Not least because I had a similar great idea a couple of years back, except I didn’t think about how cool it would be on the web.  We travel a lot where I work, and I thought a system which fed out of the travel booking system and let people know who was co-inciding would be great.  I even put up a project submission, but it was declined.  Good thing, because now we have even more incentive to use Dopplr!

I’m adding a feed of my Dopplr trips into the sidebar of the blog.  If I happen to co-incide with you, wether I know you in person or not, let me know, I may just have time to catch up for a beer and say hi!

This is something that’s been consuming my thinking recently.  I believe quite strongly that tools like Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks and others clearly represent real value for the enterprise.  But I also believe that there is a gap at the moment, the tools haven’t crossed the divide from the consumer world to the Enterprise (see my earlier post on this http://binaryplex.com/2007/05/27/what-start-ups-should-know-about-enterprises/).

I think there is a lot of evidence this is beginning to change, you only need to look at both IBM and Microsoft to see that features and tools that have evolved on the Internet are beginning to eek their way slowly into their product sets.  In some cases, there are partnerships to short-circuit their gaps, in others the big boys are starting again from scratch.

All of this has had me thinking about what does a model of the Web2.0 look like within the Enterprise.  Not what is the tool and who wrote it, but if you could design a system supported by standards (some of which exist), what is enterprise ready today, and where are the gaps.

I present my first cut of my model of Web 2.0 for the Enterprise.  I’ll take some time over the next week to post further and explain the concepts on here.  I’d love to take your feedback — I think a proper “joined up” design is what we need to work out where the gaps really are and how Enterprises want to use them. 

One simple example of the kind of joined up thinking required (not on the model funnily enough) is security - inside the enterprise I don’t want 15 different security models, or to log in repeatedly as I move between my blog and my wiki.

As I see it, the model is laid out in four parts, from bottom up:

• Services - fundamental elements that provide consistent experiences and management throughout the stack.  These are broken down into:
  • Notification Services
  • Validation Services
• Tools - the components that a pull together into a solution, they may exist discretely or combined together. These are broken down into:
  • Content Creation
  • Social Networking
  • Content Sharing
• Discovery - the “glue” that pulls it together, and often missed in the Enterprise today (how many of you have blogs without a service like Technorati to surface content and find blogs from feeds.  This is where I believe the emerging smarts are only now really starting to mature with tools like Particls, Spock and others to name a few I’ve mentioned. 
• Presentation Layer - the UI layer.  Critical for the consisten experience that the enterprise expects.

So there it is, as I say, feedback and comments welcome and appreciated — I going to expand further on this and explain the reasoning and functions behind each component in more detail, and look at what tools exist today that fill some of these gaps.

A resurgance once again in the local press about the wisdom, or lack of it, in crowds.  I’ve posted here about this a little, and that was added to very eloquently by Chris Saad of Particle who pointed out that media is additive.  There is place for both wise crowds and smart people. So what more to add to the debate? Well I was sufficiently impressed by the differences and the power of both Google Streets and Microsoft Lives Photo Synth to want to contrast them here in this context.

What’s interesting about this when it comes to the Crowds Vs. Expert debate is that both do a similar thing — street level perspectives of our world, yet they tackle the problem in different ways.

Googles view of the world in Google Streets is high quality, “expert” imagery taken presumably from a car with a special camera and then stitched together. 

Microsofts PhotoSynth uses Flickr (or presumably any photo source with a sufficiently high level of detail) to locate photos as “points” in space, pulling the wisdom of crowds to give us a point by point overview of the object in question.

Both give a very different view of the world.  Googles is a seamless experience, where you can browse from one end of the street to the other, rotate and view in any direction.  Microsofts points give an eerie overview of the object, with detail highlighted where it’s of interest and gaps where there is nothing that is worthy.

Both are amazing pieces of technology, regardless of their respective perspectives on the world.

Ultimately the power of the new web is the power of information - with Google Streets, users will be able to not only tag their favourite restauraunt, but also show a picture of its front door.  Photosynth enables a virtual tour of buildings and places and provides context to endless Flickr photos, not just on a map, but in space as well.

Crowds and experts live will together in the new world and more fool the journalist who tries to seperate the two.  To paraphrase Chris once more, the long tail of information means that there are consumers for all views of the world.

As Elias pointed out on my last post, evidence of the semantic web is emerging all around us.

I’ve had my Nokia 6233 phone for about 6 months now.  Recently I’ve been wanting to buy an iPOD, but couldn’t really justify the extra gadget just for heading to work and back.  Anyway, in conversation with someone at work, they mentioned they’d been using their Nokia phone as a music player. 

