judith meskill - soc.media.rocks

Liz Lawley has ' eggs to spare' from her breedster brood…

Robin Good interviews RossMayfield utilizing Mayfield's innovative wiki/weblog Socialtext space as the vehicle for communication betweeninterviewer and interviewee. [BTW, the judging panelists for The 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'ElevatorPitch' Competition are also utilizing a Socialtext space for communication. Thanks Ross!]
 
The Human Connectedness group writes about MusicCompass social software for music listening [i have to go back andcheck this out more thoroughly.]
 
thomas n. burg writes about " Near-Time Flow, the first peer topeer collaborative content and knowledge manager for Mac OSX Panther. Near-Time Flow enables individuals and groups tocollaborate via the web with unprecedented power and ease." [hmmm, Mac OS X, Peer-to-Peer, Social Software, KnowledgeWorkers - must check this out further and post more!]

Daya Baran, from Gruuve.com, just sent me an announcement for an upcoming Social Networking conference in SantaClara, CA on Thursday, May 6, 2004 from 6-9pm. This event is being cosponsored by the Silicon Valley Web Guild details can be foundon the SVASE website.
 
PS: scheduled speakers to include:

• CEO, LinkedIn Ltd., Reid Hoffman
• Founder & CEO, Tribe.net, Mark Pincus
• Founder & CEO, Ryze Business Network, Adrian Scott
• Spoke, VP Business Development, Andy Halliday

Or, is it YASNS for making product and business recommendations? Is it a unique offering "the first social networkfor social good" as the following eMediaWire touts:

Genuosity Inc. introduces the first social network for social good – the first social network designed to provide a way for local businesses to increase sales from referrals from happy customers by offering donation rewards to the referrer's favorite nonprofit organization.

San Diego, CA (PRWEB) April 6, 2004 Genuosity Inc., a leader in small business social network marketing technology, is pleased to announce the launch of two new tools that benefit consumers, their network of friends, their favorite local small businesses and their favorite non-profit organization. OrderGenerator provides small businesses with an automated toolset that rewards their satisfied customers when they refer new business. HummingBoard, the first social network for social good, enables consumers to recommend their preferred products and services, share special deals on those recommendations with their social network, and earn donations to their selected charity when others accept the offer.

With the importance of social networking being validated by recent announcements by Microsoft, AOL, Google's Orkut, Friendster, Tribe.net, LinkedIn and Spoke, Genuosity's new tools are the first to put the power of social networking to work for small businesses and their customers.

Genuosity's patent-pending applications represent the convergence of some of the most powerful trends on the web:

* social networking software uniquely applied to the small business enabling their customers to recommend them to friends and to provide testimonials,

* local search geotargeting enabling consumers to conduct a focused search for local businesses and services by utilizing merchant reputation ratings similar to eBay's rating system but based on first degree, second degree and third degree friend recommendations, and;

* cause marketing tools that allow businesses to motivate customer referrals with donation rewards to the referrer's cause of choice.

Have you submitted your 'Perfect Pitch' entry yet?
 
The rules of engagement for this contest are listed in: The 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'ElevatorPitch' Competition, which was posted on March 29, 2004.
 
We have the honor of hosting this competition with an awesome group of internationally respected judgingpanelists:
 
danah boyd, DavePollard, Dina Mehta, Don Park, Elizabeth LaneLawley, Flemming Funch, Jason Shellen, Jim McGee, LiliaEfimova, Martin Dugage, Phil Wolff, Ross Mayfield, Scott Allen, and Ton Zijlstra.

So submit your entries soon as the deadline is Midnight [EST] April 15, 2004!

Please submit your entry to: pitch at weblogsinc dot com. Thanks! (-:=

In an article for Japan Today Making the Internet friendly Sachie Kanda interviews Koki Uchiyama, the founder ofHotto Link, Inc. Hotto means 'peaceful' and it is Mr. Uchiyama's ideal to create a 'peaceful' society by connecting'knowledge' and 'social' infrastructures.

Koki Uchiyama's dream of a 'Social Ware Society' includes his 'intelligent agent' systems which he hopes will beinstalled in commonplace items from appliances to furniture.

This vision of Mr. Uchiyama'sstands at an intersection that I have been talking about in my 'knowledge notes' weblog knowledge & socialnetworking augmented by the utilization of intelligent agents and autonomic, or 'self-healing,' components in thehardware/software layers of our interconnectivity.

