The Data Retention Act, as you will know from previous posts requires Communications Providers, when requested, to store information concerning voice calls, emails and potentially Instant Messages sent and received by its customers.
I learned yesterday that this will not apply to IM services of companies such as Facebook that are defined as “information society services”. This does tend to make the whole Act an absurdity in my book. Also what happens when Google launches VoIP in the UK? Is Google an information society service?
It would be interesting to understand how the reg will apply to P2P services such as Skype? I’m sure I must have been told sometime.
Notwithstanding anyone’s particular feelings about the suitability of the Pirate Duck as a technology blog post it is worth looking at what has happened since it first hit the ether yesterday afternoon.
The Facebook group Save The Pirate Duck hit 50 members the same evening. Now, 24 hours after the group was started, it has 120 members (up by 7 since I started writing this post). The group has 10 wall posts and one video link.
Pressure group, Pirate Duck People’s Coalition, has also set up an online petition urging Prime Minister Gordon Brown to help save the duck. So far there are 5 signatures and I’m sure this number will increase further – it is only a matter of time.
I have also had a request by a prominent radio station to field a spokesman for an upcoming investigative special this weekend. More details on this once it is firmed up.
Clearly democracy is flexing its muscles here and the power of the internet is being used to promote the will of the people. Anyone wishing to contribute their time, money or simply expressions of support should joing the Facebook group and sign the petition.
Also constructive ideas on how to track down the perpetrators of the crime are welcome as hitherto the team’s investigative efforts have drawn a blank and the duck remains firmly ducknapped.
Unified Communications ’09 is on next week at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. I anticipate there will be 70 or so businesses there pitching their wares, including Timico subsidiary KeConnect which has a joint stand with Cisco.
UC09 is a business to business show. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in the consumer world UC is racing ahead of what is typically available to business. Lets look at my son’s radio programme as an example.
Tom, as regular readers of this blog will know, has his own weekend breakfast show on Siren FM, a local community radio station in my home town of Lincoln (England). He has a website and a Facebook home page. The Wake Up To The Weekend homepage has 318 fans as I write and each show gets around 100 listener contacts/interactions.
Tom’s listeners are by and large teenagers in the Lincoln area. They listen to his show on their laptops whilst lying in bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings. When they want to conatct the show to request a song or enter a competition they send an IM via Facebook, or leave a message on the show’s wall.
Listeners also communicate via SMS and email. I doubt that many make phone calls but if Facebook had an embedded voip client then this would overcome a teenager’s cost objections to talking. The radio presenter could then escalate an IM request to a voice call – to talk to the winner of a competition for example. The show can also post photos, videos and recordings of bands they have had in the studio on the Facebook page.
So where is this leading to? For radio show read business. Companies are more and more going to have to move into this space. Corporate websites are going to change to reflect Facebook and Twitter-type functionality and begin to interact with their customers in real time in new ways.
Integration of a corporate communications strategy with Twitter has already been shown to be highly effective. Initially the domain of large corporates, smaller companies should easily embrace it. Customer care and marketing teams will sit “on the internet”. I anticipate doing this at Timico sooner rather than later.
As a footnote Tom’s biggest fan, me aside, is a person in Lincoln named Les. Les enters every one of Tom’s competitions and has frequent interactions with the show. Looking at his picture on the Facebook site it can be seen that Les is in fact probably in his sixties. This then is not just the domain of the teenager!
PS if anyone is at UC 09 and wants to meet up drop me a line.
The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.
New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.
TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?
JP: Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.
Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.
I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.
TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?
JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.
I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.
TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?
JP: The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)
TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?
JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.
TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world
JP: It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.
TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?
JP: Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.
TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.
Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .
The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.
New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.
TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?
JP: Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.
Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.
I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.
TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?
JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.
I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.
TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?
JP: The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)
TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?
JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.
TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world
JP: It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.
TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?
JP: Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.
TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.
Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .
As 2009 evolves it is becoming much clearer where the world of Unified Communications is going. UC has always meant different things to different people. Yesterday I saw it move on with the Twitter coverage of SocComm.
What is now becoming obvious that we are moving to a world where everything interoperates with everything else. A bit of a generalisation and very dramatic I know but anyone expecting to be a player in communications markets in the future needs to have an open approach to doing business.