I should point out that we all have the same model of phone here, they get upgraded with our laptops every two year, so there is some excuse (it’s not like I reviewed the feature set it just landed on me), but it struck me that after 6 months there was a whole set of features in the phone I’d never explored, even when the phone could address a need I had.

Sitting down with another person with the same phone today, I was telling them how excited I was about this (I bought a 2Gb micro SD card and now have some 20 cds worth of music or more loaded up).  Sure it’s not quite the iPOD experience, but it’s a big step up from where I was at.  They didn’t know how to do it, and pulled out their phone only to find they’d configured theirs using yet another set of options I didn’t know about.

It got me thinking about how yet again, tools and software are so feature rich that it’s just difficult for one person to know how to use all aspects of it.  I once heard a quote something along the lines that each person only uses 10% of the features available to them in Microsoft Word or Excel.  The problem is that everyone uses a different 10%.

What this leads to is tools which do many things — they are feature rich, but they don’t do all of them well — leading to them being both feature rich and poor at the same time.  I call them the Rich - Poor.

The Nokia is a perfect example of this — I really love having my music on the go with me, but for listening to music, an iPOD, with its navigation features built into the device is vastly superior.  With the Nokia, I get 150 tracks in sequential or random order.  I can build play lists, but I have to do them manually on my PC first and can’t just choose to listen to “jazz” or a specific album on the go.

Another story I was reminded about was the Firefly.  This is a great example of a Poor - Rich product.  What’s fascinating about this is that the product designed for 8 - 12 year olds became popular with senior citizens in the US, because of it’s limited (and therefore easy to understand and access) feature set.  Catching on to this trend the Jitterbug quickly followed.  A simple set of features, but a depth and richness in the market because it does them well and htis one need in a clear, specific way.

In the software world, we also see this becoming clearer with the move to services and WEB 2.0.   Instead of Rich - Poor applications, we are now getting Poor - Rich services, services that a feature poor in terms of the diversity within the one application, but rich because of the complexity and ability that the service provides.

Of course it’s no suprise this trend has already started, but the next two years is going to be a facsinating time as instead of Rich - Poor apps, we get a true diversity on the Internet with Poor - Rich apps to meet every niche popping up faster and faster as services become more prolific and the tools to plug them together move to new levels of maturity. 

I came across two interesting sites by David Troy, http://flickrvision.com/ and http://twittervision.com.

 They are both elegantly constructed mashups that automatically match location from Flickr and Twitter to maps.  Apart from the pure simplicity, what struck me yet again was how this kind of location based information adds real depth to what is otherwise a photo board or shared SMS service.

Twitter takes on a whole new dimension when “Making my coffee” pings up on the map as day breaks in the US, and watching photo’s appear on the map from Flickr was surprisingly enjoyable.

Of course, the cynic in me is still not sure what practical use they serve, but they are both excellent sites and a worth spending 10 minutes to experience.

In trying to explain Web 2.0 to work colleagues and explaining why it’s different from Web 1.0, I’ve created this easy to use “spotters” guide of features based on the reading and research I’ve been doing.  It’s a bit tounge in cheek (not your usual list of “Ajax”, ”Wiki” and “RSS”) but you might enjoy it.

1. Glitz and glamour, every Web 2.0 site thinks it’s the next big thing.  Exception to rule 1 are sites that already KNOW they are a big thing (see http://del.icio.us as good example of a pretty ugly site that does a lot of good web 2.0 things in a visually unappealing way).
2. Visually compelling, with desktop type features on the browser.  Ajax enabled will often appear in this context.  If you don’t get some kind of type ahead or dynamic lookup on the page, it’s not real Web 2.0.
3. It’s all about the tribe and the community, who all appear to be living in a slightly off-kilter universe where somehow telling the world that you’re watching American Idol is big news, or that they can’t imagine that generations of businesses somehow survived without the ability to have a message transcribed by someone in India.
4. It has a blog.  All good Web 2.0 sites must have a blog.  Only blogs are not blogs, they are part of the “blogosphere”, form a “conversation architecture” and make up the ”attention economy”.
5. 1st generation WEB 2.0 sites are mostly free, and it’s not always clear HOW they can be monetised. Late comers (read most sites launching in 2007) Web 2.0 let you try before you buy but over-charge for what they are really tring to provide.  I like to refer to these as Web 2.0a sites and Web 2.0b.
6. It’s a large scale, device agnostic message routing service stupid! Underneath the glitz and glamour of the latest tribal love-fest, is a cool piece of technology that many organisations could find a use for, but very few will buy.
7. REpresentational State Transfer (REST).  This is just the Architects way of describing loosely coupled services that don’t really know or care if you talk to them or not, but when you do, they give you information you can use in a format that you can understand and represent (the common example is getting a HTML page which you can represent as a graphically rich page in a browser or an RSS feed which can be re-constructed as news).  It’s a lot easier to say REST, which says a lot about Architects too.
8. Richard Scoble has written about it, commented on it, been quoted on it, or in some way used it.  It’s not genuine Web 2.0 unless Scoble got there first (or maybe a close second).
9. It’s a mash-up.  Remember the old days when you used to write programs on your desktop, and call lots of different API’s which provided services that people had written? We don’t code anymore, we create mash-ups by writing programs in our browser that call lots of different services which provide information that people have written for us.  It’s very different.
10. It’s all about services and the winners will be those that control the data.  Compelling services that offer net new implementations of features that people want and don’t have alternatives for will be some of the biggest winners and the outstanding examples of WEB 2.0.

