Lauren Cooney's Blog

Links for Today: Guy advice, Win your own Company, Oracle goes Web 2.0 (kinda)

• This article popped up on my radar yesterday, discussing how teens use "IMs" and "text messages" to communicate more frequently with their friends, especially to avoid embarrassing situations, like asking people out or on dates. I've been asked out by a 30 year old guy by text before - hate to admit it, but I have (I said no, talk about no game). Interesting to see the parallels here though between ourselves and teenagers... guys, take note :)
• There's an interesting contest out that launched earlier this week, where you could "Win your Own Start-up." It is being promoted as a VC/Web 2.0 sort of contest where judges pick a few ideas that are submitted via a website, and then let the community vote... this will be an interesting one...the VC world meets reality TV, perhaps?
• Oracle had it's OpenWorld Conference this past week in SF, where it launched 2 new Web 2.0 -like sites - Oracle Mix, and the "Official Oracle Wiki." Other than the *really* creative names that they gave these sites, I haven't seem much activity on either over the past few days... doesn't quite seem that Oracle has gotten the community thing yet... at least they're trying?

Going Green: Dopplr Offsetr

I recycle. I turn my lights off when I'm not using them. I support green efforts. But this really made me think again about the impact that travel can have on the environment.

For all of you who travel a decent amount for business this application is a must. It definitely opened my eyes about the impact we (as a group of frequent business flyers) have on the environment.

Brady Forrest from O'Reilly discussed this cool app on the Radar Blog, called Offsetr. It calculates the carbon and mileage totals for you and your Dopplr network. My totals for my entire network were:

• Total Carbon for my network: 569,601 lbs
• Total Miles for my network: 1,352,866

I have about 40 travelers on my Dopplr list, so for those of you have have more, this number will be much higher. If you submit your calculations, you can get the breakdown for each traveler on your list. For example, I have about 40 travelers on my dopplr list, and I ranked about 25th out of 40 (so, I feel kind of bad, but my friend Carlos travels the most, so... )

Something to think about.../LC

*Disclaimer: Carlos is in Manila right now, so I'm just a tad jealous...

Facebook - Annoyance #1

I am a fan of Facebook, just like most of you guys out there. And so far, I've been quite pleased with the networking opportunities there and the "self-managed" community that seem to have limited spam. But I guess signing up for different interest groups has taken it's toll, as I'm outlining here as my "Facebook Annoyance #1:

Tonight, I opened up my FB email to a spam email from the founder of this group I signed up for, which we'll call "Marketing Friends." He's written a book (great!) and is promoting it on the Facebook group he so smartly launched a few months ago... great timing, eh? I know "Duh, Lauren." And now he wants us to "pre-order" his book! Nope, not kidding.

I signed up for this group "Marketing Friends" awhile ago, figuring it would be some sort of community SIG where folks discussed interesting and creative methods or programs for delivering concrete, honest information to users. Here is the description of the group:

"The Marketing Friends" (name changed) group is for people who believe that marketing is about influence instead of interruption. That the role of marketing is to tell a compelling story based on truth that people can believe and connect with.

Authenticity is the new mantra for marketers who are embracing this new world. Social media is part of this, but not the whole story. The aim of this group is to discuss where marketing should be, how we get there and who is already well on their way.

Well, there have been a couple interesting posts (there are 655 members) but the Wall Posts only consist of people that are promoting themselves rather than any information they might have to offer - rather, folks are just posting their contact information and PR services they provide. I honestly think that some of these folks probably have good services to offer, but is this a group for people looking for jobs/contracts or is it a group that shares best practices for "people who believe that marketing is about influence instead of interruption?"

I guess am frustrated here for 2 reasons:

(1) I can't believe that the founder of this group sent out a mass email to all members to promote his new book without offering a discount to folks in his facebook group or something of that sort. I mean, if you start a group around how to influence people with marketing tactics, don't you think he would have at least used the "pull" method to get folks to purchase his book? I mean, obviously he mastered the "push" method through his mass email... Marketing 101 here, folks. And no chapter excerpt? Hmmm.

