Tibco is coming out with a Twitter like service that has an emphasis on subject matters more than following people. In Tibco's view, the enterprise is not about the people anymore but the subject and contextual information that relates to a person's job. The value is in decoupling the subject matter from the person so the right information can be found quickly and easily. Sponsor The service is called tibbr, which Tibco describes as a workplace communications tool. Tibco has a corporate focus on real-time technologies. In June, the company announced Tibco Silver, a cloud-based platform for developing applications in the enterprise. tibbr is built on the Silver platform. tibbr is a real-time technology that is definitely different than a service like Salesforce Chatter , which aggregates commentary on different matters to give context and knowledge about a particular topic. Instead, tibbr will offer a service that is more about finding information about the most granular of topics. We find this approach a bit cold, perhaps even taking a bit of the soul out of what real-time social technologies have historically provided. But this may be precisely the point. Corporations may be places filled with people but it is the work and the efficiency that drive performance. Companies are flooded with information, most of it junk. The demand is not for more talk but for ways to be notified of information when it becomes available. We are reminded of Attensa , which provides a service that finds connections and aggregates data on different topics. Individuals are notified when a reference to the data is discovered. tibbr is agnostic about the actual user. The subject may represent an individual, an application or a business process. This seems like search or discovery in many regards, driven by a subscription mechanism like a feed. The focus on subject matter in tibbr makes conversation almost secondary by eliminating what it calls "static and unwanted information clutter." The intention is to eliminate duplicate information and "reply all," email strings. tibbr is definitely an intriguing service that represents how real-time technologies are taking different forms in the settings of the enterprise. tibbr will be available in the first quarter of 2010. Discuss

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Tibco: A Twitter Like Service That's About Subjects More Than People

December 1 marks World AIDS Day , and every major social site around the Internet has come together to spread awareness about the disease, its transmission and available treatments. Thanks to efforts from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, AIDS is a more visible topic today than perhaps at any other point in the history of World AIDS Day. Read on to see what each site has done and the impact this joint campaign is having on users. Sponsor YouTube Live Streams a Concert with Alicia Keys In partnership with the singer's foundation, Keep a Child Alive , YouTube is live streaming an Alicia Keys concert starting at 8 p.m. Eastern/5 p.m. Pacific. The site is also asking suers to donate $5 toward medication and other support for these sufferers. The site is also hosting and promoting this video about the Lazarus Effect, the seemingly miraculous results seen in HIV/AIDS patients given two pills of a specific medication - pills that are available at just 40 cents a day: Flickr Asks How Users Are Living With AIDS In a blog post and a group dedicated to those living with HIV/AIDS, Flickr asked its community of users to print a PDF emblazoned with the words "Facing AIDS" and incorporate it in a photograph to share with the world as part of an initiative with AIDS.gov . Facebook, Google and Twitter Go (RED) Both Facebook and Google have announced they're working with (RED), a brand that helps raise awareness and money for the fight against AIDS in Africa. Google set up a page just for today's events for users to learn more about the global effort to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, to find volunteer opportunities in their area, to get involved with the ONE Campaign, to purchase (RED) products as holiday gifts and to unite with others at the Global Network of People Living with HIV. Facebook asked users to change their profile pictures to (RED)-themed avatars, shop for (RED) products and join the (RED) Facebook page. And Twitter, our generation's megaphone, encouraged users to tweet certain terms, @usernames and hashtags, which would turn tweets red and have certain outcomes. For example, for tweets containing #red, @joinred, 40 cents, AIDS, World AIDS Day, HIV and #laceupsavelives would change the color of the text and help raise awareness with users across the site. At press time, AIDS, HIV and World AIDS Day were all trending topics on Twitter. The site is also offering a red profile theme. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote that the site would be partnering with (PRODUCT)RED to raise funds, and 100 percent of funds raised would be used to help AIDS sufferers in Africa. What Does a Social Media Campaign for AIDS Really Do? In a Facebook blog post , (RED) CEO Susan Smith Ellis wrote, "Our success is very much owed to the emerging world of social media that exploded, just when we needed it. Like social media itself, with (RED) the power is not so much in the act of one individual but in the incredible power of the collective acts of individuals. In just over three years, over 1.5 million people have joined (RED) via a range of social media." Indeed, today's efforts are a testament to the collective power of social media - and the power of all platforms united in the name of a single cause So, what does all this social media buzz do for real-world sufferers and their families? Ellis wrote of the (RED) campaign, "In three year... people's choices have resulted in $140 million being contributed to the Global Fund, with 100 percent of that money going directly to helping fight AIDS in Africa. Millions of people like you together have created this impact. "But it's bigger than dollars. This money flows directly to AIDS grants that have already reached more than four million people with testing, counseling, AIDS treatment and services - programs that truly change lives." Discuss

