::.. Timing ..::

:: 2003/07/17 ::

Ancient Blogs Unearthed

Anyone who has stayed up late enough at night with me, howling about injustice in the universe, has heard my woeful tale of Convey.com. This was my earliest experience 'blogging' -- although that term wasn't current in 1999 when I started using the system to publish 'Message from Edge City' -- a blog dedicated to the same junk I am interested in today.

I recently was talking to the Michael Blaber at Kubi Software regarding a (harmless if wrong) claim that IDC authored the first white paper on email-based peer-to-peer collaboration about their solution (which is cool, by the way: click here for the review of Groove and Kubi I recently wrote).

At any rate, I told Michael that I had written a review of the original Zaplet technology in my Convey.com blog. But when Convey.com went out of business, I lost all the content. That's the heartrending part.

The front page of the blog can be found at the Internet Archive: click here.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/17/2003 04:21:58 PM [link] ::
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My BlogShares have been Hijacked!

I set up my blog on Blogshares a few months ago, and didn't do anything with it. Turns out that someone has bought all the available shares (4000) in my blog except the 1000 shares I got for startup.

My blog value has gone up a lot recently: up to $ 51.32/share!

While there -- and I still don't know how to buy anything with the measley $500 I have -- I came across a reference to something potentially more interesting than the fictional blog stock market. The same folks behind blogshares are also touting BlogCoop, which looks to be a swarmocracy-based business model for the composition of cooperative businesses online.

I will be digging into what is going there, soon.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/17/2003 03:44:39 PM [link] ::
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WSJ Article re: IM Standards

Laura Lear at Jabber pointed out a WSJ Online article by Daniel Nasaw on the war for the hearts and minds of instant messaging users.

"Some analysts predict that SIP/SIMPLE, although widely seen as an inferior standard, will win due to the market strength of the companies that support it. "Most people will be moving toward SIP/SIMPLE simply because Microsoft and IBM use them," says Michael Osterman of Black Diamond, Wash. market research firm Osterman Research Inc.

Mr. Ritter thinks that both standards can become widespread, although in different arenas. While both have heavyweight support, SIP/SIMPLE's major backers -- IBM Lotus and Microsoft -- are already entrenched in the desktop instant-message market. XMPP's backers on the other hand, are well positioned to corner the emerging wireless messaging market through the development of chips and PDA-like devices."

Nasaw is right that IBM Lotus and Microsoft own the majority of the enterprise desktops today, and with their weight behind it, the largest enterprise users -- the ones putting hard cash behind their IM investments today -- are likely to support SIP/SIMPLE, although only indirectly.

XMPP is an XML based standard, more well suited to internet applications, while SIP is a telephony standard, not orginally intended for presence management at all.

I have done some recent research in the Mobile IM market (soon to be published somewhere!) and Nasaw completely forgets to mention the Wireless Village (now OMA) standard that brings up another alterntiave in that market, as well as the bewildering array of handheld operating environments.

And of course, the dark horse -- if AOL. MSN, and Yahoo can be called that -- are the public networks. If AOL came to its senses, and realized that countering Microsoft/MSN is in its best interests, it would support XMPP. Not just because it would open the door to a federated solution for business AND consumer IM, but because it could offer a real 'behind the firewall' solution for enterprise customers. IMlogic and Facetime are doing that, in a protocol neutral way.

I still maintain that the path to interoperability should not be a monopolistic dominance by one player of the IM market. But the big boys are playing high stakes, winner-takes-all poker here.

There should be a public interest group -- a user organization, not a vendor organization -- that would pressure the government to look after the public interest here. There should be a mandated interoperability between these consumer networks, for the good of the public. Maybe I'll start such a group. Lords knows I'm angry enough.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/16/2003 04:41:22 PM [link] ::
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Spoke Software: Social Sales Force Technology

Thanks to Rafe Needleman for a pointer to Spoke Software. The server is down today (perhaps because of the flood of traffic precipitated by Rafe's piece) but I intend to dig into the technology ASAP.

The company seems much more focussed that other competitors (like LinkedIn), working specifically around the sales/BD function. A good demo is available here (click the demo button).

:: Stowe Boyd 7/16/2003 11:55:20 AM [link] ::
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New A Working Model Website

I have been involved in the beta for SixApart's Typepad, and I have built a new website for A Working Model. It hasn't gotten propagated through the DNS tables yet, but you can check it out at http://stoweboyd.typepad.com/awm/.

I have bitten the bullet, and dropped the traditional brochureware style website, and moved over to a blog website for my consulting and research company. More to follow on that.

Typepad (which I have sworn not to talk about very much (although everyone seems to have broken the rules about that but me)) is pretty cool. The difficulties in transitioning from one platform to another (permalinks, etc.) mean that even if I thought TypePad was immeasureably cooler than Blogger, I would be reluctant to shift Timing to Typepad. This way I get to stay up with the advances of both offerings, which is probably better for me as a analyst, anyway.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/15/2003 11:45:52 AM [link] ::
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"Blogs in the Workplace" at the NY Times

I spoke with Bill O'Shea when he was researching this article now on-line, but I didn't do much aside from providing a few pointers, so I am not upset not to be quoted.

Its intriguing that the article's URL has a section that is "partner=USERLAND" although there doesn't seem to be an Userland ad anywhere. Hmmm....

:: Stowe Boyd 7/14/2003 02:15:44 PM [link] ::
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It's Getting Swarm In Here, So Take Off All Your Clothes

In my upcoming Darwin column (under my new byline, "Social Commentary") I introduce the term 'swarmth' to more clearly represent the concept of digital merit or reputation. The word is derived from the idea of "swarm intelligence" and is meant to be a better option than slashdot 'karma' or Corey Doctorow's 'whuffie.'

"The emergence of social order from emergent properties of merit-based social interaction is a potent self-organizing principle, and is likely to form the foundation of all adaptive social tools in the future. This principle has been named many times: in Slashdot it is called ‘karma’, and Corey Doctorow called it ‘whuffie’ (in his science fiction work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). I favor the term ‘swarmth’ because it gets at the heart of what is happening – swarm intelligence leading to filtering out the dumb, and intelligence rising to the top."

Just remember, you heard it here first!

:: Stowe Boyd 7/14/2003 01:19:08 PM [link] ::
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Make Room For Blogs

A report I wrote for Cutter entitled "Blogging: The New Face of Corporate Intelligence" has been published as "Make Room For Blogs." Oh well. You can get a copy, but only if you request guest access to the service, which is business intelligence. Click here to be interrogated.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/14/2003 09:54:31 AM [link] ::
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Oracle Getting Somewhere with Collaboration Suite?

My buddy Britton Manasco pinged me about a C/Net piece by Alorie Gilbert on Oracle: seems that at least a few folks are dropping Exchange in favor of their technology.

The earlier release was basically email, but the second release came out last month (nobody told me...) and includes "web-conferencing capabilities, including group Web browsing, online chat, desktop sharing, voice streaming, online whiteboard and playback." Sounds competitive. I will chase them down and do a review somewhere: stay posted.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/14/2003 09:37:38 AM [link] ::
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Earliest mention of "Social Tools"

I was working on my column for Darwin last week, and I dug up a piece I had written in mid 1999 about Abuzz BeeHive, a real-time expertise management system. The company was acquired by the New York Times while I was writing it. At any rate, the title was "Social Tools: Business Culture in the Post-Everything Economy" which was the first time I used the term, and I don't believe (but who can remember) that I was using a term I had seen elsewhere. Click here to view this issue of Message.

At any rate, I am interested to see if this is the first use of the term. I will snoop around.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/14/2003 09:18:45 AM [link] ::
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