Presentation company Slideshare recently released its list of "5 Social Media Secrets for 2010". While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we'd connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy. Sponsor 1. Pay Attention to the Metrics: Sloane Berrent's Kiva fellowship and Beth Kanter's work with ChipIn . Neither of these efforts were well funded, but both leveraged leaders' creativity to increase engagement and response. 5. Listen, Listen, Listen : Early last year we wrote an article on how sentiment analysis would heat up in 2009 . To track conversations about your company you can try

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Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

Using a cloud computing service may sound enticing, but you better consider how that data can be moved around if you want to switch to a different provider. It's a big problem that now has the attention of Vint Cerf, who is calling for standards to define how customer data gets passed between different cloud service providers. Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, is one of those legends of the tech world, up there with people like Steve Wozniak . He is one of the co-designers of the TC/IP protocol. He is one of those few who had this idea way back when of hooking computers together to create a network. Today we call that network the Internet. Sponsor So you listen when Cerf gets up to speak and says that it's like 1973 out there when it comes to cloud computing data portability. According to InfoWorld , Cerf said major cloud service providers like Amazon, Google and IBM have no real form of interoperability. Cerf spoke Thursday night at the Churchill Club in Menlo Park, Ca. "We don't have any inter-cloud standards," Cerf said. "The current cloud situation is similar to the lack of communication and familiarity among computer networks in 1973." People will want to move data around. They may have multiple cloud service providers. They may want to use different cloud service providers as an interconnected network. Moreso, customers will simply want to move data from Cloud A to Cloud B. Cerf went on to say that the industry needs to develop protocols and standards to make this all happen. It's important to note that Google, Cerf's employer, obviously has a stake in how this all pans out. We went to Aardvark to ask about this issue. What can you do right now to avoid getting locked into one cloud service provider? Marc Limotte , director of engineering at Feeva Technology, writes: "The obvious problem is that the difficulty in switching limits consumer choice and therefore competition. You can't "vote with your feet", if you can't walk away. This is common in IT, though. It's never been easy to switch from one enterprise package to another, or from one hosting facility to another. The data isn't even the worst of the problem. In most cases, you can at least get an extract (even if it is terabytes of data), and perform a load in to some other system. The more complex issue is when you architect your solution to take advantage of a vendor's proprietary services (e.g. the data store in Google App Engine, or the Amazon's SQS). Not that you shouldn't use these features... they're useful, just be aware that they start to limit your options is you want to someday move away from that platform. My suggestion... make sure you know how to export your data. And try and use your own interfaces in front of custom services. that way if you want to move, you just have to write an adapter, and not a complete re-architecture." Discuss

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Vint Cerf: It's like 1973 for Moving Data Around in the Cloud

Socialtext is saying it posted record quarter-over-quarter bookings growth in 2009, bolstered by social computing's growing presence in the enterprise. It's important to note that Socialext is reporting record bookings, not record revenues. The company does not disclose its actual revenues. It's hard to to give Socilatext a lot of credit without knowing how its revenues fared. Further, the year ahead may be one of the most challenging for the company as competition is only getting more fierce. Sponsor Socialtext is one of the most established companies in the Enterprise 2.0 space, dating back to 2002 when it got its start as a wiki provider. In recent years, the company has diversified, adding a microblogging platform and collaborative tools such as SocialCalc , its collaborative spreadsheet application. Socialtext said it now has 6,500 customers, compared to 4,000 in 2008. The company also said it set a record for the number of companies that renewed contracts. Jive Software may be one of the biggest competitors for Socialtext. Microsoft will be pushing hard into the enterprise market this year with Sharepoint 2010. Google, Cisco, IBM and a host of new players are also fighting for the same piece of the pie. But, overall, the Soclaltext news is more real proof that social computing did get the attention of the enterprise in 2009, and that the year ahead should be another record year for the overall market. Discuss

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Socialtext Gets The Bookings But The Year Ahead Will Be Tough

