is being one of the first to set up in a 3D world.
Reuters reports (on itself): Car maker Toyota, music label Sony BMG, computer maker Sun Microsystems, join Cnet in taking part in Second Life.
"In Second Life, we're making Reuters part of a new generation," Reuters Chief Executive Tom Glocer said in a statement. "We're playing an active role in this community by bringing the outside world into Second Life and vice versa."
More on the who and what's of the Reuters move can be had in this blog post from the virtual bureau's chief.
What do you say? Would you talk back to InfoWorld if we had a splashy virtual office, complete with virtual vitamin drinks for refreshments?
Posted by Mike Barton on October 16, 2006 04:26 PM
October 03, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Study: Telework gains acceptance
There was a time when you could tell someone that you worked from home, and they'd reply, "Right. 'Work' from home." The air quotes were audible.
However, skepticism in an employee's ability to get the job done away from the corporate office continues to decrease, according to a recent study by Yoh, a provider of talent and outsourcing services to customers in the United States. For the study, the company surveyed 198 HR managers at the Society for Human Resource Management 2006 Conference and Exposition.
The study finds that 67 percent of HR managers believe that telecommuting likely will increase over the next two years.
Moreover, the study finds that 81 percent of companies already have remote work policies in place. Of the HR managers surveyed, 25% said that employees at their companies have the option of telecommuting from home. Another 13% can work from a satellite office. Nineteen percent have no telecommuting opportunities. The remaining 44% fall under the cryptic category of Other.
A couple of factors seem to be driving the trend. First, the option of telecommuting is an enticing benefit to prospective high-talent employees. "The war for talent, combined with commuting times and costs, and an increasing need for work-life balance are all factors that promote telecommuting," says Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing for Yoh. "This survey validates what we've seen over the years: High-impact talent prefers - indeed, thrives - in an environment that provides a flexible work-life balance."
Advances in technology are also playing a key role. "People and organizations have long wanted the business flexibility that telecommuting offers. But it's only in recent years that the technologies that enable cost-effective telecommunications have reached critical mass - such as wireless broadband, PDAs and smart phones, and standard issue PCs capable of remote enterprise access," says Lanzalotto.
Interestingly, though, the study seems to contradict findings from a Gartner study from earlier this year, as reported by Dave Margulius. In a report, Gartner said it expected the growth of telecommuting to slow, from 12 percent -- worldwide and in the United States -- in 2005 to 5.5 percent worldwide and 3.7 percent in the United States by 2008.
Security factors also remain a telecommuting concern, IDC reported earlier this year. It's easy to be lax when it comes to securing a home-worker's system, making them easier prey for viruses, for example.
Perhaps even worse, data leaks abound throughout the corporate world, and in many cases, thieves are getting access to employee and customers' private, unencrypted data - not by clever hacks but by simply swiping a laptop.
From personal experience, I can say that it's much easier to be productive from my home office than it was a few years ago. (Of course I say that; I am writing this from that very location.) But really: I have my laptop, along with high-speed Internet access from which to quickly get at the apps and data I need. Wireless Internet access is also abundant, helpful if, for example, I'm working from my girlfriend's home office.
Throw in collaborative technologies such as IM, easy-access e-mail (I tend to use Web-based Exchange when working remotely), and reliable cell-phone service, and it's pretty much like being in the office -- except I don't need to spend time commuting (save for the five second walk to my desk). Heck, I don't even need to shower.
However, there are still some potential drawbacks to telecommuting, from my experience. A couple of weeks ago, we had some fairly important editorial meetings at our San Francisco office. I opted to work from home one of those days and called in for several sessions. It was difficult to keep up at times, since I was unable to see the projection screen or the notes the meeting leader was writing on the whiteboard, or to even hear all that was being said in the conference room.
Granted, Web conferencing is an increasingly viable means of having a meeting with far-flung individuals, but it's not always practical to set those up just for the sake of a couple of participants.
Moreover, some things are much easier to explain face to face to a co-worker than they are via e-mail, IM, or even the telephone. There are plenty of visual elements to discuss when planning a magazine section each week, and the ability to sit down with the art director (who is a very visual person) for a few minutes is useful.
Finally, one potential advantage to having 24/7 access to my job is also a potential drawback: It's difficult to resist the allure of checking e-mail or posting articles at odd hours. That could be dangerous for a workaholic.
