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If you haven’t been living under a rock recently you are well aware of Microsoft’s latest foray into the search market with Bing. The latest buzz word in Web search is “real-time” lead by the constant flow of 140 character posts from the Twitter platform. Many companies have been attempting to harness this information in the form of real-time search engines. Some recent contenders include Topsy, OneRiot, CrowdEye, and now Bing.

Bing’s real-time search experiment as of right now is only indexing results for popular tweeters. It’s still unclear on how they plan on delivering these results as my own tests have been varied. For example if I search for “Al Gore” on Bing I do not see anything related to Twitter. If I search “Al Gore Twitter” I see some results at the bottom of the page. However if I search “@algore” the Twitter results are right at the top.

I tried a second test with “TechCrunch” and this time I do see tweets at the bottom of the page. “TechCrunch Twitter” delivers the results at the top of the page, as does “@techcrunch“.

Search heavyweight Google as of yet has not launched any products to index Twitter content (outside of user pages), but rumors of a Google microblogging search engine have been surfacing.

An effort to give smartphones a more integral role in business communications will expand collaborative features for WebEx users. Announced at the Cisco Live conference this week, new features planned for the third quarter of next year include…

The availability of employee presence information while a smartphone is in use.

Speech-to-text voicemail while users are participating in a WebEx conference. This non-intrusive measure will allow users to carry on a text conversation and offers the ability to invite the sender into the conference.

Anchored connections in case a user loses mobile service while in a WebEx conference, which will allow easy re-connection when service is regained.

Additional features include the ability to visit a remote office and map your location via Wi-Fi, which will also allow detection of available resources such as meeting rooms and equipment.

WebEx introduced an iPhone app earlier this year. As these new initiatives continue to develop Cisco plans to upgrade these features and offer intuitive interfaces across multiple smartphone platforms.

Source: PC World

Facebook is a sharing and social networking platform that is constantly in development. Recent and upcoming changes are focused on reflecting three basic principles in which Facebook grounds effective privacy for it’s users. Control over who we share information with and Simplicity in use allows us to effectively create the Connections we desire.

Control reflects Facebook’s desire to give users the ability to share specific information with targeted audiences. Earlier this year Facebook added the “Everyone” option which allows users to share parts of their profile with all Facebook users. On the flip side Facebook wants to give us the ability to limit certain details about ourselves down to select groups of users such as family, co-workers, or a circle of friends. This option will compliment the “Create a New List” function on our Friends page. Right now the list function is strictly a news feed and friend filter but soon it will also serve as an access control for each individual update.

Increasing control functions can sometimes complicate things. Facebook noticed over time that privacy settings corresponding with the addition of new features created undue complexity and confusion. Focusing on Simplicity, new developments have consolidated those settings to a single page along with the standardization of control options. Also, overlapping settings have been removed and profile fields considered to be similar have been combined.

To make sure that users are making desired Connections with these new changes, Facebook will be asking us to reaffirm some of our settings over the next few days. This new Transition Tool will enable us to select which parts of our profile we feel comfortable sharing, giving us the choice to be as open or reclusive as we would like.

Previous privacy settings will carry over as these changes take effect and no new information will be shared with outside sources, such as advertisers.

Source: Facebook Blog

Potentially bad news for smaller image sharing apps such as Twitpic and Posterous as Flickr (finally) adds a new feature which allows users to tweet their photos. Also this week Twitter modifies their user interface to give us more control of who we follow and who follows us.

To share photos from your Flickr account directly to Twitter you must first authorize the two services to communicate with each other through your account; standard for many Twitter applications. Now you can easily send shortened http://flic.kr URLs from the “Blog This” button on your photo pages or mobile device. Enable “Upload by Email” in your Flickr settings before you attempt mobile photo sharing.
 
Twitter tweaks it’s user interface slightly this week by enhancing features on the Following and Followers pages. Twitter now gives us two new ways to view our tweeps. A compact view gives us a clean overview of users listed on our follow pages, while the expanded view shows us a user’s last tweet along with their location. A new drop-down menu delivers quick access to @ mentions, direct messages, unfollow and block.

Intrigued by the concept of Enterprise 2.0? If your company is considering implementing Web 2.0 technologies as an innovative business solution, advancements are being made every day within enterprise collaboration and social networking applications. If you’re like most executives however, you are still on the fence or unsure how to approach these new technologies.

Business software and technology consultant Dion Hinchcliffe led a workshop at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. As part of his presentation, Hinchcliffe discussed the allocation of resources and expenses related to introducing 2.0 technologies within organizations. From his experiences, here is the breakdown…

Tools 15% – First understanding that Enterprise 2.0 is more about people than it is about software and hardware, the cost of acquiring business collaboration and/or social networking systems is potentially the smallest expenditure. Even though the cost of solutions can vary greatly, there are several other considerations in this plan.

Customization and Integration 25% – One size fits all would be ideal, but most companies have unique business processes and applications. Customizing the user experience to ensure smooth integration and transition will take some time and resources.

Community Management 25% – As we look towards the long term, serving the community of users will be instrumental. Through engagement, moderation and mentoring we will see greater adoption and participation throughout the organization.

IT Support 15% – Keeping all-systems-go requires a skilled IT team, as with most business technologies.

