Widgets

A lot of people were sceptical when two gigantic investment firms, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price paid $50 million or a 9.1% stake in Slide, a San Francisco-based company best know as the purveyor of entertainments like SuperPoke, which allows Facebook users to ‘slap’ or ‘punch’ their friends. Slide was built using a portion of Slide CEO Max Levchin’s fortune when he sold PayPal, which he co-founded, to eBay for $1.5 billion. Some people believe that Slide and its ‘widgets’ could be the long-awaited solution to the problem that has been plaguing everyone in the business of selling ads on the Internet.

 

Widgets are small, self-contained programs that can be plugged into a web application like a blog or social network. The widget factory Levchin built is considered a giant in the world of widgets. It is now the largest in the world in terms of users. It is no doubt that widgets are important when you use Facebook or MySpace because those are what make social networks more enjoyable! Where in the world do you get to ‘ninja kick’ your friend without breaking their ribs and putting your friendship on the rocks?

 

Since the usage of most of the widgets is free, then where is the money, I hear you ask. Slide CEO offers you two answers. The first has to do with the changing nature of the web. According to TIME magazine, online search only accounts for 6% of what people do when they go online. So what else do they do? Even though there are a lot of people spending more and more time on MySpace, Facebook and other social networks, they are not a loyal bunch. They tend to flock towards the newest and hottest thing and will not look back again. But whenever they go, they’ll find Slide’s widgets, which can be programmed to work anywhere with just some minor adjustments.

 

Levchin’s second answer has to do with how a company measure the success of their ads. The metric most ad buyers, including Google, use does not work so well when friends are trading virtual kicks and punches with each other and Levchin thinks he has the solution, which he calls ‘engagement’. He can mine that database of 50 million active widget users for all kinds of behavioural data. Unfortunately, engagement does not exactly appeal to the people of Madison Avenue. Most advertisers still continue to price ads by the number of people who view them. So if people view the ad, the more expensive it is. Still, engagement seems to be catching on, albeit slowly.

 

So what do you think of these widgets?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Networks for Enterprises?

The term “Web 2.0” has clearly taken hold after the first O’Reilley Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. The dot-com burst in the fall of 2001 was once seen as if the web had overhyped. In fact, the shakeouts marked the technological revolutions and had separated the pretenders and the real success stories.

Web 2.0 did not introduce new technical specifications. What makes it different from Web 1.0 is that it changes the way on how the end users and software developers use the web. It is an expression referred to the second generation of the Internet-based services, such as the social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies. It aims to facilitate collaboration, creativity, and sharing among the users.

Web 2.0 is the trend in the Internet technology. Social networks are growing like weeds and have attracted millions of users that integrated these sites into their daily lives. This creates fear among the employers who worry that the trend will cause the workers to waste their time on the social network sites during working hours and share the corporate information on the sites, which are not protected by corporate firewalls.

Since the Web has already made its way into most of our heart, it is appropriate that the employers start accepting this fact and implement the social networking tools to drive business value and gain competitive advantage to the company. In fact, most corporate executives believe that Web 2.0 assist the employees to work more efficiently.

Security ProPortal.com stated that 472 executives around the world had been surveyed by the professional services firm and the Economist Intelligence Unit and nearly 70% said they believed that Web 2.0 tools will help the employees to work more efficiently. 75% said that Web 2.0 tools would foster innovation within their businesses and 86% see them improving knowledge sharing.

Another survey done by Sophos last year has shown that the respondents perceived that good productivity is the result of good management. Some of them worry that the employees might try to get round the Web filters and try to gain access to the site in some other way.

Israeli-American software company, WorkLight Inc., is one of the growing number of software companies that provides secure server-based software product that provides a secure, simple, and customisable “Web 2.0 style” access to corporate data that resides in the enterprise application. These accesses include RSS readers, personalised homepages, gadgets/widgets, application mashups, and instant messaging. The employees are the one who define how they want the information to be aggregated and presented.

WorkLight was approached by a major US bank that has 70, 000 employees (and about 10% on Facebook) and was focusing on communication among remote users and expertise. The investment bank installed IBM’s Lotus Connection but it is not adopted by the employees in a meaningful way. The solution for this is the WorkBook.

WorkLight launched WorkBook Facebook application in the UK on 19th February 2008. This is to address the issues caused by the usage of social networking sites among the employees. Since many employees are already familiar with Facebook, it requires no training and they are able to pick up the new software instantly.

To install WorkBook, log on to Facebook and install it like FunWall, SuperPoke or other Facebook applications. It will appear in your application list and when you click on it, you will be asked for authentification with your organisation’s identity services. You can have your company information on your Facebook profile but it is only visible in the WorkBook application. Workbook enables you to communicate securely with colleagues and to perform the functions you normally find on Facebook, such as form groups, share information and ideas, as well as search for employees with specific expertise or by the location, department, project etc. It also allows you to receive activity streams from the Facebook news feed. 

Apart from implementing social networks for enterprise, WorkLight has begun trial to allow customers to view their credit card and bank account transaction history on NetVibes, iGoogle or Yahoo homepage. WorkLight also has a software that enables the employees to fill out their expenses on their personalised homepage. Unlike SAP software, which requires the employees to go through tedious steps just to file their expenses, there are no flags, no codes to memorise, and no need to involve a help desk on WorkLight.

All of these applications are hosted on the company server and are protected by security layers as the software deals with highly valuable and private personal or corporate information. Only those who are presently on the company network or who sign in via VPN are allowed to gain access to the WorkBook.

While these benefits are encouraging companies to implement the system, putting up highly confidential data on the Internet is always a risky business. Will you adopt the social networking site as your collaboration tool for your company?