Ned Notes


Ideas in Motion - Collaboration and Social Media

updated posting on

Bloggers have been asking for some time, for Yahoo to join Open Social. Now it's happened: Yahoo has officially joined Open Social. It's been positioned as a defensive move against Microsoft's drive to own user data (a la Passport) and thus, to keep Microsoft away from actually acquiring Yahoo. I just don't see the value of Open Social as a purely defensive move -- after all, Microsoft itself has learned a lot since the Passport and Palladium days. I believe that Microsoft has effectively made the transition towards more openness around protocols and systems and allowing much more user control over personal information (I was part of Microsoft during part of that transition). I'd point to people like Dare Obasanjo as examples of this type of thoughtful movement.

If you accept this premise, you could even argue that Yahoo's act of joining Open Social serves almost as a stalking horse for Microsoft itself to become a contributor to more of these open information-sharing and protocol-sharing movements. I know, I know, hard to believe -- but I think Ray Ozzie's heart is definitely in the place of co-creating and co-collaborating with as many software developers as possible -- and if building that kind of ecosystem means embracing Open Social and LAMP instead of Windows Live and Windows Server / SQL. It's heretical, but it'll happen.

The piece that I think is the most interesting is, in fact, the Open Social Foundation, which creates a larger framework for almost anyone to work inside of Open Social and contribute effectively to Open Social efforts.

WhitePages.com, my erstwhile employer, has wanted to add user-generated content to their site(s) for years. I was just featured in a print article on the topic -- and I'm hoping my old friend Jeff Bond, Editor of Seattle Business Monthly will forgive me re-printing his publication's print article. Here's the full text for the news article on my big "social media" project at WhitePages.com:

WHITEPAGES GO WIKI: During the past few years, the age-old physical "white pages" book has virtually disappeared with the success of Whitepages.com. This month, however, the digital directory is being reinvented yet again as an interactive "wiki."

The community-driven wiki model, which allows users to manage their own listings to keep them as up-to-date as possible, has been the company's top priority for years, says product manager Ned Hayes. Also new to the site in 2008 is the addition of cell-phone numbers, e-mail addresses and social networks. Unlike relatively unmonitored sites such as Facebok, where user information has to be taken with a grain of salt, Hayes says Whitepages.com's security features will make it very difficult for malicious users to hack in and pose as other people.

Found an interesting presentation on collaboration. It's from last year, but it does cover the basics of why social media works, focusing especially on organizational development -- moving from a “need to know” to a “right to know” mindset. I was especially struck by the fact that Don Rumsfeld is quoted at length. Apparently, he (or one of his speechwriters) was not -- is not -- a total flaming idiot. Relevant quotes from Rumsfeld:

“The two truly transforming things, conceivably, might be in information technology and information operation and networking and connecting things in ways that they function totally differently than they had previously.

And if that's possible, what I just said, that possibly the single-most transforming thing in our force will not be a weapon system, but a set of interconnections and a substantially enhanced capability because of that awareness.

It can simply be in connectivity. It can be in interoperability. It can be in taking things that every single of which exists presently and managing them, using them, connecting them, arraying them in a way that has a result that is transformation.”

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 8/9/2001,Town Hall Meeting, Washington, D.C.

Graphing Social Patterns the new edition, in San Diego -- notes from Dave Glazer from Google

David of Glazer of Google’s OpenSocial team shares at Graphing Social. He suggests that novice should read Nicholas Carr’s book “the Big Switch” on social computing, there are parallels between open grid electricity and open

Here are notes from another attendee.

Here's a few photos from Graphing Social Patterns in San Diego

Seattle Facebook conference... what it's like to see people glom onto a platform

And I saw Dave McClure again... friend of Scott R...

Graphing Social Patterns... Reid Hoffman and thinking about LinkedIn.... links on this topic available here.


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Reaching Me: Ned Hayes · Seattle WA · 206.321.7981 · ned AT nednotes.com