Facebook's getting its own movie , Ashton Kutcher is the social web's unpaid spokesman and now NBC is launching a show dedicated to mobile apps. What's the world coming to? Call me old fashioned, but where I come from, a geek is a geek and a mainstream actor with an iPhone is still just a mainstream actor with an iPhone. The Oprahtization of technology is at least a bit demeaning, from my point of view. Sure, this trend brings exposure to our heroic exploits, but it's often done through stereotypes about geeks and an air of naïveté about how technology really works. What do you think? Am I being a curmudgeon? Is all this mainstream-tech integration really a good thing? Sponsor Granted, we all have to discover technology at some point. None of us were born nerds. But there's a certain je ne sais quoi that is unique to geeks: a melange of smarts, social pickiness, a willingness to be different, insatiable curiosity, a desire to learn and create new and amazing things, and frequently, a very necessary shell to protect oneself from the rejections of the larger world around us. As a people accustomed to being ostracized for speaking in terms too technical, having a bizarre sense of humor or caring more about bandwidth than baseball, we have generally existed far outside the cool kids' club. Not to frame my entire argument in a high school analogy, but we have mostly been useful for one thing: Doing other people's homework. When they - the non-technical of this world - want an application, device, website or feature, we built it and teach them how to use it. This has been the geek's role for eons: Doing the jocks' dirty work and then skipping prom. Can you imagine Einstein hobnobbing with Marlene Deitrich? Or a young Steve Jobs on an early '80s red carpet with a young Harrison Ford? Yet we are seeing more and more crossover between mainstream media and our little world of technology to the point that you can't tell the tech from the tinsel. Perhaps it's just disconcerting to see those two worlds meshing for the first time. Perhaps all my angst is simply discomfort. Yet when I see and hear innovators and geeks referred to as ugly, graceless basement-dwellers, even in jest, by mainstream talking heads, it still gets to me. But what gets to me more is the new set of faux geeks - folks who know just enough about tech to send a misspelled Twitter update from their mobiles but who thrive on the attention and revenue they gain from this scene. They wouldn't know an API from a IP; the red carpet is more likely their natural habitat; yet they incessantly appear in blog posts, pictures and videos until the real geeks don't even remember how they got there. It happens on a small scale (every tech scene has its skill-free new media douchebag), and it's starting to happen on a larger scale, as well (why is Olivia Munn a geek, again?). Call me bitter, call me jealous, call me cynical - but let me know what you think, too. Some of our friends on Twitter told us they didn't like mainstream media's encroachment onto geek territory, but others who responded to our query see this exposure as a good thing, and we want to hear this point of view, as well. After all, I was excited the first time I heard Twitter mentioned in a news report, too. Give us your opinions in the comments, and don't hold back! We love a good, long-winded discourse at ReadWriteWeb. Note: Lest you throw stones at the writer for not being geeky enough herself, she was building LANs and playing the first version of King's Quest when you were still in diapers. Discuss

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Open Thread: Mainstream Media Discovers Geekery, Is This a Good Thing?

