Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
I gave a talk yesterday for the members of it@cork titled “The Web 2.0 Toolset - a business focussed overview”
There were around 70 people in attendance and feedback afterwards was very positive.
Here is a copy of the presentation I gave. I hope to have a video of the presentation live by tomorrow.
Twitterfone launched last night to a spectacular response. Mike Arrington gave it a glowing report on TechCrunch and the feedback has been very positive.
What does Twitterfone do? Not much! It does one thing and it does it well. It allows you to dial a local number, leave a short message, the message is then transcribed and posted to your Twitter account along with a link to the audio file in case the transcription doesn’t quite come out.
The best use case for this is in your car when you shouldn’t can’t browse!
I have no idea how well it works if you are outside your own country but Pat being the king of roaming, I imagine he is all over that.
Just how good is it? Well I just left a message saying “@patphelan looks like everyone is looking for a twitterfone invite” and got the following Tweet posted:
ask Pat Phelan looks like everyone is lookig for a twitterfone invoice
It obviously had issues with my enunciation (although listening back, the quality of the line left a lot to be desired).
A couple of things Pat will need to add to improve it (and I assume Pat has already thought of these):
Well done to Pat and the rest of the team for getting this up. I look forward to watching its evolution.
Things move fast in the Web 2.0 world! Only a couple of weeks back I wrote a review of Enterprise Wiki software in which I mentioned PBWiki and Socialtext amongst others.
I like Socialtext and would have recommended it had PBWiki not just shipped its new interface. The PBWiki interface is friendlier and easier to get around for non-techies so I went for that.
Now today I see two posts mentioning that a new version of SocialText is en route which will make SocialText a much more compelling enterprise app.
Socialtext is adding Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People. From Michael Arrington’s post:
SocialText Dashboard, pictured above, is a Netvibes-like customizable home page. Users can add SocialText widgets that show information from the company’s wiki - total edits, a list of workspaces, change summaries, etc. Other widgets are for productivity, like a calendar, or just for fun, like a YouTube widget.
All Dashboard widgets are Google Widget compatible, which means that, subject to security settings, they can also be added to sites like iGoogle. But more importantly, all iGoogle widgets can also be added to the Dashboard page. So you can, for example, pull Gmail directly into your SocialText Dashboard.
While in Socialtext People, users can create profiles and add “friends†within the organization. You can monitor the activity stream of mutual friends as well, which includes outside services such as Twitter. And as Rafe Needleman points out in his post:
You can tag yourself “M&A” if you’re in business development. Others can tag you, too. Then, if you’re looking for someone with a particular skill or hobby, you just search on tags. Tags are easier to update, and because of that you’re more likely to see good information in individuals’ tag clouds, compared to a bunch of form fields that no one wants to bother with. Of course, tag clouds and folksonomies are also less rigorous than straight data fields, but you know what they say: They make it up in volume.
So, if you haven’t rushed out after my last post and dived into PBWiki, you might want to think again about SocialText. It just keeps getting better and better.
Via Clare Dillon the Virtual Earth blog and Martha Rotter on Twitter I spotted that Microsoft’s Live Maps now includes images of Cork, Galway, Carlow, Limerick, Navan & Wexford - cool!
The Bird’s Eye button becomes active when you are over an area that Microsoft has detailed aerial imagery of.
The image below is of Cork City Hall. You can rotate and zoom to see it from other angles and sizes! Way cool.
According to Clare’s blog post, Dublin will be up soon as well.
While everyone talks about the power of FaceBook as a cool means of getting a message out, you hear very little about the power of Twitter as a communications tool.
I inadvertantly compared the two in recent months and found that Twitter was by far the more potent communications tool (in my unscientific test, at least).
What happened was, last November and December I changed the status on my Facebook profile to reflect the fact that I was looking for a job. My profile displayed that info for several weeks. In all that time I had one person approach me offering me some possible contract work. No more.
However, two or possibly three times since Christmas I have mentioned on Twitter that I am looking for a job and from that I have received 6-7 strong expressions of interest some of which are at the stage of swapping proposals.
The very first time Will Knott asked me why Twitter was so powerful was at the first Cork Open Coffee meeting back in March 07 and I remember telling him that the power of Twitter is in the network. Twitter continues to prove me right.
I have been very quiet on this blog for the last few weeks - apologies for that but I can’t promise on the pace returning to the two or three posts a day I was averaging at times last year.
Why? I have been spending a lot of time on the micro-blogging site, Twitter.
Twitter is a site where you have a maximum of 140 characters per post but instead of a traditional blog site, these posts are typically conversational. Because of the immediacy of writing 140 characters, reading and responding to ‘Tweets’ is relatively trivial and so conversations are born.
Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a great article last year explaining how Twitter is now paying his rent.
And because of the still early nature of the application, it is possible to very quickly build up a powerful network of highly influential users who are only too happy to converse with you. I have met several people recently who, up until now I only knew through Twitter.
Another way I use Twitter is I often pose questions to Twitter and get great replies back from highly qualified people in minutes.
Twitter has an open API so it is possible to use third party applications to post to and read from Twitter. Currently I am using twhirl on my laptops (twhirl is a cross-platform desktop client for twitter, based on Adobe AIR) and twibble on my phone. Snitter is another cross-platform Twitter desktop client which gets a lot of good reviews.
Dave Weinberger called it “continuous partial friendship” but I think it goes beyond that. The term Ambient Intimacy has been coined to cover one of the aspects of Twitter - it brings you a lot closer to people you might ordinarily never get to know (if you decide you don’t want to know them, you simply stop following them!).
Whatever it is, it is growing in popularity steadily and it was how I and many others chose to remain connected over the holiday period.
If you want to follow me, here is my Twitter profile.
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