So vendors traditionally associated with fairly closed UC plays, such as Nortel, Cisco and Microsoft need to make it easy to integrate their tools with new kids on the block such as Facebook and Twitter. They are all moving towards this slowly. Timico is in the middle of a major platform upgrade with its Nortel UC capability and the new offering will optionally enable Instant Messaging with other networks such as MSN, jabber, yahoo etc.
It is only a short hop then to see Nortel soft clients embedded in Facebook (they already do this with traditional business tools such as Outlook and Lotus Notes), Facebook profiles and Twitter feeds embedded in corporate websites and vice versa and wall posts embedded wherever you care to embed them (plasma display on the fridge?!).
There was a time when I thought that the world of UC would be dominated by a few giant players. Now, we are seeing that new companies can easily develop applications that sit well with existing systems. 2009 is looking like a year of accelerated integration and I think that the phrase Unified Communications is already dead on it’s feet because I don’t think it adequately describes what is actually happening.
As 2009 evolves it is becoming much clearer where the world of Unified Communications is going. UC has always meant different things to different people. Yesterday I saw it move on with the Twitter coverage of SocComm.
What is now becoming obvious that we are moving to a world where everything interoperates with everything else. A bit of a generalisation and very dramatic I know but anyone expecting to be a player in communications markets in the future needs to have an open approach to doing business.
So vendors traditionally associated with fairly closed UC plays, such as Nortel, Cisco and Microsoft need to make it easy to integrate their tools with new kids on the block such as Facebook and Twitter. They are all moving towards this slowly. Timico is in the middle of a major platform upgrade with its Nortel UC capability and the new offering will optionally enable Instant Messaging with other networks such as MSN, jabber, yahoo etc.
It is only a short hop then to see Nortel soft clients embedded in Facebook (they already do this with traditional business tools such as Outlook and Lotus Notes), Facebook profiles and Twitter feeds embedded in corporate websites and vice versa and wall posts embedded wherever you care to embed them (plasma display on the fridge?!).
There was a time when I thought that the world of UC would be dominated by a few giant players. Now, we are seeing that new companies can easily develop applications that sit well with existing systems. 2009 is looking like a year of accelerated integration and I think that the phrase Unified Communications is already dead on it’s feet because I don’t think it adequately describes what is actually happening.
Completely unscientific but as a rule of thumb there are typically 10% of my Facebook friends online at any given time. Except for early in the morning, anecdotally this stacks up with what others have said as well.
I am online for most of my waking hours though not necessarily always on Facebook. Assuming I am on 16 hours a day, which is a bit of a stretch but not wildly off the mark this suggests that my friends are typically on Facebook for around 1 1/2 hours a day.
I’m not always active when I am online, of course.
Unix Time reaches a milestone in history next week as it hits 1,234,567,890. For those millions of readers of this blog who don’t know what I am talking about (ie most of them I’m sure) Unix Time started at midnight on January 1st 1970 and represents the number of seconds since then.
Unix Time is a way of storing time information on a computer. It isn’t without its issues. For example back in 1970 the boffins chose 32bits as a size of number to represent Unix time in machine code. Unfortunately this means that Unix Time hits the ceiling, ie runs out, in 2038.
This could well lead to another bout of hysteria akin to Y2K with many Unix computers expected to run into problems.
Anyway the point of this blog post is not to worry you too much about what will happen 29 years hence but to celebrate the number. Party animals can join in the fun at the Event on Facebook . Pseudo geeks amongst us can read more here. Real geeks will already know all they need to know.
I was originally going to post this on Friday 13th but I figured some of you would want to know in advance.
I have just been to one of Jeff Pulver’s breakfasts and was completely bowled over with how effective his networking techniques are. Jeff, as he told us in his speech, is naturally a very shy person. It’s taken me ten years to realise this. In order to overcome his shyness he has developed a technique for getting conversation going.
This involves sticking bits of paper on yourself with a statement about you that is meant to be an ice-breaker. The person you are talking to, during the course of your chat, writes a comment on a small piece of sticky paper and sticks it on a label that you have positioned on your chest, and vice versa. This can be somewhat awkward if that person is a she but hey ho. The sticky note effectively works like the “wall” on Facebook
The point of these breakfasts is not to learn how to network though. Apart from Jeff, who I already know, I didn’t meet a single person who might be described as shy. Everyone there was an entrepreneur and interested in how the whole Social Networking technology movement, if I can call it that is going to change the way we work.
I can’t say I have all the answers although I am working on it. What I did pick up on though was Jeff’s comment regarding the death of the email. He has a point. Most of the younger generation (Y), me included of course, now communicate more by IM and the use of sites such as Facebook than by email.