Sachie Kanda says of Koki Uchiyama:

Anything's possible in the world of Koki Uchiyama, the 33-year-old innovative president of Hottolink, an IT venture company whose motto is to make the Internet friendly by providing knowledge based on a distributed monitoring system.

Anyone who knows Uchiyama wouldn't be surprised at such ambition and enthusiasm. When he was younger, he wanted to be prime minister. Now he figures he could become the Bill Gates of Japan and there are many top executives around the world who think he might just succeed.

Douglas Rushkoff, an Instructor at NYU's Interactive TelecommunicationsProgram reported over at The Feature, that tonight qualifies as 'launch night' for dodgeball.beta including the following email in his post:

A few weeks ago we sent around an email about creating a Friendster-like social networking site for use by ITP students. Our thinking was that there are enough ITP students who are interested in social software, that we should have our own friend-of-a-friend data set so we can start building interesting apps. (sites like Friendster & Orkut won't give developers access to their data)

So, we built a Social Networking Service… http://www.dodgeball.com/social
... that is currently powering two projects here at ITP:

dodgeball.com [ Alex and Dennis ]
Alex and Dens' thesis project. "dodgeball.social is like a mobile version of Friendster. Tell us where you are and we'll tell you who's nearby".

SociaLight [ Karen + Mo + Dan + Mike Sharon ]
A project for the Microsoft Design Expo class. "Socialight is a mobile social networking platform which lets you use your phone to find friends, browse profiles and leave messages for them in specific locations."

So to help both of our projects move along, we ask you to please sign up and forward along to your friends. Even though the site is skinned to look like dodgeball, the Design Expo group is currently pulling from our database of users.

The more people who join, the stronger all of our applications will become. :)

Thanks!
- Dens + Alex + Mike + Karen + Dan + Mo

So pass it on! (-:=

Today, WSJ writer Lee Gomeswrites about Jonathan Abrams' goal to 'deliver on the financial promise' of the seven million users and counting ofthe Friendster SNS. In his commentary Mr. Gomes relates a number of premium services that Jonathan Abrams hopes to foldinto Friendster's bag of tricks.

Is Mr. Abrams desire to become a 'Premium' Social Networking 'Portal' Service like a Friendster + 'Amazon'ster +'Classmate'ster + 'Evite'ster realistic?

Will Friendster's current hiring 'friend'zy [that we have been chatting about here on the Social Software Weblog] help toimprove scale sufficiently? And, in time to keep their current Friendsters happy and the membership numbersgrowing?
 
Lee Gomes observes that if you get 'too big' you start to look like the 'real world' which ain't always such a'friendster'ly place… ]-:=
 
[The Related Links entry for this WSJ article can only be viewed if you are a WSJ OnlineSubscriber.]

Srikumar S. Rao teaches a course at Columbia Business School B9601-050 - Creativity andPersonal Mastery. [on the 'course description' page that I link to above, and in the Related Linksbelow, you will find a link to a fifty-six page PDF syllabus for this course.]

I was intrigued by New York Times writer Amy Wu's description of this unique business and social ethics forum in her' Biz school not the same'article reprinted yesterday in the San Mateo County Times.
 
Professor Rao's class has thefeel of a Friendster forum according to Ms. Wu. What caught my eye was the 'pay it forward' type of exercises that Raoemphasizes with his students "His style of networking includes suggesting that people help five people they admirewithout any expectation of repayment."
 
One of the requirements of Rao's class is that each student "contribute to the community." This reminded me of arecent post by my friend Dina Mehta Random Acts ofKindness - Pay it Forward. Dina's post is about a lovely act of kindness bestowed upon her by Ton Zijlstra, a member of our 'blogging community,' for Dina's one year'blogiversary' a gift of 'conversation,' to be delivered "somewhere on the web."
 
And so I started ruminating we often speak of the potential of 'Social Networking Services' really becoming usefulwhen grounded within a viable 'context.' Well here is a significant 'context' Where are the 'Pay It Forward' SocialNetworking Service offerings?

Existing? Soon to be lauched? On the drawing board?
 
