Intranets are becoming a higher priority for organizations. Intranet teams are growing in size, and the best of them are embracing new trends such as mobile accessibility and social networking. These are some of the findings from Jakob Nielsen's annual report on the top intranets for 2010. Companies that made the list this year include General Electric, Trend Micro Devices and Walmart. Nielsen is recognized as one of the world's foremost usability experts. His findings appear solid, though it is apparent that Intranet development is just on the verge of becoming a central communication environment for enterprise collaboration. Sponsor This year, Nielsen says, top companies on the list had a median size of about 6,300 employees, which continues a year-to-year trend toward smaller businesses. He attributes it to the increase in availability of small-company-friendly intranet technology. In addition, intranet teams are growing, up to 14 people, 27% higher than the average team size in 2006. This is not a big surprise. The need to develop the best possible internal communications environments now cuts across multiple platforms, ranging from the web to mobile devices. More resources are required to keep these platforms synced and accessible to the employees in the organization. Mobile Intranet Sites The best intranets had a separate mobile site for its employees. Of the companies polled, only 30% actually had a dedicated mobile site. Expect this to change in the year ahead. People are still getting to know how to use smart phones. It's still rare for companies to launch application environments for users, but at least one company did: an iPhone web app. Soon, though, users will expect to have access "anytime, anywhere," to their organization's network. Social Features The social Web is finding its way into intranets. Nielsen cites two trends: social features for employees as individuals workgroup support and other features that encourage work-related connections He cites Walmart for its discussion and profile pages and Trend Micro's TrendSpace, which includes the capability for employees to create their own content. Trend Micro goes as far as offering an elaborate system of reward points that accrue to employees when they contribute to the intranet's community features. It's noteworthy that social features are still just emerging in intranet environments, especially with the advent of enterprise collaboration services. Companies still have the chance to be recognized as innovators in this space, especially if they implement real-time update capabilities and mashup environments . Intranet Design is Maturing Overall, Nielsen comes to the conclusion that intranet design is maturing. In many respects, the Intranet has come of age. In the year ahead, intranets will change even more. Mobile usability and social networking features will continue to evolve, especially as teams begin to experiment with the wide variety of enterprise collaboration services now available. Discuss

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Top Intranets Embrace Mobile Accessibility and Social Networking

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. So far we've explored these trends: Structured Data , The Real-Time Web , Personalization . The fourth part of our series is on Mobile Web . We're including Augmented Reality in this category, as we think it's a key element of where the Mobile Web is heading circa 2009. In April we reported statistics from browser company Opera showing large growth on the Mobile Web. According to Opera, there was a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009. What's driving that growth is devices like the iPhone, new mobile operating systems like Android, and hot applications like Augmented Reality. 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! Apple Dominates Mobile Web, But Android on The Rise... We named Apple our Best Bigco of 2008 , mostly due to the success of the iPhone and accompanying App Store. By most statistics, Apple is in a fairly dominant position in the Mobile Web. At the beginning of the year we reported data from AdMob (a leading mobile advertising marketplace) showing that Apple has a 48% market share of smartphone traffic in the United States. That figure doesn't just come from the iPhone, but the iPod touch too. By June 2009, Apple's share of smartphone traffic in the U.S. had surged to 64% . Perhaps more significantly though, Apple's share of worldwide smartphone traffic had increased to 47%. This is important, because internationally other smartphones were utilized much more than in the U.S. before the iPhone arrived. However, Apple can't afford to rest on its laurals. Google's mobile OS Android has been making rapid progress. According to the latest Admob statistics available, for July '09 , requests from the Android Operating System increased 53% month over month and Android now has 7% worldwide OS share. The iPhone OS dropped slightly to 45% worldwide and 60% in the U.S. Bigco Initiatives & Trendy Startups All of the big Internet companies have strong Mobile Web initiatives. We discussed Apple and Google above. Yahoo continues to push Mobile Web , which currently goes under the OneConnect brand. Microsoft has announced a number of mobile initiatives this year, including a mobile version of Microsoft Office and MySpace bringing its platform to Windows Mobile phones. Earlier this month Facebook announced a mobile expansion of their Facebook Connect platform . "Facebook Connect for Mobile Web" enables developers to add a Facebook Connect button to their apps in order to make them more social. Probably of most interest is watching the up and coming Mobile Web startups. We've had our eye on Brightkite for some time, but perhaps the trendiest startup right now is Foursquare . It's a location-aware social app for the iPhone, but only available in a limited number of countries currently. Augmented Reality Augmented reality, the addition of a layer to the world on your mobile device, has been a very hot trend this year. As we noted in August , it is in everything from mobile apps to kids toys. Many people think that "AR" will soon be talked about by everyone the way they used to talk about "social media" and "Web 2.0" before that. That remains to be seen, but there's no denying there is a lot of interest in AR right now. As we reported at the end of August, the AR apps are starting to flow into Android (the early leader in this space) and iPhone devices. We reported that the Paris Metro Subway was apparently the first AR-enabled app to be accepted into iTunes. Then came a new Yelp app with AR , which any 3Gs owner can turn on by shaking their phone. Presselite , the company that made the Paris Metro Subway app, followed up with a London Bus app for the App Store. Conclusion Clearly mobile devices are an increasingly important way to access the Web. Many of our readers have smartphones nowadays, a good proportion of them being iPhones or Android devices (our statistics prove this). And there is no shortage of mobile web applications flowing into the App Store and Android's marketplace - not to forget Nokia and other prominent mobile manufacturers. What's perhaps most encouraging however, is the entirely new class of mobile apps we're seeing. Augmented Reality is the most obvious example. It's been a big year for mobile, with much promise to come. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Mobile Web & Augmented Reality

