Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat.   Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive.  Teambox organizes communication around projects.  Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files.  The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar.  And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data.  And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails).  Now I just need a project to test it with… Read the rest of this entry »

Some public agencies understand that their data is our data — some public, or quasi-public agencies has taken a different tack.  The New York Mass Transit Authority at one point maintained that transit schedules were copyrighted — nice to see they’ve come to a more reasonable attitude.  Whatever their misgivings, this will make their service, and customer relations/communication better.

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So after all the hype I finally got a Google Wave account and well…. well…what was all the hype really about?  And I guess I’m not alone in being underwhelmed.  Now yes, it is really beta (not just a perpetual beta that really isn’t) and they are trying to do something completely different.  Plus, as with any social networking/collaboration tool it isn’t much fun when there aren’t many people using it.  I do fault them for producing something that doesn’t run in Internet Explorer, and didn’t even seem to run too well in Firefox.  Browser dependent behavior is a cop-out at best.   Maybe it, or the protocol will become useful for something really good over time, or the user community will embrace it in numbers to reach some tipping point.  But until then I’m much more interested in the possibilities of other tools — like BuddyPress.

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In the theory of limited time and resources, if people do more of one thing then they do less of something else.  So if Twitter is growing, what is losing out?  Are Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer, etc. competitors, or do they complement each other?  I have accounts on all these services, and for me they complement each other nicely: Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone else notice all the 40th anniversary celebrations lately?  The Internet, Sesame Street, Woodstock, People walking on the moon, and of course the premier of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Funny, but as a nine year old I remember vividly the movie and the moon — Sesame street just seems like it has always been there, and I missed the Internet launch completely.

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We had a good group watching the Effective Use of Social Media for Student Recruitment webcast last week.  The session was nicely moderated by Jacques Steinberg of the New York Times, with speakers Robert Moore a consultant and Greg Carroll from Furman University.  A couple of take-aways: Read the rest of this entry »