Looking forward to your feedback… Have a great day… (-:=

Well, this experiment certainly takes the social phenomenon of 'Flash Mobs' to new heights! The results are in for'FlashMob I' a Flash Mob Computing event held at the University of San Francisco yesterday, April 3, 2004, to create an'Instant Supercomputer' from over 700 computers:

Results: FlashMob I was very successful and a lot of fun. Over 700 computers came into the gym and we were able to hook up 669 to the network. Our best Linpack result was a peak rate of 180 Gflops using 256 computers, however a node failed 75% through the computation. Our best completed result was 77 Gflops using 150 computers. The biggest challenge was indentifying flakely computers and determining the best configuration for running the benchmark. Each of the 669 computers ran Linpack at some point in the day.

Check out computation status board and pictures (make sure to click "Linpack Visualization" in left gutter).

BTW, over on Fast Company Now, Heath Rowis doing an awesome job of transcripting the WTF2004 sessions.

Blogging to you from David Isenberg's WTF2004 conference at the beautifulGirl Scouts [ Edith Macy] Conference Center. I have lots of bits to blog fromthis conference!
 
Heath Row just reminded me to publish my morning presentation anInternet Services Technical Support Sonnet written about some of my early Pacific Bell and subsequently SBCInternet Services knowledge/social networking efforts to stem the flow of customer dis-satifaction with early DSLTechnical Support:

the Internet supplies a useful space
in which to serve your customers real-time
and though you do not see them face-to-face
you 'feel' them in this cyber-place just fine.

now SBC was adamant about
a service level for their DSL
with agents who, at times, would scream and shout
and customers who thought they'd gone to hell.

'plan B' was what we called our 'knowledge net'
our agents built it out of faqs and stuff
it made us proud to know that we could get
good answers to our clients - not just fluff.

from 90 to 5 minutes 'wait' times fell
a 'bottom-up' support job done quite well.

[this sonnet's phrased to honor Shakespeare's rhyme
and WTF-ers in 'real time.' (-:= ]

Kudos to David Sifry and the Technorati team for their coverage in the April, 2004 edition of Enterprise Networks & Servers!

In an 'OpinionWire' the Butler Group gives both Technorati "an excellent attempt to harness the power of blogs." and "the growing power and importance of what can be broadly termed social software, which allowsindividuals to come together to form networks, based on a common interest or subject." a solid, positiveappraisal.

Bravo… (-:=

Doug McCune wrote in with a tip on:

Political Friendster is a parody of Friendster, creating connections between politicians. You can add politicians or corporations, create connections, create visual maps of political networks, etc.

Political Friendster went 'live' on March 8, 2004. As on March 26, 2004 there were 100 new 'Political-sters.' Thissite is being run by Doug McCune, from Stanford.edu, on "a really old computer I had lying around and sometimes it getsoverloaded."
 
Despite these 'physical' constraints 'Political Friendster' was chosen as the Yahoo!Picks popular pick of the day for April 1, 2004. Go Doug! (-:=

"Hilarious"… Seems to be the consensus on popdex too…
 
No YASNS is safe in zefrank's ' small world'...
 
Great rant on all things 'social networking' from Friendster, to Jonathan Abrams, to not being able to get rid offriends on Friendster, to the sometimes bizarre individual proclivities of friendsters, to friendsters who have morethan 100 friends, to Orkut's 'invitation only' policy, to Wallop's 'no one's invited' policy, to George Bush, to theBible's Book of Esther no one and nothing is sacred, and 'prose' periodically peppered with profanity - so don'tclick on 'small world' in the Related Links below [or the link above!] if easily offended… 0-:=
 
This rant ends with: "In my version of Friendster, you'd have to pick me up from the airport, or at least lend memoney, before I'd let you in."

Thanks to Peter Caputa for the tip… (-:=

Ryan Naraine reports that SNS Ecademy's Julian Bond has received a cease-and-desist order

with a warning that the creation of a news feed from the results of Google News was against its terms of reference.

According to Bond, the company requested the removal of RSS-powered Google News headlines from his Ecademy business networking site and made it clear Webmasters are not allowed to display headlines from Google News on third-party sites.

Bond goes on to express his disappointment with Google's failure to embrace RSS. Ryan Naraine points out that:

many in the content syndication space view Google's reluctance to embrace RSS as a strategic move to boost the competing Atom format, Bond thinks the company has simply not gotten around to adding syndication to the news portal.

...Google, through its Blogger service, has ditched RSS in favor of Atom syndication format but critics argue that the availability of competing formats is scaring away mainstream adoption of RSS.

In March this year, Dave Winer, the co-author of the RSS format proposed a merger between the two formats, insisting "it's time to bury the hatchet and move on."