The Timico Network Operations Centre is not at the Newark HQ and during the day I will have many conversations with the team via IM. In fact I probably only use email to open tickets to get specific jobs done. The team is largely always online whatever the time of day.
This is so much the case that if there are any developers out there working on IM products can I suggest that we need to be able to drag and drop IM conversations into folders. This is how I store emails for later retrieval. I’m not going to patent this idea (it wasn’t mine originally anyway). Consider it to be my contribution to the open source movement 🙂 .
Many photos were taken during the breakfast so I’ll see if I can get hold of one. I have to say though as a breakfast it was a complete failure. I was too busy talking to eat anything 🙂
I have just been to one of Jeff Pulver’s breakfasts and was completely bowled over with how effective his networking techniques are. Jeff, as he told us in his speech, is naturally a very shy person. It’s taken me ten years to realise this. In order to overcome his shyness he has developed a technique for getting conversation going.
This involves sticking bits of paper on yourself with a statement about you that is meant to be an ice-breaker. The person you are talking to, during the course of your chat, writes a comment on a small piece of sticky paper and sticks it on a label that you have positioned on your chest, and vice versa. This can be somewhat awkward if that person is a she but hey ho. The sticky note effectively works like the “wall” on Facebook
The point of these breakfasts is not to learn how to network though. Apart from Jeff, who I already know, I didn’t meet a single person who might be described as shy. Everyone there was an entrepreneur and interested in how the whole Social Networking technology movement, if I can call it that is going to change the way we work.
I can’t say I have all the answers although I am working on it. What I did pick up on though was Jeff’s comment regarding the death of the email. He has a point. Most of the younger generation (Y), me included of course, now communicate more by IM and the use of sites such as Facebook than by email.
The Timico Network Operations Centre is not at the Newark HQ and during the day I will have many conversations with the team via IM. In fact I probably only use email to open tickets to get specific jobs done. The team is largely always online whatever the time of day.
This is so much the case that if there are any developers out there working on IM products can I suggest that we need to be able to drag and drop IM conversations into folders. This is how I store emails for later retrieval. I’m not going to patent this idea (it wasn’t mine originally anyway). Consider it to be my contribution to the open source movement 🙂 .
Many photos were taken during the breakfast so I’ll see if I can get hold of one. I have to say though as a breakfast it was a complete failure. I was too busy talking to eat anything 🙂
Found another domain parasite today, if that is the right word. I was going onto www.facebook.com and typed in www.faceook.com by mistake. It takes you to a site completely unrelated to facebook that is just trying to make money out of click-throughs.
Actually there is nothing illegal about this and I suppose there is a limit to how many derivatives of your own domain it makes sense to register. I’ve registered a few for this site – 10 or so as I recall, but mostly just the suffix variants, .net, .org, etc.
trefor.com and trefor.co.uk would have gone when DNS first appeared. Trefor is a village in Wales and a solid Welsh Christian name (Huw Trefor Davies for those who want to know my full moniker). In fact the name Trefor is derived from tref (Welsh word for “town”) and or (Welsh for “from”). There you go. You learn lots of useful bits of information on this site:-) .
I considered myself very lucky to find that trefor.net was not taken last year. Someone must have not renewed it. The roll of the dice…
Next week I will be attending a Social Networking Breakfast organised by Jeff Pulver in London. For those of you that don’t know him Jeff was one of the pioneers of VoIP and ran the Voice On The Net conferences (VON). VoIP is mainstream these days and Jeff has shifted his focus to Social Networking.
Being a user of sites such as Facebook and Twitter I am a strong believer that the structures underlying what might be called the whole “social networking phenomenom” will server the business world well. This is why I am attending the breakfast. I want to understand how best to use these tools to further my business interests.
This is despite the “not for business use” stance of Facebook. The interesting thing for me is that you can use Facebook to build relationships and get a message across without having to sell. In fact one of the things I like about Facebook is that I don’t feel I am being sold to. I don’t mind the notionally well targeted ads (I keep getting pitched singles dating agency ads though which as far as I know is not good targeting 🙂 ).
I am quite happy to mix personal friends, customers, suppliers and business colleagues as friends on Facebook. After all people do business with people.
As for next week this is an open event. It is being held at the Institute Of Contemporary Arts, 12 Carlton Terrace, London between 9am and 12 midday. Jeff would I’m sure appreciate advance notice of attendance and you can register your interest at this Facebook Event Notification.