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Facebook, Google & Twitter Unite for World AIDS Day Around the Web

Square , a new mobile phone payment system founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey , just launched its private beta today. Square will give anybody the ability to accept payment cards without having to go through a costly credit card processing service. Instead, Square will give its users the ability to use their mobile phones, laptops or desktop computers to accept payment cards and swipe them with the help of a small dongle that will plug into the computer's or phone's audio jack. Sponsor Square is backed by Khosla Ventures and a team of angel investors. Square's team of advisors includes actress Alyssa Milano , Susan Wu, Ryan Gilbert, Ted Wang and Gregg Kid (who was also an angel investor in Twitter). According to the information on Square's website, users won't have to sign any contracts and there won't be any monthly fees or hidden costs. Square is currently only working with a select group of companies but plans to expand widely in 2010. In its current iteration, Square works on the iPhone and iPod touch. It's not clear how much the dongle will cost, but chances are that it will be cheap, as the company plans to focus on the service and not the hardware. Disrupting the Credit Card Processing Business Credit card processors (the people behind the card swiping machines at your local coffee shop, restaurant or corner store) typically take a hefty cut from every transaction and charge monthly fees. Square want to be a cheaper, more modern alternative to these systems. Square will email receipts to a payer's phone, for example, and allow merchants to track frequent customers and offer them discounts. In addition, Square will also donate one penny for every transaction to a cause of the user's choice. Thanks to Square, every stand at a local farmers' market and every small coffee cart or hot dog vendor on the street will soon be able to accept credit cards without having to go through one of the major credit card processing services. Competition It's worth noting that other services like ePAY and Obopay also offer solutions that allow anybody to accept credit cards, though Square's service looks to be far more elegant than any of the current solutions we have seen. See the next page for additional screenshots The Square dongle Discuss

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Square: Twitter Co-Founder Launches New Mobile Payment System

Collaboration may be the hottest trend to hit the enterprise this year. But what makes it so hot? Why now? According to "Benchmarking Your Collaboration Strategy," a new report from Forrester Research , two key trends make collaboration important to the enterprise right now: The amount of content that people produce is morphing, especially as the advent of social computing becomes more commonplace. Sponsor Second, inefficiencies are swamping the enterprise with the need to create collaborative strategies that provide a more structured approach to how information is managed. Four Key Factors Innovation: The poor economy is playing an important factor in how companies view the ways they develop products. Management is looking for more efficient and creative ways to innovate. And they are looking to Web 2.0 technologies for answers. According to Forrester, discussion forums and idea management tools are the top two Web 2.0 technologies being considered and piloted by IT decision-makers this year. Efficiency: Information workers are high-paid, valuable members of the enterprise. But they have a hard time finding information to get their job done, with 83% saying they waste time searching for information vital to their work projects. There is growing importance for tools that provide the ability to better find information and connect more easily with co-workers who can provide expertise to solve problems and drive efficiencies. Email Woes: A huge need is emerging for better ways to reuse information that normally would be lost in email communication. Email is used to share information but it only goes so far as the people in the email chain. Once in the chain, it's locked away. Changing email behavior is no easy task but collaboration technologies hold promise for more information to be shared throughout the enterprise. Governance: Managing business information is becoming a legal necessity. Communication is becoming so widespread that it is becoming difficult to track. According to Forrester, only 20% of businesses report that they're very confident that if challenged, they could demonstrate that their digital information is accurate, trustworthy and accessible. Benchmarking For Success Forrester's report is designed to provide a framework for building a collaborative practice in the enterprise. Senior level executives came to understand in 2009 the need for better collaboration. In 2010, we expect structured formats like what Forrester proposes will be increasingly important for successful implementation of collabortion technologies in the enterprise. Discuss

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Collaboration Is Hot: Why Now?