In our first post about trends in the enterprise for the coming year, we looked at five forces that will rise in importance in 2010. In part two, we picked five more trends that we feel will have importance in the enterprise for the year ahead. The more we look at the space, the more we see how mobile looms over all of these trends. It will help shape IT spending in the years ahead as smart phones and other devices increasingly become part of daily work life. Sponsor API's The use of API's will come on strong in 2010 as more companies adopt web-oriented architectures that reflect the growing importance of using social technologies as communication and productivity applications. For instance. you may know OpenSocial as a consumer-facing service for Google gadgets to integrate with Ning, MySpace and LinkedIn. But its true potential may be in the enterprise. Just before Christmas, OpenSocial announced it had written a white paper on a number of enterprise vendors. The paper lays the framework for an API infrastructure that customers may use for integrating Google gadgets. Companies participating in the effort include Atlassian , SocialText , CubeTree , Cisco , IBM , SAP , eXo Platform , Alfresco and of course, Google. Each of these enterprise vendors is integrating with OpenSocial to extend its products and for purposes of interoperability with other enterprise vendors. We expect that in 2010 more companies will develop API road maps to push information out to customers. We'll be watching companies like Sonoa Systems and Mashery as barometers for API adoption in the enterprise. Web Oriented Architecture The concept of web oriented architecture (WOA) first emerged a few years ago. Gartner's Nick Gall developed the concept and it has since grown in scope. Dion Hinchliffe recently wrote a WOA "un-manifesto," detailing the 17 principles that guide it. The future of WOA does not mean the end to service oriented architecture (SOA) but it does point to a shift in views about the way the Web works in the enterprise. As he always does, Dion Hinchliffe accurately illustrates the concept: WOA's influence can't be underestimated. Enterprise architects are looking to data-oriented services. Traditional SOA is still important to many organizations but the trends clearly point to the deeper availability of Web service components. And with this comes an increasing volume of applications that can be easily developed. Application architectures will be increasingly perceived as dynamic, configurable items, like pieces loosely joined. Community Management Social media has to be one of the most over-used phrases of the year but it should not reflect on the increasing need for community management practices within the enterprise. We expect community management to become an increasingly valued role. You only need to look as far as the proliferation of API's to understand what is happening. As pieces of information spread to communities across the web, the need to create a stronger bond will only intensify. The idea being that as more communities engage, the need to service them will change. The processes for spreading and aggregating information will become further automated but people with communications and technical skills will be increasingly needed to keep the communities cohesive. VoIP VoIP will move deeper into the enterprise. The days of closed, siloed telephony systems are coming to an end. The freedom of web-based communications will be far more clear to the enterprise customer this year as the sheer volume of applications and features enter the market. Again, this trend in many ways stems from the move to WOA in the enterprise. The move is to the web. Voice will also heed the call. A number of factors point to this trend. Google's intentions to enter the enterprise are pretty clear. Google acquired Gizmo5 , the web-based service for making calls from your computer or your mobile phone. This is a service that Google is expected to provide as a business service. Bandwidth.com recently unveiled its nationwide voice IP-network. Skype is making a play for the enterprise. Cisco and Skype have a partnership to offer Skype's service to customers. Avaya is said to be close to a deal with Skype. The signs are all there for VoIP to be a trend to watch next year. The Big Sync Finally, cloud computing will continue its pace as a trend to watch. But with it will come a battle that will leave some players bruised and battered. Microsoft has to be the most vulnerable. Joe Wilcox of Betanews makes an interesting point about this in a post about the need for Microsoft to do a better job in syncing mobile devices to the cloud. Here's why: Syncing has real importance with the advent of the mobile enterprise. Take the Blackberry as an example and its ability to sync to your email. Now, we have applications that update all the time. Syncing is critical in order for these applications to work on your mobile device. Wilcox makes the point that Google seems to get this and has done a good job in providing the ability to sync on the mobile. Ironically, this is in large part thanks to Microsoft, which licensed its "ActiveSync," technology to Google. Soon after, Google used ActiveSync in "its e-mail, calendar and contact synchronization from its cloud services to iPhone and Windows Mobile handsets," writes Wilcox. "Google also used the technology to provide Exchange Server sync with Google Apps, so that businesses could use the hosted service instead of Outlook." Google has it right. Apple seems to get it. But Microsoft does not have a clear path for syncing updates across a wide network of applications to a mobile device connected to the cloud. Conclusion As we look deeper into trends, it's evident that Google is getting a lot of attention. But the attention is deserved. Google took advantage of the recession to invest in research and development. Microsoft keeps promising big things but its direction is confusing. How data is accessed and delivered is the name of the game in 2010. It's a disadvantage to keep information in a silo. Monolithic applications and static documents will be less valued, replaced by a mobile enterprise fueled by web-based services. We saw massive adoption of the social Web in 2009. Next year will be the year where WOA and mobile technologies become core parts of the infrastructure for the enterprise. Discuss

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5 Enterprise Trends To Watch in 2010: Part 2