(2) Maybe it's just because I am a community person rather than a marketing person (although I know some of you folks don't think there's a difference here... but trust me, there is, as Anant will tell you from our weekly LAMP stack and Open Source debates) that I just don't think that this kind of stuff should be on Facebook. I know, I know - I just had a debate with a friend this weekend over the real "need" for Facebook and it's purpose, so I see holes in this argument, but still. Possibly I'm just jaded (or naive) from watching how Apache has done things and how its community has worked, but still. Sigh.

Well, I guess I'll post something relevant to this Facebook SIG list and see if this group will start to give back. If not, I'm out. And most definitely I'll be screening my interest groups a bit better next time. I'm sure this isn't the only one out there that is created for these purposes.

Watch out, I'm on a roll. :) Possibly I'll pull a Chris Anderson. I think his idea here was brilliant. Sometimes things just needed to be weeded out./LC

Open Innovation Continued - Is Google Really Playing Fair?

As you know from my posts on my other blog I am a huge fan of Open Innovation. I define open innovation basically as honest community building for the general advancement of a group of people or for the good of the technology. I usually think of the Apache Software Foundation as one of the best models for this. I know that some folks tend to get involved in ASF for the good of their company, but with Apache, if you do this, the members pretty much cite you on lists for not working for the good of the community, and your reputation is pretty much tarnished right there and then. Not only that, with the incubation process that Apache uses, it pretty much weeds out folks who might be doing just that.

I've been closely following the OpenSocial movement that Google has kicked off over the past few days. Initially I was really excited about it - with all of the freaking APIs out there, it's a terrific idea to create common APIs so that devs have less to learn when building for multiple sites. And what a roster of partners there - Salesforce, Ning, etc etc. Very cool.

That said, as I was reading my RSS this AM, little subtleties started popping up, like this nice entry from Bob Warfield's "SmoothSpan" blog talking about the authentication scheme of OpenSocial's APIs. From Bob's perspective, this is a "leaking" of information that Google will, in the end, be able to access and pull information from. He states:

The preferred approach (to be authenticated to the API) is to use your Google account, a mechanism they call AuthSub.  Can you see where this is going?  If everyone who uses an app has a Google account, and is logged in while they use the account, Google has the treasure map.  They know how all the names link up across all the Social Networks.  Pretty cool, eh?

Now, I haven't gone through this process, so as a disclaimer I have to note that this may not be 100% true, but it sounds pretty fishy to me, as a community person. Is this really how this works? Is Google in the end accessing all of this data? Google is pretty smart then, I'd say. Data is power, as we all know.

Now, a bunch of folks have picked up on this here, and there's been an onslaught of MSFTers posting on this (of course). But there are some other folks coming out and jumping to this conclusion as well, including Danny Ayers, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and a handful of others. I'm still waiting on the Redmonk guys to jump on this with their take.

I'm not a fan of control when it comes to community - I prefer to have a self-governing community. And I'm interested to see how Google and their new partners in the OpenSocial network respond to this. I for one wouldn't want all of my information accessible to vendors who have their own personal best interests at heart. In the end, I think it's a double-edged sword: you get the common APIs which mean easier development, but you might have to give up some privacy here as well. I guess we'll see which one wins in the ongoing debate on community v. vendor control. /LC

Links for today

Thoughtworks supports (and targets) women programmers: http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=9570B067-C860-4FEA-81DC-7A6C6517EBCD Very cool stuff.

New Blog

I've finally decided to take the leap and move from JRoller to TypePad. Not only is Typepad on the XFN bandwagon (as I learned at the Web 2.0 Summit) but I've been having several problems on JRoller with links, comments, etc and was spending much more time figuring out what was wrong then blogging... and when that happens something is definitely wrong.

I'll be re-directing folks to this blog soon, so stay tuned... /LC