After recent comScore data showed Twitter stats leveling off as WordPress traffic continued to grow, some bloggers framed the results as an either/or proposition; if one platforms wins, the other loses. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has weighed in on the subject, stating that the interaction between microblogging and what he's calling "megablogging" is hardly a zero-sum game. "It's not really a 'versus,' it's an 'and'," he wrote. Sponsor "One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts (and other people's blog posts,)" he continued. "As we grow, so do they, and vice versa." Here's a chart showing data similar to comScore's: As you can see, Twitter.com's growth rate for unique site visitors is slowing, while WordPress.com's site stats continue to grow. Does this signal the supposed "death of blogging" trend is coming to an end? Mullenweg certainly doesn't think so. He notes that because the question is more one of cooperation than competition, the folks at WordPress are actually trying to create more opportunities for overlap between various platforms. "Features like WP.me, post by email, Twitter publicize, RSS Cloud, P2, email subscriptions, and more stuff in the cooker is trying to tie these things together more because people who do one are highly likely to do another," he said. Moreover, many readers would question the validity of data for Twitter.com, since the website is, for many users, a secondary or even tertiary method of accessing the service. Between mobile and desktop apps, stats for Twitter.com really don't reflect how many people are using the service. Should comScore and other domain statistics analyses be thrown out of these conversations? 'I would say they probably are precise but not accurate," wrote Mullenweg. "For WordPress.com, they don't count the custom domains or RSS readers; and for Twitter they don't count API usage or desktop clients." Ultimately, comScore data are one way to compare site traffic, but in the age of APIs, they're hardly useful for tracking the actual number of active users for a particular service. So, we're curious to know, do you blog, tweet, or both? And are you more likely to use Twitter.com or a mobile or desktop application? Let us know, and give us your feedback in the comments. Do you post to a blog, Twitter, both, or neither? ( survey ) How do you use Twitter's service? ( survey ) Discuss

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Mullenweg Speaks Out on Twitter, WordPress and the Question of Competition