I blogged about Twitter here and alluded to the power under the hood beyond the glitz of the live-conscious that is the twitter-stream.  Well I found another potential interesting use with Twitterment, a Twitter search term engine.

I remember reading somewhere, (no link sorry) someone making the comment that Twitter has potential uses in trying to track what people are talking about — well Twitterment is a tool investigating how to help delve that potential information mine better.

I’ve touched on location based services in a few articles on AGPS and Plazes.  All which has me thinking more and more about logical extensions for this — how do we get location “off the map” and into a real application?  I was pointed to GeoRSS which adds geospatial support to RSS posts which allows you to know WHERE a post is relevant to, amongst other things.

This is leading to some interesting applications, if you haven’t seen it, check out World Explorer from Yahoo Research Berkely which analyses Flikr tags to produce a geotagged map of the world, weighted by the number of tags for a location – explore the world through the eyes of others in a way that makes sense.

So what should Enterprise Architects be thinking about?  In my overly lengthy post on AGPS (I’m going to try get better at more succinct ideas I promise!) I suggested you should be thinking about location type services, but I’ll go one further — you need a consistent global taxonomy for location in your organisation as it will become crucial.

Some 16 years ago, I worked for a fertilizer company, and we experimented with MapInfo to map sales data.  What we found was that based on the invoice address, most of our product was shipped into the centre of the city.  Now of course, this was explained as farmers either being owned by corporates, or having accountants who are located in the CBD.  Still, it wasn’t what we expected.  Even moving to delivery address didn’t help, as product was delivered to one of 6 major national distribution centres where farmers sent a truck to pick up product.

The point is simply this, location offers unique opportunities, many which I propose we don’t fully understand at this moment in time and others that will arrive.  To some extent we’ve been doing this in business for a while (hands up who has systems that know what office a staff member is located in), but we probably don’t understand this to the same degree of relevance about customers and in particular our own information.

I’m still remain sceptical that LBS will prove to be a ”killer app” for office based corporates, but I’ve no doubt that it will provide some incremental level of benefit.

I found this Wall Street Journal video here at The Lost Remote.  One of the things I’ve been working on at the moment is a retail sector publication on trends and issues for 2007.  This video sums up succinctly the message I’ve been trying (like many others) to get across - the world of communication (as in Internet and Mobile Phones) is fundamentally changing.

Apart from being an entertaining little video, it issues some real challenges which is to get our heads around some of these types of features.  Particularly for retail (ie consumer focussed sectors) understanding where the internet and mobile technology is going will be key to early mover advantage and future success.  Taking advantage of the application driven nature of the Web 2.0 and plugging services together with proprietary systems is the compelling challenge for companies today — even if they don’t realise it!

From an Enterprise Architecture point of view, an SOA view of the world is becoming even more critical.  It’s all a service, wether it’s an internal or external application, the boundaries are changing.  With a strong services focus internally, then mashups between internal and external apps become compelling value adds for consumers and the companies that serve them.

Here’s a simple example, using Plazes, another interesting startup I’ve come across recently.    There’s a similar service shown in the video.

Plazes is at first glance locating you on a map. Kind of neat, but when you explore it under the hood a bit you realise it’s also a locater service for friends and others in your area.  For a retailer, the scenario could play out like this.  Set up Plazes, place your retail outlets, let your customers hook up as friends then use the Plazers service to let you know when your friends (ie. customers) are near your location.  This kind of location mashup could be put together quickly with a prior investment in SOA internally, enabling you to then link the friends to your backend systems, work out what they’ve purchased recently then contact them to tell them that there is a special offer available now if they come into the store.

What the Web 2.0 evolution is doing is removing the requirement for us to wait for big vendors or vertical applications.  Enterprises should be acting now to ensure that they are ready to grab the best of the web and put it together in innovative ways for their customers. 

That means sound SOA strategy so that agile developers can pull together the systems they need to create compelling applications.