Video of Paul at Office 2.0

ZDNet has posted a short snippet of Paul’s commentary about Connect, after Dan Farber quizzed (and needled) him. I lol’d when Paul said he had a team of developers who are web savvy. Rich apparently has cloned himself. Woo-hoo! Either that or I am now a web developer . . . bah?

Too Busy to Innovate

I had a conversation with a product manager over IM today that got thinking big thoughts about stuff, you know, like Paul does. I’ve known this PM dude for years and worked with him while I was in development. Great guy, with massive doses of cynicism and negativity, at least when it comes to work.… Read More

Yahoo! The Sleeping Giant

Last week, screenshots of Kickstart, Yahoo’s lastest foray into social networks surfaced. Not surprisingly, Kickstart is targeted at recruiting, helping college student find an “in” at companies where they want to work and helping companies recruit students. I like this approach, as long as they can keep it clean by ensuring the students are really… Read More

Why Bans Don’t Work

Effectively immediately, nothing will be banned. The Summer of Facebook has brought a new list of social network (sorry Mark, social utility) bans, as well as some fuzzy research on the cost of social networking. Some interesting points: Does anyone really believe that Facebook alone costs the Australian economy $5 billion? The Sophos study says… Read More

Cage Match: Google vs. Facebook

While Yahoo has spent time and energy over the past year and a half trying several times to talk Facebook into a merger, Google has been curiously silent. Until, they recently snagged Brad Fitzpatrick from Six Apart. Fitzpatrick, known for founding LiveJournal and selling it to Six Apart, wasted no time laying down the gauntlet… Read More

We Were Connect First!

I was excited to see that Dow Chemical launched a social network today. It sounds like a great project, joining Dow’s current and former employees, targeted at different demographics. I especially like targeting alumnae who left for family-related reasons. Great stuff all around, excellent case study of a brick/mortar company embracing new web. What’s the… Read More

A New Day

I woke today to a wave of coverage on our little Connect project from ZDNet, namely Dennis Howlett, Michael Krigsman and Larry Dignan. I will spend today riding this wave, hoping not to eat it. Interlude After we went alpha, we needed a name for our little project. In true new web fashion, we offered… Read More

Oracle Gets Social

Here on the AppsLab team we have always been big believers in the power of people as a design point in applications. My personal background is in the portal space, and for years we preached people-centric. In those days, it meant a user had a configurable homepage with all the content they cared about in… Read More

Death of an Inbox

In a comment on my first post about the slow death of email as a communication medium, Julie asked: I guess you are talking about email in the context of personal communication rather than business? What are your thoughts on IM for business use, as a replacement for email? My position is that email is… Read More

Jake is Blogging about Facebook.

Yes, this is also my current Facebook status. By way of Nick O’Neill at All Facebook, I read a blog by Megan Berry today about the collision of her personal and professional lives on Facebook. It’s an interesting read. Aside from the irony of blogging about things she did not want her co-workers to see… Read More

Good Old Email in its Twilight Years

I’m sure most of you will not agree, or you’ll convince yourself otherwise. News.com has an interesting article with the catching headline, “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead”. This got me to thinking about dead letters, for some odd reason. Like it or not, email is dying. Just like face-time gave way to phone… Read More

More High-Powered Friends?

First, it was Steve Ballmer. Now, Eric Schmidt? What is going on here? I’m surprised Eric would want to befriend me, since I called him coy in this space not once, but twice. Maybe he wants to hire me and doesn’t know I have no PhD, or even masters. D’oh. Seriously, can anyone shed some… Read More