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Facebook's Privacy Move Violates Contract With Users

The Web 2.0 world may seem at times like a glamorous, hip place. Services get wild attention. The names are something out of the space age. The companies work out of coffee shops and lofts. But the money has a way of running out before the entrepreneur can find a way to make a profit. No wonder the enterprise world can look so enticing to a Web 2.0 company. So, we thought it might provide some perspective by looking at companies that are showing signs of reaching into the business market or have made the big switch. Sponsor Posterous is a stylish miroblogging service that has gained attention for its ease of use, especially the simplicity in it as a publishing tool. We corresponded with the company today and were told that it will launch a "Posterous for Business," service. The news follows an update to Posterous that allows multiple users to create group blogs that allow users to post to a group page on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. A company logo may be placed in the Posterous blog with a description. That's a big deal. Facebook group pages are becoming important for business users. It can be a bit clumsy trying to update to group pages from outside Facebook. This is an important development for the microbogging service, pointing to its entrance into the business market. Box.net started as a consumer service for people to store online files. In 2007, the company turned to the enterprise and has not looked back. In February, the company launched a new interface. Today, their client roster includes companies such as Nike, Oracle and Marriott. Its direction is pretty clear. The enterprise is where box.net sees its future. Xobni launched in January of 2008. The company billed itself as a social network for your inbox. Cool service. Today, Xobni places a good bit of its attention on the enterprise market . Xobni offers a service that allows administrators to provide Xobni for employees. It can be customized and has features to make it regulatory compliant. Control features are built into the service. In November, the company announced its integration with Salesforce.com. Xobni's future looks more and more like an enterprise play. No Going Back There is no looking back once Web 2.0 companies switch to a business focus. The business market is so entirely different than the consumer world. Free services can remain intact but once the move happens, it's rare to find a small company that can manage to dive deep into the enterprise while maintaining its focus on the Web 2.0 world. Some have been able to do it. WordPress is an example of a company that has had success with both consumers and the enterprise. Perhaps that will be the case with Posterous, too. Discuss

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Forget the Web 2.0 Glamour - the Money's in the Enterprise