What do you think about telecommuting, either from a managerial or telecommuter perspective?
Posted by Ted Samson on October 3, 2006 10:38 AM
July 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Friendster patents social networking
Friendster has said it received a patent that covers online social networks, one the company had applied for long before its decline and recent recapitalization, reports Red Herring.
The report said:
The U.S. patent, which was awarded June 27, is extremely general, and would seem to cover the activities of many other sites, especially those like LinkedIn that allow people to connect within a certain number of degrees of separation.Naming Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, who has left the company, as inventor, the patent refers to a "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks."
"It's way too early to say" whether the company would pursue licenses and litigation from its competitors, Friendster President Kent Lindstrom told RedHerring.com.
But he said: "We'll do what we can to protect our intellectual property."
This patent highlights just how ridiculous the patent system is in the U.S., also recently highlighted in Neil McAllister's Patent overload hinders open source innovation.
There are some interesting comments in our Talkback, Are patents killing innovation?
But patenting social networking takes the cake. Let me restate, Friendster now has a patent on any "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks."
Talk back to us below.
Posted by Mike Barton on July 7, 2006 02:56 PM
May 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Contact service provider Plaxo said today it acquired HipCal.
Plaxo said:
The addition of HipCal's team and technology will dramatically accelerate Plaxo's efforts in the calendar space, bringing lifestyle management tools such as appointment management, iCal publication and subscription, and group calendars to Plaxo members by the end of 2006.
Plaxo's Rikk Carey answers What do Plaxo, Pimps, and Hippopotamuses have in common?, "an insider's view of why we joined forces with these young guns from upstate New York".
What's up with the pimp reference? "btw: The original name of HipCal was MyPIMP.com. And, in case you didn't know, "PIM" is a common acronym for Personal Information Manager," Carey says.
Posted by Mike Barton on May 1, 2006 10:25 AM
April 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Social networking (SN) is not just for tweens any more, as evidenced by the $17 million in second round funding for enterprise SN firm Visible Path.
BW online reports it is not the first SN play, in "How LinkedIn broke through".
Visible Path is aiming squarely at the enterprise with its SN/collab service, rather than the individual, however.
BW writes: "Visible Path looks different from other social-networking sites. Users don't create home pages or profiles on Visible Path. The site instead keeps tabs on whom its users communicate with by e-mail or through other means. And it ranks the strengths of those relationships based on how often people communicate. Then it helps users find common sources and contacts so they can approach one another to do business."
Seems to me, and VC folk obviously, there's a great opportunity to seize on collaboration in business yet and get people off e-mail for group communications and project work. But the more these enterprise SN plays can integrate with e-mail and exisiting apps, or shift work to them to capture ideas etc, the better for their acceptance as additional value as a tool is weighed down by another app on the menu.
Enterpise wikis such as Social Text are on a roll, and others are sure to follow as the technology use gels. Social Text's newish Miki, or mobile wiki, is an example of how to weave the tech into an increasingly mobile workforce - and make you wonder how email has lasted as the dominant collaboration tool for so long.
Posted by Mike Barton on April 18, 2006 04:26 PM
December 15, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Sun urges Open Document Format adoption
Enterprises, state governments, federal agencies and others should follow the lead of the state of Massachusetts and adopt Open Document Format (ODF), a Sun president said on Wednesday afternoon.
Acknowledging that others have yet to follow Massachusetts's lead, Piper Cole, Sun vice president of global government and community affairs, said a wait-and-see approach is being taken. "[Others have not adopted ODF yet] because Massachusetts is first and I think everybody is watching to see," what transpires, Cole said during a meeting between Sun executives and the press.
Massachusetts's decision was based on a massive analysis of what training and other requirements would be if it adopted ODF, according to Sun.
ODF is being positioned by Sun and companies such as IBM as a global document format. It is being rivaled by Microsoft's Office Open XML format. Simon Phipps, Sun chief open source officer, said he has no idea what it will take to get Microsoft to establish an invariant, multilateral baseline for a document format. But Sun has high hopes for ODF.
"If we can get to where [ODF is] widely used, wonderful things will happen," said Tim Bray, Sun Web technologist and a co-inventor of XML.
ODF has been used in Sun's StarOffice office productivity suite, which Cole acknowledged has been a bit difficult to use in previous incarnations. "StarOffice used to be pretty klugey, but it's gotten a lot better," she said.
