Friday, August 22, 2003
Social Network Software: Who Knows Who?
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) covers contact mining tools, from companies including Visible Path, Spoke Software, and Zero Degrees.
Success depends on effective use of permission and integration into the existing social network. For example, when a salesperson using Visible Path asks the system for an introduction to a person at Microsoft, she doesn't find the name of the contact inside the company, or the contact at Microsoft, until after the person who has the contact has given consent.
These tools complement explicit networking tools, like Linked In, Friendster and Ryze, where participants explicitly declare their business and personal relationships.
These approaches represent two ends of a continuum
* contact mining tools infer relationships from email and address book contacts
* social network tools explicitly represent relationships
A third complementary approach is emerging, based on hyperlinked public and semipublic media such as wikis and weblogs. Tools like Technorati and Feedster implicitly identify relationships by following the trail of hyperlinks.
On the one hand, a link relationship is weaker -- hyperlinks are one-way, and may indicate a tangential association rather than a direct relationship. On the other hand, the content is public. So you can read the discussion over time, and decide for yourself whether Sam Ruby knows Mark Pilgrim. (thanks Adina Levin@Socialtext)
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) covers contact mining tools, from companies including Visible Path, Spoke Software, and Zero Degrees.
The goal is to identify people within the company who have potentially useful contacts elsewhere and could make a personal introduction, say, linking a salesperson with a potential customer, an attorney with a prospective client or a fund-raiser with likely donors.
Success depends on effective use of permission and integration into the existing social network. For example, when a salesperson using Visible Path asks the system for an introduction to a person at Microsoft, she doesn't find the name of the contact inside the company, or the contact at Microsoft, until after the person who has the contact has given consent.
These tools complement explicit networking tools, like Linked In, Friendster and Ryze, where participants explicitly declare their business and personal relationships.
These approaches represent two ends of a continuum
* contact mining tools infer relationships from email and address book contacts
* social network tools explicitly represent relationships
A third complementary approach is emerging, based on hyperlinked public and semipublic media such as wikis and weblogs. Tools like Technorati and Feedster implicitly identify relationships by following the trail of hyperlinks.
On the one hand, a link relationship is weaker -- hyperlinks are one-way, and may indicate a tangential association rather than a direct relationship. On the other hand, the content is public. So you can read the discussion over time, and decide for yourself whether Sam Ruby knows Mark Pilgrim. (thanks Adina Levin@Socialtext)
Thursday, August 07, 2003
The Secrets of Successful Idea People: "Great ideas don't execute themselves. Identify the idea practitioners in your company the people who turn blue sky into green profit." Okay okay.. it's a little bit of preaching to the choir, but check it out nonetheless.
Friday, August 01, 2003
Patent Granted for No Cell Phones Signage: If you read MIT Tech Review then you've witnessed the frequent rantings abot how broken the U.S. Patent and Trade Office system is. If you've talked with me for any length of time your've probably stumbled upon similar rantings. If the stories of patents being granted for PB&J sandwiches aren't enough, here's what should vault the PTO into championship status for the heavily contested "Most Broken Government Institution" award.
"If I asked an eight year old to draw me a 'No Cell Phones' sign, I'm sure he would craft the obvious. However, the US Patent office has just granted a patent for the obvious design. The signs themselves are a good idea for locations where, for whatever reason, mobile phone use should be restricted. Hospitals and dynamite blast zones come to mind. However, do we really need our government to issue a patent on this? " (thanks derek)
It is clear now that the Patent Office, underfunded, overworked and with a now clouded mandate, has abdicated it's responsibility to the courts. They grant just about anything that comes across their desk, and leave it for the lawyers and judges to work out who actually should have been granted a patent in the first place. Great news for big business and patent law firms, death for individual inventors, entreprenuers, and small business.
"If I asked an eight year old to draw me a 'No Cell Phones' sign, I'm sure he would craft the obvious. However, the US Patent office has just granted a patent for the obvious design. The signs themselves are a good idea for locations where, for whatever reason, mobile phone use should be restricted. Hospitals and dynamite blast zones come to mind. However, do we really need our government to issue a patent on this? " (thanks derek)
It is clear now that the Patent Office, underfunded, overworked and with a now clouded mandate, has abdicated it's responsibility to the courts. They grant just about anything that comes across their desk, and leave it for the lawyers and judges to work out who actually should have been granted a patent in the first place. Great news for big business and patent law firms, death for individual inventors, entreprenuers, and small business.