Google launched its version of integrated real-time search , one of a number of impressive product demos given, at a press event this morning. It's much better than what Bing and Yahoo! have done , but it's still just the beginning of a full-scale engagement with the real-time web. To provide further context to this discussion, we're rerunning a post we wrote in seven months ago, titled " 3 Models of Value in the Real-Time Web. " We hope you find it useful and interesting. Sponsor Hey web DJ. Reach into your magic bag of search tools and pull out a big result - dripping with related ephemera born just moments ago. Those could hold the grain of information you're really looking for, or they could sparkle with data that changes your course of action in unexpected ways. Alert! Another factor has emerged, elsewhere on another site. You said you wanted to be told, right away , about any online artifacts that crossed a threshold of popularity within a certain group of people in your field. That has just occurred, so it's time to watch the replay of how it got so hot, evaluate its usefulness and decide whether to bring this emergent phenomenon into the work you were doing before you were interrupted, drop the former for the latter or return to your original focus. How would you like this to be your job description? It could well be - if the red hot Real Time Web keeps showing up on sites all around the internet. The Real Time Web is coming so fast we've hardly had any time to think about it yet. So let's do that, shall we? The two hottest technologies online, Twitter and Facebook, are fast integrating real-time delivery of activity streams to their users. Paul Buchheit, the man who built the first versions of both Gmail and Adsense, says the real time web is going to be the next big thing . Buchheit's FriendFeed is a key point of innovation in real time. Social media ping server Gnip promised to turn everything online into Instant Messaging-style XMPP feeds, and though that's been put on hold in favor of more immediately clear value - we've still got our fingers crossed. Our investigation of companies like Bit.ly and OneRiot this morning turned up even more big news that's right around the corner for the Real Time Web. But what's the point? What's in it for us, as users? We offer below three models of value that we suspect will be found in the Real Time Web. They are the concepts that underly the vision described above at the top of this post. Those concepts are Ambiance, Automation and Emergence . This is just an initial exploration of ideas, reality will undoubtedly be more complicated shortly. We welcome your participation in thinking about this part of the fast-approaching future of the web. Ambiance The web is made up of web pages linked together, but hovering around many of those pages are now social media signals like blog posts, bookmarks, tweets and other URLs that refer to a page but aren't visible when you're looking at it. The same is true for concepts. Most of us use Google to find pages about things we're looking for, but Google prioritizes historical inbound links and the text on pages. In the above image you can see a custom search engine we use here at ReadWriteWeb, with Mark Carey's Twitter on Google greasemonkey script running on top of it. If you want to know about streaming video, Forrester's, Jeremiah Owyang, has a running list of vendors in the space (1) and that's where you want to start - but wouldn't you like to know about the very freshest (2) live streaming vendors on the market as well? That's what people are talking about, in real time, on Twitter. In our experience these Twitter augmented search results are valuable because they are up to the minute - but sometimes they are also just better . Someday you'll be able to discover Owyang's list and be prompted to view the most recent, the most authoritative and the most "socially relevant to you" conversations about the same concept going on all around the web. People are working on all of that and as research-lovers we hope they succeed. The point is that no matter what you're doing on the web, there are valuable related activities going on elsewhere - probably simultaneously. Exposing those is exciting. Automation We probably should have started out with this, but what's the most obviously valuable example of clear value in real-time information delivery in recent internet history? Blackberry and the push email! We tend to assume that the real time web is something we'll be looking at constantly, because it's constantly bringing up new information. That doesn't have to be the case, though. The real time web could very well just do its thing and notify us, in real time, of important events. Thresholds crossed. Simple changes made. For example, when the already controversial Google Chrome Terms of Service were changed again last December, I got an SMS sent to my phone notifying me that it had been changed. I was able to jump online, grab a screenshot of the changes from the application that was monitoring the document and report on the change before anyone else . I certainly wasn't watching for the change. A robot was doing that for me and let me know about the change in near real time. It was pretty awesome, but it wasn't real time and the services I patched together to do it are all marginal enough that they often don't work or are very late. Put real time at the center of the web and we'll be able to automate all kinds of information monitoring. At first it will be a competitive advantage for those who use it strategically; then it will just change the game, become standard practice and require competitive knowledge workers to come up with something else that's new. Read the last section of this post and the comments readers left here: 3 Models of Value in the Real-Time Web Discuss

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What the Real-Time Web Can Deliver

The federal government reported today that the unemployment rate fell to 10% for the first time since the recession started last year. But are the numbers accurate? Mint.com is not so sure. The company is giving its own take on what it really means to be unemployed with an amusing video they are calling " The Unemployment Game. " Sponsor We are curious why Mint.com would take on unemployment as an issue. But take a look at Mint.com and you see the company is clearly trying to take economic trends and provide their own spin on what the numbers mean. For companies in our space, the unemployment issue hits home. Thousands of people have been let go from their jobs. Jobs are hard to come by. So this is a perspective that has some resonance. Free budget software - Mint.com Mint.com makes the point that we need to take a closer look at unemployment figures. The government tells us that the recession is over and the economic stimulus is working. But we still have to be thinking about how the Fed reports its numbers. Mint.com says that if you count everyone, the unemployment rate should be 17.2%. The video is amusing. It's a smart approach that gives a different perspective on the economy. We cover a lot of enterprise issues but the perspectives we see from companies often focuses exclusively on their products and other narrowly focused issues. Mint.com takes a different approach. They are a personal finance service, but the issues they cover affect anyone who works in the business world. Discuss

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Mint.com: Are You Really Unemployed?