A wish for corporate social software

Posted on 2012-01-12 by Jon Leirdal

I attended an IXDA meetup yesterday discussing among else “Collaborating in the stream”. Pete Lacey from Podio showed us some of their ideas regarding different communication types in different activity streams or different applications. The catch though, everything runs on their server; in the cloud.

Now personally I use the cloud for several services, and I feel that such services may be very useful and probably secure enough for me as an individual. The problem is that there are several reasons for not thrusting your corporate or business data to an external service provider. The most obvious ones are based on regulation, in Norway government entities probably will not be able to put their data on servers located outside of Norway, or worse, outside of Europe. There might be risks regarding this even for private companies, foreign governments might insist on access to data stored on servers located within their countries, either for security or legal reasons. Another issue might be the security of the information itself, other companies might be able to break into the service and gain access to your corporate information. Several security officers at different companies are also very protective of their information and data, and would never accept that anything like this should be available externally. All reasons may be resolved as the solutions and regulations evolve, but as an IT-consultant doing business right now, I would like to have the following framework available when dealing with cloud based services.

Intra-social: I need to be able to implement a copy of a cloud based social service or product internally in an organisation. Using all the normal protections and security that the different corporations demand I follow. Examples might be protected sub-groups, protecting content, firewalls, single-sign-on and so on.
Extra-social: I need to be able have a “demilitarized” version of this product available for partners and other external participants that make it possible for them to collaborate securely and share information trough the same services that the companies are using internally. These users should probably only be able to access a subset of the information available internally. I would like to be able to enforce encryption of the communication and use strong log-in features. Of course it should be possible to protect content and have access-groups here as well.
Inter-social: Now the big differentiator is the connection to open services on top of this. By using semantic technologies and other modern integration techniques I would like to intelligently be able to integrate these internal and external parts of my social software with the corresponding public service. Sharing information and collaborating on open issues should still be possible, and this would make it possible for the users to use the same tool for collaboration both internally, externally and on the open internet.

Do you have any comments? Please tell me your feelings on this below.

Posted from Oslo, Oslo, Norway.

Beware online "filter bubbles"

Posted on 2011-05-20 by Jon Leirdal

When I saw this little video on TED.com I just had to share it as quickly as possible. If you, like me, get most of your information from the Internet you should be aware of this issue. Facebook, Google, Yahoo and several other large information brokers have installed filters that optimize the information you see based on your interests and what you click. There is an issue with that. Information you probably should be aware of get filtered away, you are not even aware that it exists.

Please use a few minutes to see this video and beware online “filter bubbles”!

Photography resources

Posted on 2010-05-10 by Jon Leirdal

Most of you that know me are aware that I am a pretty eager amateur photographer. I do enjoy taking pictures enormously. So as a tribute to my “teachers” and other inspirational people/sites I thought I should give them a little shout out. Following you will find some photography resources that I have found to be very useful, interesting or informative.

This list is of course no way near complete. Please take a look and enjoy.

Podcasts/Vidcasts

Websites/Blogs/Photo galleries

Talented friends

Google Buzz

Posted on 2010-02-11 by Jon Leirdal

The Buzz is growing among us nerds. It is typical among my friends to be testing everything new I guess. This is probably an effect of our general curiosity for anything we feel is interesting. Right now Google is back in the buzzing circle, after what many consider to be an overhyping of Google Wave. Their new product Google Buzz is kind of a competition for Facebook and Twitter combined with location information. They are integrating Google Mail, Google Reader and Google Maps into the mix as well. According to their presentation video they even want to integrate Google Latitude and Google Wave into the mix later on.

My experiences so far are mixed.

The integration with Google Mail works kind of well, but it can get a bit noisy when you start discussing buzzes
I like the way they hide things that seems to be uninteresting. Their idea of showing what is important and hiding what is not is promising.
The search features combined with large numbers of messages is probably a key feature.
The integration with flickr and twitter is a starting point so far. I want to see those I follow in twitter within Buzz as well, and not only my tweets, but I understand the reasoning behind the current functionality.
The photo posting is not available on the iphone, but the feature in Google Buzz using a browser on my PC works great.
Link posting with the rich interface is not available on the iphone, but again, using a PC works great.

A web world

Posted on 2009-05-13 by Jon Leirdal

It’s kind of interesting to see the turn among most companies out there concerning the use of different software tools for different tasks. For years we have had a mentality that either you create your own monster of a solution or you customize one product from some big vendor. But since the appearance of internet and the web our world has gotten a lot more fragmented.

(All links in this post opens in new windows)

Lately the consumer market has created a feel for sites and products on the net that is not only OK to use, but “necessary” to use. I am of course talking about web based applications and social software. In other words, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, instant messaging products and other similar tools. Several companies have their own Wikis, blogs, forums and instant messaging products. Micro-blogging tools like Twitter and Yammer is also being used more and more these days.

For years we have had Open Source Software (OSS), and except for Linux and Apache not all of them have been accepted by big business. And the only reason that Linux and Apache got accepted was due to their track record and the support from some pretty large vendors, among else IBM.

Lately I have got the feeling that a lot of corporations have accepted the risk of using products with a smaller support organisation than what these corporations are used to. The acceptance of small vendors and OSS products into the suite of software used by corporations have given me as a professional both benefits and challenges.

The biggest challenge is the same as it has been for years now, integration. We need information and functionality integrated on several layers and in infinite ways. So what the big vendors do and have done for years is to create tools for us to help integrate our fragmenting world.

The increasingly complex world of tools and services always make me think of the second law of thermodynamics. Luckily we do not have a closed system; we have the opportunity to impose change and to establish ways to solve our complexity.

So, the next time you use a wiki for documenting your experiences, the next time you rate some other users post on the web, the next time you chat with a colleague or the next time you write a blog post, consider this – how do you use such information from other products and sites within your company. Are you able to use the information? Should you be able to use it? Do you want to be able to use it? And finally, if the answer is yes on any of those questions, how do you integrate your tools?

I have deliberately not mentioned search, archiving and all the other corporate necessities like reviewability, reusability, accountability and so on. Neither do I want to mention the words service oriented architecture (SOA), web services or integration platform. What I want is a world where this information is seamlessly available to me, stored indefinitely and persistently at no cost. As a professional I do not trust this, so I need to gather knowledge I have produced in such a way that it is still available to me even though the service I originally used to create this information no longer exists.

How do you do that?