Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: social networking (Page 1 of 3)

Gluecon 2010: A Chat With Objectivity About ‘InfiniteGraph’

InfiniteGraph-logo On the second day of the Glue conference, somehow I was Johnny-on-the-spot for breakfast, despite the activities of the night before. (No, I did not participate in the hackathon — they didn't want no stinking bloggers.)  Schmoozing over coffee and rolls around the vendor tables, I ran into my buddy Dave Fauth, who was chatting with Warren Davidson, director of biz dev at Objectivity, about their new InfiniteGraph database. The company describes it as "the distributed graph database for the cloud and beyond." I decided to pull out my handy-dandy recorder (Olympus LS-10) and do a quick interview.
InfiniteGraph-diagram

So, let's say you want to build the next big social networking platform, or have a project involving scientific research, intelligence, or a personalized Internet service platform. Then, bucko, you'll want to take a look at this "distributed, scalable, enterprise-ready, high-performance graph database solution" that enables (…deep breath…) "leading-edge innovation and real-time discovery of multi-dimensional relationships and answers from vast volumes of distributed and complex data."  Seriously, this is cool stuff. The company just announced, on day one of Glue, the availability of InfiniteGraph in beta….

Download or listen to Graeme's interview with Objectivity about InfiniteGraph (MP3)"


Anticipating Defrag….

Getting excited about the Defrag conference, kicking off this Sunday evening in Denver. Once again, Eric Norlin and his colleagues who originally conceived this event (including VC Brad Feld) have planned a wonderful conference program, and again attracted a stellar group — coming off a blowout successful first-year event a year ago. Defrag2008-logo
(I wrote about the inaugural version extensively: here's an index of my Defrag 2007 posts. Actually, I believe it was the last event I live-blogged, versus the live-Twittering approach I've adopted since for my conference reporting. Why has Twitter just sort of taken over?) And, with this year's advisory board including people like Esther Dyson (of PC Forum fame) and Chris Shipley (of DEMO fame), how could this not be another fantastic conference?

Last year's experience was so great in every way that I took to describing it as basically like a religious experience. I was in awe hobnobbing with so many luminaries and big thinkers. I also got to connect again with many of my friends from the early days of the Internet — Doc Searls, Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Steve Larsen, and others.  I love my (younger) friend Aaron Fulkerson's testimonial comment about Defrag 2007, used on the current web site: "The
event had quite the attendee and speakers
list. You couldn’t spit and not
hit an industry notable."
 
It was an amazing group — all told, about 300. The collective intelligence in the room was unlike
anything I've ever experienced, and the program, keynotes, and
discussions — both the panels and the informal variety — were
off-the-charts valuable and thought-provoking.  There was just this energy level that I can't fully describe…that we were about to collectively imagine the future of the Internet, the social web, a whole new level of collaboration. You had to be there.

And you should be there this year! It's not too late, and I even have a juicy discount code posted in my sidebar to the right. [Shhh, don't tell anybody.  I'm not sure I'm supposed to be offering that to all my blog readers — but what the hell! Maybe Eric Norlin won't read this… 🙂 ] The best way to get the real skinny about what's in store this year is to check out the Defrag blog, which Eric writes so well. The man has a gift for storytelling. And, of course, check out the list of stellar speakers…and the great agenda. This conference is packed with aha moments and extreme takeaways.

What's also cool is that there are three speakers from my home state of Minnesota. Rich Hoeg of Honeywell, whom I met at our "Minnebar" BarCamp event this past spring, will be speaking about social search in the corporate environment, and Connie Bensen, a community strategist now working with Network Solutions, will be on a panel about "making the social web." Oneplace_logo
And I'm especially looking forward to a panel on "Re-imagining
the metaphors behind collaborative
tools
," which includes my friend Steve Kickert of Minnesota's own Riverock Technologies, who'll be talking about his very cool, just released from beta OnePlace™ online team collaboration and work management system. 
These guys are some amazing developers, and this thing rocks. (I know — I use it!) You can catch some buzz about OnePlace™ just starting to appear here and here. [Full disclosure: I'm a consultant to Steve's company.]