For those of you who can’t go don’t worry. I’ll report back although it won’t be the same as being there.
PS I first met Jeff at one of his VoIP industry Executive Summits at Cannes in theSouth of France. It must have been around 1998/99 and was my first foray into VoIP for my then employer. I recall sitting down for three days just writing page after page of acronyms for decoding later. I don’t anticipate the same problem next week.
I would be writing this from my Caribbean beach home if I were really any good at predictions. Having said that there are a few macro level changes I think will happen in our industry that are worth putting down as reference points. Some of these might be considered obvious but are none the less valid – they will be high profile in 2009.
Facebook will come of age as a business tool as well as a social networking website. Linked-In will struggle to keep up with Facebook. Twitter will gain in strength.
The use of web based conferencing and collaboration will grow significantly in the face of the economic downturn and the need to cut costs.
The ISP industry will see some big consolidations. In the UK the Big 6 will become the Big 4.
Mobile VoIP will become mainstream for business.
The ISP industry and the Music industry will finally get together to combat illegal P2P downloading.
Liverpool will win the Premiership.
6 predictions are enough. It reduces the chances of getting it wrong 🙂 .
I would be writing this from my Caribbean beach home if I were really any good at predictions. Having said that there are a few macro level changes I think will happen in our industry that are worth putting down as reference points. Some of these might be considered obvious but are none the less valid – they will be high profile in 2009.
Facebook will come of age as a business tool as well as a social networking website. Linked-In will struggle to keep up with Facebook. Twitter will gain in strength.
The use of web based conferencing and collaboration will grow significantly in the face of the economic downturn and the need to cut costs.
The ISP industry will see some big consolidations. In the UK the Big 6 will become the Big 4.
Mobile VoIP will become mainstream for business.
The ISP industry and the Music industry will finally get together to combat illegal P2P downloading.
Liverpool will win the Premiership.
6 predictions are enough. It reduces the chances of getting it wrong 🙂 .
Animoto is a company that takes your digital photos and turns them into a slideshow whilst adding music as a backdrop. Their platform employs an algorithm that analyses the content/colours in a photo and applies what it deems to be a suitable soundtrack.
The product looks pretty cool. I understand that their principal claim to fame is that when Animoto was launched on Facebook the demand was such that their use of virtual machines went from around 30 to 4,000 within 48 hours.
If true, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, this illustrates the power of Web2.0. Most Facebook applications of course disappear into obscurity but this type of success story is what keeps people developing.
It’s also what makes me keep playing golf. One good shot…
I’m not a sad person, I like to believe, but I do seem to spend an awful lot of my time on the PC. I don’t play computer games. Typically I work, though the type of work that I do in the evening is different to what I do durng the day in the office. I like my job.
Tonight I have spent reading market research briefs and checking out some fixed mobile solutions on the internet. I also note that Facebook is trying to buy Twitter. I use Twitter to update my facebook status via sms. In checking out my facebook homepage I note that 12 out of 108 of my friends are online too.
I’m not a maniacal collecter of friends. Ten percent, if extrapolated across the whole population, is a huge number of people online. My son Tom has 381 friends and he claims to know them all in person. Without prying this would suggest that around 40 of them were online at any time. I’d like to bet that the number in his generation Y case is a lot higher.
I’m also watching Manchester United play against Villareal on the TV. Of the 6 people in our house five have a PC. The youngest is 8 and he is the lone unfortunate without one. On the arm of the chair next to me is my Nokia E Series mobile phone which also has email. The phone also has wifi and I use it to browse the internet when my laptop is switched off.
My electricity bill is huge. I am glad to say that they don’t allow mobile phones at Lincoln Golf Club.
There’s a great deal in the online media this morning regarding Facebook’s need to raise more cash. The site is apparently uploading between 2 and 3 Terrabytes of photos a day.
That’s roughly 3 million one MegaByte pictures. Users are also downloading the photos at a rate of 300,000 pictures a second!!
In order to host this growing online album Facebook is looking to buy 50,000 servers this coming year. It’s not just the cost of the servers. 50,000 of them will probably use up 1,250 or so racks and consume in the region of 2.5Megawatts of power.
That’s a big rent bill as well as the cost of power and cooling – currently retailing at 18 pence per KiloWattHour in London Docklands. All this has to be paid for by online advertising in what must at the moment be a declining market.
