Tag: memolane

  • Well. Begun

    Twice in the last few weeks, my hosting service took down my sites citing database problems. The second time, I decided to a slightly more detailed check, and figured out that the rogue database was one of my lifestreaming experiments. Thanks to memolane, I could delete it without fretting much. Coincidentally, that was also the day that I gained access to Facebook’s new Timeline feature, and was inspired enough to start filling it. 🙂

    Though I have connected all my online presence, the blogs retain their individual identity. The only place where they really met was the lifestream. But like I mentioned in an earlier post, Google+ allows me to integrate identities even while allowing compartmentalisation. Increasingly, so does Facebook. Privacy is already a huge concern, and anonymity is not something our institutions can digest. Thankfully, in my case, I do end up behaving as per Darth Schmidt’s adage “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” At least I wouldn’t post it 😀

    What I do post however (across both the blogs) are a range of topics – personal perspectives, restaurant reviews, book reviews, my start up and technology columns, travel photos, job notes, and so on. All of these are part of my identity, and technology allows me to distribute it according to the audience. Considering that these parts are already getting integrated on social platforms, one of my ‘projects’ for 2012 is going to be how I can accommodate all of this on a single blog/site. Any ideas?

    Meanwhile, memolane is already thinking of how brands can use ‘lifestreaming’. When Facebook opens the Timeline feature for Pages, it is going to be really interesting! But for now, I’d like Facebook to open up imports from other sites.

    until next time, 1/2.0 done 🙂

  • Social Collaboration eg.

    My friend via Twitter, Prem, (twice over, because both his handles are friends :D) got me thinking on ‘Social Collaboration’ ever since he wrote this post, attempting to define the term as used by its vendors. Despite a good discussion in the comments, a definition proved elusive. Though I began to agree with Prem’s assessment that ‘social’ was redundant, Gautam’s post on it did offer an interesting line of thought –  that ‘social collaboration’ was emergent. He illustrates it with an example too. This was vaguely similar to one one of the ways in which I had tried to define the phrase, before I gave up. Here are the attempts.

    The first was by tying it to the idea of a ‘social business’ (not the wiki one, but the Dachis group version), where 2 or more businesses collaborate on an objective that may be larger/ unrelated to their individual objectives. Obviously, this is more utopian than any vendor’s idea, so I dropped it.

    Which led me to the second attempt, where I thought  the tools of the (enterprise) social web would enable social interaction in various contexts and collaboration would be one of the products. (Probably like what Krish Ashok is building at TCS?) This would be around the premise that Gautam presented – even identifying the need would be the result of the social interactions and collaboration would follow.

    While on this, I was reminded of Google Wave, where each participant could ‘drag’ people into a conversation. There were several instances when I, as an initiator of the conversation, did not have any control over the quantity or quality of the participants or even the morphing of the intent. I was also reminded of the last paragraph of this post I wrote in 2008, when Yammer came into the limelight – “..a bridge between Yammer and Twitter. One service that allows absolute transparent conversations within the organisations, and another that allows brands and organisations to be transparent with its end users.”A one way channel did open later. If any collaborator could ‘drag’ in another collaborator from a social web outside of the enterprise’ social web eg. a customer from Twitter, could that be social collaboration? On a related note, I also remember another post of mine when I came across Memolane and wrote about brand-streams connecting consumers and the enterprise. A couple of days back Memolane released an embeddable version which it hopes will be adopted by organisations.

    Alternately/further, could it be like what happened right now – where neither Prem nor Gautam invited me to collaborate, but I did nevertheless, inserting myself into it thanks to having access to their thoughts, having a take (hopefully) on a thought Prem started and being able to connect it back to them. (forget Twitter, their blogs will have trackbacks) Even if they do ignore me and refuse to collaborate, my take would still exist, available to all who might be interested? That’s probably not what the sellers intended of ‘social collaboration’, but could that be what it evolves into?

    I don’t know, and that’s why for now, I have parked this aside. 🙂

    until next time, continue collaborating..

    PS: Bonus Read – How Cisco integrates social media into the organisation

    PPS: Back in a fortnight 🙂