Want to see who else you'll be able to hobnob with in this intimate setting?  Check out this blog post that lists just some of the many companies attending.  People, I'm tellin' ya, this is a heavy-duty crowd!  Want to read a great rundown on what your two-day experience will be like at Defrag?  Check out this blog post, which will give you "a sense of what you'll encounter" at this great conference.

I really hope you can make it to Defrag. See you in Denver!

GSP+ETech=A Damn Good Week in San Diego

Despite the fact that I lost my voice halfway through my three days in San Diego (some weird cold thing I picked up), the two O’Reilly events this week were definitely worth attending. I say that even though I wasn’t able to participate as much as I would have liked. Certainly, the networking suffered. I haven’t figured out how to do that without talking yet… 🙂 Gspwest08banner

I did live-Twitter the sessions I sat in on, capturing all the nuggets you can likely handle. If you’d like to see those, just go to my Twitter page. For Graphing Social Patterns, scroll back to March 3 and 4. For ETech, scroll to the March 5 tweets.  I must have written 150 or more total for both events. And there were some darn good speakers and panels, which I captured as best I could (in the requisite sound-bite form).

GSP was Monday and Tuesday, while ETech was Tuesday, Wednesday, and
Thursday. But I only covered ETech on Wednesday, which I had previously
determined was the most interesting day from my perspective.  I definitely wanted to
be at GSP on Tuesday, and I skipped ETech on Thursday for a couple of reasons: to go back home to San Clemente so my voice could recover, and to avoid another expensive hotel night. Etechlobby

I also posted some 118 photos to Flickr in two sets: GSP pix here and ETech pix here. Note that I mostly shot what I thought would be interesting to you: speaker slides, as well as shots of the speakers and panelists themselves, plus other general scenes — as opposed to posed/cutsie shots of my friends, etc… 🙂

Anyway, I found the programming at both events to be very good, and I learned a lot. Plus, I made a bunch of great contacts. (Look for that list in my next post.)  I hope you found my live-Twittering and Flickr pix interesting, at least, and (even better) useful.

‘Social DNA’: Do You Know Where Your Digital Genes Are?

You knew it had to be coming: a way to map your online social self. My god, how did we get along without this till now? Thank you, eSnips (I think). Esnipslogo
I mean, Facebook asks some questions when you create your profile there [many of them lame, certainly for adults]. And it seems to me MySpace does, too — but then I never go there anymore.  [I remember they force you to tell your age on your profile, so I went with the max they would allow: 91.] Do I need another social network now?  Well, let me think about that… 🙂  But I went through the sign-up procedure, anyway. After all, if I’m doing a post, I’d better. And it was interesting. More on that in a bit.  First, some background…

eSnips is a content-sharing site that officially launched at DEMOfall in September 2006 (my coverage). CEO Yael Elish, a veteran Internet entrepreneur, told me then that her site lets "everyday people share content in one place, without having to manage so many accounts."  She said then that it was about sharing, publishing, and even selling your creative work — and was all free. At that time, eSnips offered 1GB of free space, but that’s now been upped to 5GB. Traffic to the site appears to be growing nicely when viewed at Alexa.

So, what’s this new wrinkle of "Social DNA" all about?  From today’s press release:

A key premise of Web 2.0 services is the ability to discover like-minded people through common friends or tags. eSnips Social DNA takes this ability to the next level by matching people with others who resemble them most based on hundreds or thousands of common defined aspects of their lives. It’s done through a series of fun, creative and often intriguing 1-2 minute online quizzes across multiple topics (referred to as Social Genes).

The multiple-choice quizzes are just one type of “Social Gene” that makes up a user’s Social DNA.  The other type is a List, where users can express their musical, literary, cinematic and even dietary preferences.  A List can express personal favorites in a more diverse way than a Quiz, which is why a mixture of both is essential to get comprehensive Social DNA results.