It has been a few weeks since the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit . Workshops ran the gamut of real-time Web applications and services. They addressed the impact of the real-time Web on search, feeds, aggregation and even branding and marketing. But several topics and terms were not discussed as much as one might have expected: "social," "interaction," and "communication." Perhaps they were assumed. But their absence from discussion spoke of something bigger; namely, our tendency to still view Web content, even real-time content, as information . Sponsor This guest post was written by Adrian Chan. Of course, communication involves information. Information access and distribution are part of what makes social media interesting. Information is also an attribute of social relationships — which are another good reason to respect social media. But the tools and practices of our "status culture" are also a means of communication; communication that uses social media in personal, social and public ways and that combines both system messaging and user messages in ways that are conversational. Making Meta From Conversational Media This "conversational" content may look like information. But when it is the product of mediated conversation, content conceals dynamics and relationships: social forces that are by their nature implicit and tacit. The real-time Web industry is poised to go "meta" and to extract and extend greater value from the information captured, mined and repurposed in real time. But for this to occur, the implicit of social interaction and communication will need to become explicit. Consider what we can already observe and infer from content and information produced on the real-time Web: influence, social capital, attention, relationships, trending topics. We accomplish this by means of algorithms and analyses based on incomplete social information. The real-time Web doesn't yet furnish much social meta data. Could it be restored after the fact — from interactions, relationships and social meanings read between the lines? The real-time Web's conversational content is produced through uncoupled, or at best loosely coupled, posts. Can dialog, relationships and social structures be detected amidst monological posts? The Content Is People. Long Live the Content! Social media are the new means of production. We are no longer in the information age, but are now in the age of communication. And in this age, the attention economy may explain the disruptive impact of social media on established industries; industries, not coincidentally, built around the production and distribution of information — as well as control over its consumption. Content is king. The content of the real-time Web is people. And yet the socialized Web is much more than a Web of, by and for the people. The social world is not flat, open and transparent. It has distinctions, boundaries, biases and preferences. It is also about who chooses, what is chosen, who is chosen, who replies and why. Social Value Add "People" content produces social information, and it is relevant because it reflects the social preferences, tastes and interests of individuals, groups and communities. Communication is how we produce this information; attention is how we consume it. Real-time Web analytics and metrics already understand this. Influencer metrics count who chooses whom as well as what. Influence is contingent on the ongoing attention paid by an audience. It is not a quality owned or possessed by the influencer. It's a relation between influencer and an "audience" willing to pay attention and help pass it forward. This is the medium's power. That power is as much in social relations as it is in information and content. Understanding what interests a user, by means of their contributions and activities but also by means of their relationships and social interactions, is at the heart of the value that the real-time social Web holds for brands and businesses (as well as the value that the user adds to their reputation and visibility). Attention spent in communicating reproduces brand value by redistributing it socially (and free of charge). Social Context The real-time Web is built on uncoupled posts. But many online social interactions are at least loosely if not densely coupled. This coupling restores some degree of social context (social information). It may reveal social relationships (relational information). The speed, reach and redistribution of tweets and updates expose social organization (attention information). And when observed and analyzed over time, changes in this activity can reveal persistent interests and relationships, as well as those that are changing (historical trends and predictive information). Social contexts can be partially reconstructed out of other communication forms: chains, loops and circuits, clusters, clumps (and more). Satellite "conversations" fashioned from re-aggregated comments (see PubSubHubbub , Dave Winer's RSSCloud and the new salmon protocol ) will spark innovation in contextual analyses. But all the social analytics in the world won't work unless the architectural and data models can capture communication. If tools and applications can increasingly provide ways to communicate in ways that also expose social context, and if data-mining efforts are enhanced with models of social action, then the world of real-time social interaction will surface immensely valuable information indeed — at which point we may be able to say that in the midst of all this information, we are also better informed. Adrian Chan is a social interaction design specialist and SNCR Sr Fellow. You can find him on Twitter @gravity7 and on his blog . Discuss

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Getting More Out of the Conversation: The Real Real-Time Challenge

Games can be a clever way to gain knowledge about a market and provide a simulated way for people to play with the products you sell. "IT Manager III: Unseen Forces" does just that. It's an online game developed by Intel that touches on the aspirations of any IT manager to become the CTO of a global enterprise. Sponsor The game is set in an IT Department of a fictitious company. The aim is for the player to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the company by applying special powers to a fleet of PC's, laptops and servers. In the meantime, the player faces a constant array of technology issues that pose threats to the company's bottom line. Successful players discover that their IT department and company expand, leading to more challenges that come with any corporate expansion. The "special powers," gives the game a sense that the IT Manager is like the "Clark Kent," of the enterprise. He's the ordinary guy who fixes the laptop when it crashes. But in actuality he is a super hero, who, of course, uses the special powers of Intel technology to save the day and bring new glory to the corporation. The game is entertaining and can be a bit stressful, too, as glowing, red wrenches float over the heads of the people who need assistance. This game is about gaining work knowledge but also about the culture and the camaraderie that comes with working in an IT department. In the game the player can unwind after a stressful day or engage in friendly competitive games. For instance, the game has its own sense of humor that runs through the IT culture of any enterprise. Employees who need help are sometimes spoofed for the types of questions they are asked. An employee with a faulty monitor may ask what is wrong with their television. Hilarious is the "bozon" count that measures the level of technical naivety. Awards are given that include an "attitude adjustment and an "Order of the Reboot," medal. It provides the hopeful intention of giving the user a reason to come back to the game, a place where they can relate to their peers. The game is definitely intended to serve as a community builder for Intel. Developers can show off their high scores and player profiles on their web sites. Code snippets are available for badges. It has also been localized into 12 languages. Players may also use a Facebook application. The entire experience of the game is to engage IT managers in the world of Intel technology with the goal of becoming an IT superhero. It looks like Intel has done its research. The game is engaging and recognizes the culture of the IT worker. The only risk is if the game becomes too much about Intel instead of the user who is playing the game. Bu at first look, that does not appear to be the case. Discuss

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The Intel Game for the "Unseen Heroes" of the IT Department