I’m not saying that Facebook is shaky. In fact in my view the application is a serious winner. This is though a warning to all IT managers out there about the rising cost of storage. I don’t think Moore’s Law is keeping up with rise in data.
It is also a warning to make sure that you are dealing with a partner that is on solid financial footing. If you are looking for offsite storage solutions, and most are these days, choose a partner that is not as vulnerable to the fluctuations in the stock market, has plenty of cash in the bank and low or no debt.
A very interesting report on the uses of Social Networking has just been published. The report, entitled “Network Citizens, Power And Responsibility At Work” was commissioned by Orange and written by Peter Bradwell and Richard Reeves of Demos.
The report highlights the tensions that exist between use of Social Networking for social and work purposes. I have very much seen these tensions in Timico where some people are reluctant to mix work and home life which is the inevitable consequence of using websites such as Facebook.
My view is that it is going to happen in anycase and that we should embrace the technology sooner rather than later. You can download a copy of the report using this link network_citizens1.
If you want to interact with me by all means hook up on Facebook – my username is Trefor Davies. At Twitter I am Trefor.
I mentioned that I would chart the progress of the “Save Lincoln Theatre Royal” Facebook Group. The diagram below shows the membership growth over the past 12 days.
I’m not saying this is a stellar recruitment campaign nor making any point other than an observation on how this particular effort is going. The Group has however been publicised on BBC Radio Lincolnshire and its exposure is increasing.
What seems clear from the Group membership is that the demographics of Facebook are still squarely set with the younger generation.
What is also interesting is the difficulty I have had in recruiting Facebook friends from the UK ITSP community for the ITSPA Group – currently standing at 16 members after a few weeks of trying.
ITSPA is a closed group with membership by invitation only. However this is still slow progress. Most company representatives in the ITSPA world are in their thirties or forties I would guess and likely not comfortable in the Web2.0 space.
The more I play with websites such as Facebook the more I find out. Initially I couldn’t see the sensible use of Twitter. The selling pitch to me was that it provided someone who was sat in a closed meeting with the ability to send messages that could be broacast to the outside world from their mobile phone. I didn’t really get this.
Now i have found out that I can use Twitter in conjunction with Facebook. When I send a SMS to Twitter it not only posts the message on Twitter but also as a status change on Facebook. For me it is easier to do it this way than to use the Facebook mobile upload.
I have used the Facebook means of uploading photos from my mobile – I just send an MMS message to a Facebook address and hey presto the photo appears in my profile.
This is all technology that now looks useful for business purposes. The Twitter SMS service, if embedded in my company intranet might be a secure way of me sending out messages whilst on the move (ok I can email it but Twitter can be programmed to send the same message as an SMS to other mobiles). I could say the same thing for the photo upload. This adds to the flexibility of business communications and who knows what it will evolve to.
I don’t know if businesses will use Facebook in anger or whether they will demand closed websites that are specific to their use. This is to some extent possible with Facebook already but would I trust my secure business data to Facebook? Probably not yet. Still the ride is exciting.
Well I have been bowled over by an application that I saw today for the first time on Facebook. I was responding to an invite of an old friend Carl Ford to attend an online conference call on Alec Saunders’ Squawkbox. The subject was “deploying globally, regulated locally”.
Regulatory stuff isn’t really what turns me on but the exciting bit was the Calliflower application that was being used to host the call. This an online conferencing app that can be buried in facebook. You use the web interface to see who is online, their pictures and put your hand up when you want to say something.
The great thing was that you could also use your facebook interface to send IMs to people on the call and to write wall posts in real time.
This is a great example of what is coming along in the web2.0/voip2.0 world. The application wasn’t perfect. You either called in using Truphone or Skype or used a paid for number in the USA or France. However as an example of what can be done it was brilliant.
Immediately after the call I set up my own call (in seconds) and had a play with it with a colleague Dean Bruce. You could even press a record button and download the conference to your pc when it had all ended.
Now I’m not quite sure yet how this is going to be monetised and there are quite a few missing features compared with some commercial “Meet Me” and collaboration services such as those provided by Cisco/Webex and Nortel. Integration with your company systems, video and collaboration to name but a few.
However Dean and I walked away from the office in quite a state of excitement. It must have been because I was going home for my tea :-). Check it out on http://apps.facebook.com/calliflower/.
If you aren’t in facebook go to http://www.calliflower.com/Index.html.
