In the world of IT, social buzzwords can be a real way to kill any interest in adopting applications that give the enterprise access to the consumer Web. You have to speak their language. Social media? No way. Social middleware? Oh, yeah - now we are talking! Socialware talks in a language that IT can understand. The company is offering social middleware products that help companies integrate social networks with a level of control that makes them comfortable that the access is compliant with government regulations and IT policies. Sponsor In many ways, companies have set up their own iron curtains to keep social interaction to a minimum. It's also fair to say that many companies are eager to let their employees engage with the social Web. But they want the risk managed, especially when it comes to interacting with social networks. Socialware believes the missing component for the enterprise is a bridge layer that helps companies connect its people, processes and systems with the open, social Web. Socialware offers feature access control to social networks. An admin panel allows the IT manager to block access to different features on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. For example, users may access LinkedIn but there may be features that the employee is not permitted to access. The feature is flagged with a message that tells the user they do not have permission to use it. Socialware provides the security layers and controls that give corporate IT the comfort that the risk in exposing social networks can be managed with rules that reflect the policies of the organization. Socialware is funded by Mike Maples, Jr. , who is an investor in Twitter. It is also funded by Silverton Partners and G51 . The management team members have backgrounds in Web 2.0 and the enterprise. That's a mix that can make for a winning combination in the enterprise space. Socialware's technology is reflective of that experience. We'll be interested in seeing how the company develops in the year ahead. Discuss
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Social Media? No Way. Social Middleware? Oh, Yes
In an interview with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb today, Google's Marissa Mayer discussed some of the new product that Google announced over the last year, including the recent integration of real-time news streams into the default search pages, Google Music Search and Google Wave. Talking about the future of search, Mayer expects that people will soon do searches by talking to their phones, or through services like the newly announced Google Goggles . Sponsor Going Beyond Text While Mayer expects the search market to continue to grow, she also thinks that a lot of additional growth can come from introducing new ways of searching the web. Translation and personalization are also a major issue for Google. Asked about SearchWiki - which Arrington considers a failure - Mayer said that Google wants to morph the user experience a bit, but didn't go into any details. Regarding the Google Goggles and Google's current dependency on text to power its search, Mayer noted that the application looks at more than just location data and image recognition algorithms. Speech recognition, however, is still easier to do for Google than image recognition. Mobile Search Talking about mobile searches, Mayer said that the number of mobile searches doubled last year. Mobile searches make up slightly more than 5% of all of the search queries that Google processes. Chrome and the ChromeOS With regards to Chrome, Mayer noted that Google wants to focus on the user experience with features like the new tab page. She described the ChromeOS as an anti-operating system. In total, Google sees "tens of millions of Chrome users," though characteristically, Mayer did not go into any details. Google and the News Media Google wants to increase users' engagement with news. According to Mayer, if we were to reinvent the news today, it would look very different from what we know today. She cited Google Living Stories as an experiment that tries to reinvent the news for the 21st century. Currently, readers tend to come to articles from Google and only read one article. To increase engagement, Mayer wants to create more personalized services. In addition, she also thinks that newspapers can do a better job at keeping users on their sites. Why, for example, do most sites not offer links to related articles? The Future of News Mayer's vision of the future of news is a personalized stream of news that is portable. The personalization would take into account stories that your friends read, location and a knowledge of the topics a user is interested in. Asked about Rupert Murdoch, Mayer noted that Google partnered with MySpace to aggregate real-time status updates from MySpace users. She hopes that Murdoch will not pull all of his content out of Google. Surprisingly, Mayer didn't completely deny that Google would be willing to pay publishers for their content. Music Search Mayer said that she was happy with Google Music as a start, especially because it includes song lyrics. Mayer sidestepped any discussion about the future of Google's Music search feature. Google and Social Networks Asked about Google Social Search, Mayer noted that search can help social networks by helping users to find experts in their circle of friends. Mayer noted that users are more likely to trust their friends when it comes to certain queries (snow conditions, for example). The perfect search engine would also be able to crawl private updates that a user is credentialed to see. Mayer also noted that Google might be able to help to create an authority ranking system for real-time updates from services like Twitter and Facebook. Google Wave Arrington asked Mayer if users need to be trained better to understand Wave or if Google plans to tweak the experience. Permanent URLs are one of the features that Google plans to add. The fact that Google Wave doesn't have critical mass yet is also hindering the experience. Some teams at Google are currently using Wave for their internal communication. Mayer did not make any announcement regarding the future of Wave. Discuss
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Marissa Mayer Talks About Wave, Music Search and the Future of News
Being one of the first social networking sites in existence certainly doesn't establish you as the best or most popular. For this reason, Friendster leaked a video outlining its look and product features. According to TechCrunch , the company is set to release the new product features tomorrow morning. If the below video was meant to get prospective users excited for a revitalized service, they could have approached it from a different angle. Below are the top four reasons Friendster's new messaging needs to change. Sponsor 4. It's You! Up Close and Personal : When you're trying to brand yourself as an alternative to "generic sites" you might want to come up with messaging that differs from that of a recent $100 million dollar campaign already launched by Yahoo. 3. Your Own Look, Your Own Style : In August, Microsoft was widely criticized for Photoshopping a man's head and subsequently changing his skin color. In this case, all of the models involved appear to be both racially homogenous and between the ages of 18-30-years-old. Ironically, I would be able to express myself with "[my] own look and [my] own style"; however, the visual message here is that those who do not fit this image would be misfits. 2. [You Can] Send Gifs : If you're going to show how your network is different from Facebook and MySpace, you should focus on product features that people care about - like mobile uploads, geo-locational applications, news feeds and anything from this decade. 1. Connecting Smiles : This tagline doesn't conjure images of a fun social network. It does however relate to the tragic fact that up to 1 in 50,000 babies are born as conjoined twins. The phenomenon happens when identical twins' bodies are fused in utero and the surgery to separate these poor children is often complex and life threatening. Discuss
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Friendster Relaunching: A Lesson in How Not to Brand