Immediately upon answering the first question, users get exposed to others who responded like them.  As they continue the quiz, the matches change until eventually a user only sees the highest scoring matches. They also can see how their answers compared to rest of the population, shown through a uniqueness score and set of graphs. Upon completing a quiz, users can quickly and easily create a fun widget to post on their website or blog.

Here’s a screenshot of the page I got after I went through my first quiz, in the category of Business & Technology.
I chose the Web 2.0 quiz (natch). As you can see, only 30% answered like me, so I’m "in the minority" — how special! This is just one quiz of many I could have done.  I didn’t count how many quizzes there were, but I’m assuming there would have to be hundreds, eventually, anyway. [Note the service is, of course, labeled beta — what isn’t?] Esnipsresultspg_2

My take after going through one quiz is that the questions were a bit trivial — even silly. I think eSnips is trying too hard to be funny, in an attempt to make the process fun (which of course it has to be).  I just question the scientific nature of all this, I guess, if there is any.  Should there be?  More than a few of the questions didn’t offer an answer that I liked.  Nonetheless, I think this Social DNA concept is fascinating, and I have no doubt that eSnips users — mostly all younger than me — will eat it up.  Why?  Because it plays right into the powerful need to get your online profile "just right."  I heard a stat last week that active social networkers are spending up to an hour a week on average fiddling with their profile.  This will enable them to go nuts like on no other site I know!  If you’re into finding/discovering people online (can you say dating?), this will be a very engaging and "sticky" feature for eSnips. I think it’s bound to boost traffic to the site, bigtime.  It will be interesting to watch that play out over the next weeks and months.

Andreessen: Any Site Can Now Be a ‘Social App’

You say you’re feeling down, bunky, because everyone seems to have a Facebook app but you?  Well, got a web site?  Then, perk up, son!  Because you are well on your way to having a social app — one that’ll actually run on a whole bunch of social networking sites that have at least as much traffic as Facebook — and maybe even on Facebook itself soon. At least that’s what Marc Andreessen, founder of social-networking platform Ning, has to say on his blog post today.

It’s all thanks to the "Open Social" spec set to be announced tomorrow by Google, which says it already has about a dozen partners, including Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning,
Friendster, Salesforce.com, and Oracle. See this Wall Street Journal story (actually dated tomorrow!) and this one in the New York Times, which was published today.

So, how can you transform your web site into an "Open Social" app?  Andreessen says it’s even easier than developing a Facebook app. He says you "just take your current HTML and Javascript front-end pages and create a version of those pages that use the Open Social API."

Andreessen believes web site owners will soon begin maintaining multiple sets of front-end pages for their web sites, in order to get "maximum distribution across the largest number of users." And he says it’s easy. They’ll have a single back-end, but multiple sets of front-end pages.  Here’s how he defines what those multiple sets will be:

• One set of standard HTML and Javascript pages for consumption by normal web browser.
• Another set of HTML and Javascript pages that use the Open Social API’s Javascript calls for consumption with Open Social containers/social networks.
• A third set of pages in FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that use Facebook’s proprietary APIs for consumption within Facebook as a Facebook app.
• Perhaps a fourth set of pages adapted for the Apple iPhone and/or other mobile devices.

"The overwhelming good news here," said Andreessen in his blog post, "is that these pages can all be served and serviced by the same back end code."

I think this "Open Social" spec is big news.  It’s something I know a lot of insiders have been been thinking about, at least in the back of their minds, since the Facebook juggernaut took off some five months ago.  Walled gardens — proprietary platforms — just don’t last on the Internet. Like my buddy PXLated said in a previous comment, "The Internet just routes around ’em."  Indeed.  Let the party begin….

UPDATE (11/1):  Marc Andreessen did another very informative blog post with a screen cast and screenshots showing how the Open Social spec can be implemented, using three actual Ning social networks as examples.

 

 

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