Microsoft's planned Office 12 suite, for its part, features a different user interface and a previously undocumented file format, Phipps said. "Migrating to Office 12 will involve user retraining," Phipps said.
A Microsoft executive, meanwhile, said that two open document formats are better than one.
-- By Paul Krill, blogging live from Sun's offices in San Francisco.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 15, 2005 08:40 AM
October 10, 2005 | Comments: (0)
WebEx to launch 'Exchange' on demand
WebEx on Tuesday is planning an SMB-focused services launch that will include a hosted offering designed to give small companies a sort of "virtual Exchange server," including calendaring, database apps and the ability to build content databases, and online meetings.
The services are rebranded and enhanced versions of Intranets.com offerings (WebEx completed its acquisition of Intranets.com in September).
The new services will be aimed at small businesses and individual users, according to Subrah Iyar, WebEx CEO.
In addition to the "virtual Exchange" offering, WebEx will introduce a new service targeted at individuals. That service will be a lightweight screen sharing offering designed to make it very easy to launch a meeting from an e-mail message or from within an IM chat window, according to the company.
The services will also shake up typical WebEx pricing models. The services will offer different price points including unlimited minutes packages.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on October 10, 2005 04:16 PM
September 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Bloggers handbook gets published to help dissidents beat censorship
With the support of the French foreign ministry, Reporters without Borders published a guide book for dissident bloggers in repressive countries.
The group said that the book houses tips and technical advice on how to remain anonymous, get around censorship, set up and make the most of a blog, establish credibility as well as tricks for publicizing a blog and getting picked up by search engines.
From the Reporters without Borders announcement, the impetus of the book:
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.
The Handbook for Bloggers goes on sale today, or can be downloaded in English, French, Chinese, Arabic and Persian at www.rsf.org.
Contributors include prominent bloggers Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen, and Canadian Internet censorship specialist Nart Villeneuve.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on September 22, 2005 10:54 AM
August 25, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Google Talk may spur IM interoperability
Google's plunge this week into the IM market may cause a big enough splash to jump-start the pipe dream of IM interoperability.
Google built its Google Talk on XMPP, an open source, XML-based IM protocol that enables connectivity to other systems that support it.
According to a research note written by Gartner research director Allen Weiner, Google Talk holds the potential to bring interoperability to the MSN, Yahoo, and AOL networks. But Google first will have to boost use of Gmail and get loyal IM users to switch to its service, Weiner wrote.
Google's entry into the IM space creates "a new dynamic that could lead to a market repositioning," according to Weiner.
Google's selection of XMPP, as well as its considerable market power, could force changes, Weiner said.
"This structure could bring about IM interoperability among the major players if Google gains enough market traction to force changes," he wrote.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on August 25, 2005 04:55 PM
August 19, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Moveable Type blog tool to get a face lift
At the conference for business blogging attendees got an early look at a tool designed to help their businesses better manage blogs.
Six Apart's Anil Dash gave a preview of the new Moveable Type Version 3.2 Weblog publishing platform on Friday here at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco.
According to Dash's stats, Six Apart's platform powers more than 10 million blogs around the world.
The new version of the platform coming out next week will include more features for administration, ease of use, and community management.
Version 3.2 will include a new section of the application that provides a system overview, Dash said. This is designed to help administration of multiple blogs.
"It lets you view all the information in the system no matter where you published it," he said. "Everything is in one place."
The system overview link shows every blog post title, which Weblog it was posted on, and time of post.
Comments and trackback improvements were also added in Movable Type 3.2.
The publishing tool will automatically filter comment or trackback spam and delete spam after a set period of time. The announcement of this feature drew a few shouts of appreciation from the crowd.
Older blogging tools had a problem with what Dash calls "silent data loss." This is when valuable trackbacks and comments were mistakenly filtered as junk.
"In the old days silent data loss was a big management burden; you had no way to know who's building your community," he said.
The new version also lets users retrieve false positives from the junk folder.
The context sensitive search feature knows where you are in the application and lets you search for and replace any item across all your blogs.
For example, in one step you can update the look and feel across all your blogs.
Another cool feature is that the user manual is a living document that allows comments from bloggers, which are subsequently reviewed and used to help improve the document.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on August 19, 2005 03:47 PM
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