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data , our second about The Real-Time Web . The third part of our series is on Personalization . Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations . Ultimately personalization is about websites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! All of the trends that we're profiling overlap. This is particularly so with personalization, as we'll see. Filtering the Real-Time Firehose Personalization is often used to provide an organization layer for users on top of real-time data. As Ken Fromm put it in his primer on the Real-Time Web : "The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences." If you use a dashboard product like TweetDeck, Seesmic or Peoplebrowsr to use Twitter, then you're able to group people, keywords and topics. This is effectively personalization at work. Open Web: More Data About You, Better Personalization Another aspect of personalization is the increasing prevalence of open data on the Web. A lot of companies make their data available on the Web via APIs, web services, and open data standards. And as we discussed in the first post in this series, much of that data is structured - allowing it to be inter-connected and re-used by third parties. How does open data lead to personalization? Simply put, the more data about you and your social graph that is available to be used by applications, the better targeted the content and/or service will be to you. There are non-trivial privacy issues about this, however the personalization benefits can be significant. There are a whole host of open data standards on the Web now. They include: Data portability - taking your data and friends from one site to another. OpenID - portable identity; single sign-on. OpenSocial - Google initiative for social networks, enabling developers to create widgets with one set of code; MySpace a member, Facebook isn't. APML - growing 'Attention' standard; Your Attention Data is all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume. Recommendation Engines Many consumer products on the Web aim to recommend you things that you may like . A couple of years ago, Alex Iskold outlined what he saw as the 4 main approaches to recommendations : Personalized recommendation - recommend things based on the individual's past behavior Social recommendation - recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users Item recommendation - recommend things based on the item itself A combination of the three approaches above Amazon is probably still the best example of recommendations on the Web, but an example of something new from 2009 was Netflix launching better personalization features in March. They included new taste preferences, allowing users to (for example) choose between movies that are romantic, suspenseful, or dark. Other additions included a personalized homepage and a feature enabling users to mix and match genres. Conclusion Personalization has shown slow but steady progress in 2009. It hasn't been as wild a ride as Structured Data or Real-Time Web, but we consider personalization to be a key facet of the evolving Web. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Image credit: davepatten Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Personalization

In 2006, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled, "How to Be Silicon Valley." He argues that a tech hub must have nerds and people with money. At the time, he proposed that Boulder and Portland would be the next tech hubs and indeed both have thrived. Nevertheless, as seed funds and incubators become more common, new tech centers are springing up in some of the most unlikely places. ReadWriteWeb caught up with two mentorship groups to find out the advantages of launching outside of the tech epicenter of Silicon Valley. Sponsor Bootup Labs After moving from the Valley, Vancouver-based entrepreneurs Boris Mann and Danny Robinson looked for a way to continue working with startups. The duo launched Bootup Labs to fix the Northern tech ecosystem and pass some of their learnings on to budding entrepreneurs. The group accepts 6 companies per program cycle for two annual cycles. Companies receive 8 months of mentorship, free office space, administrative/legal services and a $100,000 dollar covertible line of credit. In exchange for mentorship and funding, Bootup takes 5% equity from your company. If you choose to use the entire line of credit, they will receive an additional 10%. By attracting a star-studded cast of program mentors including Guy Kawasaki, NowPublic CEO Len Brody, and investor and writer Paul Kedrosky , Mann and Robinson ensure that their program's 12 annual spots are highly coveted. Says Mann, "I asked Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield why he decided to stay in Vancouver and build his new startup Tiny Speck . He answered that he loves living here. Being a place where people love to live is hard to replicate. We have the nerds, we think it's easier for us to bring more nerds here because of immigration rules (vs. the US) AND because people love it. [We've got] mountains, ocean and it's one of the most livable cities in the world. " Bootup Labs' choices for its January cycle include event-based community Zedmo , lifestream aggregator Statusly , location-based gaming development service Compass Engine , relevancy-based web surfing aid ReadFu , online farmer's market Foodtree and enterprise storefront platform Blast Ramp . Difference Engine Launched this year by Jon Bradford, Difference Engine is based in the North East of England. The group offers applicants £20,000 pounds of investment capital and a 16 week program in business development in exchange for an 8% equity stake. As of January, Difference Engine will welcome 10 teams per cycle, with 2 program cycles per year. When asked why Bradford believes his program can create the basis for a good tech community he replied, "The North East of England is home to The Sage Group - one of the largest software company in the UK.  As with many other parts of Europe it is not the lack of technical expertise but the lack of pre seed capital and support which reduces the opportunities for young entrepreneurs.  Whilst there is increasing activity with angel investors, it is still less mature that the US market...The Difference Engine provides mentors the opportunity to "get up close and personal" with teams over an extended period of time [and] mentors may ultimately invest in these businesses." According to Bradford, one of the advantages of starting a company is Europe is the fact that developers learn to build platforms and businesses with multi-language capabilities. This attention to global markets places European and Asian companies at a potential advantage to their US-based competitors. Difference Engine's group's first intake will be in February 2010, to apply for the inaugural program entrepreneurs can submit ideas via the Difference Engine application form . Discuss

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The Advantages of Launching Outside of the Valley