barryjogorman

Interesting piece from Fiona McCann in today’s Irish Times, ”on facebook“.

Would agree fully that Facebook has changed (and devalued) meaning of friends.   Much of what Fiona says rings true with me – as someone who spends a fair amount of time blogging, twittering and updating facebook.  Her comments would also be well received by many of those who are actually my friends.

Many of us set out  to use FaceBook for the personal stuff, sites such as linkedin for the business networking, with twitter and our blogs potentially reaching across both.  However, even within this, there is inevitable overlap between personal and business.  And Facebook wants the business stuff anyway!

Many people also waster a great deal of time working to update their various sites/ presences – with material which is of very little interest and/ or benefit to themselves or the reader.  There was a an excellent piece recently by Dion Hinchcliffe 12 Rules For Bringing ‘Social’ To Your Business.

I think one of the other interesting areas in all of this is bringing the various islands of social networks together.  Much of this is being pioneered out of DERI in Galway.  Projects such as SIOC spring to mind.
Comments certainly make a lot of sense.  As of now do not have all the answers.

The offerings are global – and available (Amazon, Google, Salesforce, etc.).  There are attractions particularly in terms of avoiding major capital expenditure, scaling the infrastructure investment as demand for the business application grows. The 'private cloud' is now also an option.  There are concerns – how do I pick the right vendor, will it prove expensive in the long run?  However it seems to me that for a country like Ireland and for entrepreneurs here trying to build out businesses to kickstart our serious challenged economy, cloud computing offers a great way to push forward, with limited capital outlay but all the scalability to build web/ global business.

Dion Hinchcliffe's well thought out piece provides a more comprehensive list of some of the pros & cons.  Time to move forward.

Dion Hinchcliffe's talk at web 2.0 Europe

Dion reflects on the impact of 4 year's of web 2.0.  He focuses on the move from 'push' to 'pull' systems.  But much of the question is our readiness/ willingness to embrace and exploit the opportunity.

• Who creates the value? (The network)

• How much control do we have over our businesses?

• How intellectual property works (creative commons…)?

• Increases in transparency e..g in supply chain

• Product development – we get that our customers tell us …but how do we listen to '000's of customers?

• Operations – cloud computing

• Customer service

Interesting to think about the value proposition that is the data companies now.  Would point business towards the unclaimed classes of data.

Dion Hinchcliffe, in his recent blog Enterprise 2.0 industry matures as businesses grapple with its potential, captures the essence of much of the change – and the associated issues – involving web 2.0.  Interesting commentary – we have the IT department led web 2.0 initiatives and we have the ‘bottom up’ approach weherby user communities initiate use of web 2.0 products.  Doubtless (1) this will lead to some of the usual interaction between IT and users; (2) will also raise some interesting questions about prefered software solutions and vendors in organisations.