Project and Change Management 20% – Enhanced collaboration, communication and transparency creates several new dynamics that can be foreign to many traditional business organizations. The culture of many companies can easily create resistance to any Enterprise 2.0 initiative. Creating clear objectives, measuring results and making appropriate changes along the way will be key to progress and success.

Today FriendFeed rolls out a new file sharing feature to expand collaboration across the social networking platform. File sharing has been a common request by users, especially organizations that take advantage of FriendFeed groups. The new file sharing feature functions similar to photo sharing: simply click the “Files” link below the post box (conveniently located next to the “Photos” link) and browse for the file you would like to upload. You can also share files and photos via email through share@friendfeed.com by adding attachments.

Common file types that FriendFeed expects to see users uploading include documents, spreadsheets, Photoshop files, MP3s (limited to three per day), and altogether does not allow video or executable files. While a daily MB limit has not been publicly specified, we expect that FriendFeed will come to a determination in the near future based on common usage.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference today in Boston, collaborative social software provider Socialtext announces Socialtext Free 50 to entice companies on the fence to integrate enterprise social networking into their organizations. This new freemium model offers online collaboration tools such as micro-blogging, social networking, personalized home pages, and a wiki workspace.
 
“Many of our customers take a practical approach of workgroup use, before widespread transformative deployments,” said Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext. “These new offerings enable more businesses to discover a new way of working without barriers and decide when to engage with us to grow revenue, strengthen customer relationships and adapt to change. Socialtext continues to exercise its Enterprise 2.0 leadership with a ‘freemium’ SaaS business model, while expanding the power of its social software platform.”
 
Features reserved for premium accounts that you won’t see in Socialtext Free 50 include multiple wiki workspaces, technical support, the ability to deploy Socialtext behind company firewalls, access to the SocialCalc collaborative spreadsheet, and obviously the ability to allow more than 50 users to access your company’s Socialtext account.

Today Intel Corp. and Nokia Corp. publicly announce a partnership to “define a new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks, enabling the development of a variety of innovative hardware, software and mobile Internet services.”

While details are still in the works the two companies have said the new devices “will marry the best features and capabilities of the computing and communications worlds and will transform the user experience, bringing incredible mobile applications and always on, always connected wireless Internet access in a user-friendly pocketable form factor.”

The plans are to include open source mobile Linux projects along with an Intel acquisition of Nokia’s HSPA/3G modem IP license.

Source: Sacramento Business Journal

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference began today in Boston. Over 20 companies were chosen to announce their latest developments for business collaboration and enterprise social networking. Following up with Part 1 of this article, here is what will be introduced at the conference over the next few days…
 
nGenera Corporation unveils nGen Collaboration to enable companies to increase efficiency and productivity through an innovative collaboration platform. nGenera is also the creator of Collaborative Enterprise Management (CEM).
 
Open Text Social Media supports compliance and security while giving companies the social productivity tools that employees desire, enhanced by mobile access through devices such as the iPhone and Blackberry.
 
PIEmatrix launches project management “made for humans” through integrated “pie” and “matrix” models designed around the way people think. Create teams, manage, and execute projects in real-time.
 
RollStream enterprise community management and collaboration software announces a new Onboarding solution for accelerating growth within supplier and customer oriented communities.
 
SimpleFeed content syndication publishing and analytics platform will announce Twitter integration to allow users to seamlessly publish content to their Twitter accounts.
 
Socialtext announces a distributed social spreadsheet known as Socialcalc, updates to the Signals micro-blogging application including a full page Web UI, and will introduce a new mainstream offering this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
 
Sun Microsystems unveils SLX Enterprise, a video community platform for business. SLX enhances communication and collaboration between employees, customers, and partners through social media.
 
ThoughtFarmer releases the latest version of it’s turnkey social intranet software. New features in ThoughtFarmer 3.5 include Discussion Capture for monitoring email threads, an improved People Directory, tree-view navigation, and enhanced performance.
 
Tomoye Community Software 3.0 is a social community platform which can be deployed on top of Microsoft SharePoint or as a standalone system.
 
Twinsoft introduces Convertigo Enterprise Mashup Server 4.5 to capture Web and legacy data and processes to create Web 2.0 enterprise mashups.
 
Yakabox 3.1 knowledge sharing software from Yakabod combines collaboration, social networking, content management and search with security features that make it the choice of the U.S. intelligence community.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference will begin on Monday in Boston and more than 20 companies have been selected to showcase their new enterprise collaboration and business social media offerings. Here is what we can expect to see this week…
 
Alcatel-Lucent is integrating real-time communications and Web 2.0 technologies with OmniTouch My Instant Communicator.
 
ArtusLabs mixes collaboration and social networking with refined scientific data mining to drive research with Ensemble for Life Science 4.5.
 
blueKiwi combines social recommendations, micro-blogging, idea generation and widgets into a new business platform with bK2009 Social Board.
 
Bluenog will showcase an open source Enterprise 2.0 development platform, or Integrated Collaborative Environment: ICE 4.5.
 
Box.net has created a partnership with a global provider to offer users anytime-anywhere document shipping.
 
Brainpark productivity and collaboration software will announce a new Task Awareness system that learns from employee work history to provide recommendations on contacts and resources.
 
Central Desktop has developed a SaaS mico-blogging platform for business.
 
CMS Watch has updated it’s Enterprise Social Software & Collaboration research and will release the new results.
 
Joyent will announce two new products at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Develop, deploy and scale web applications with the Joyent Smart Platform. My.Joyent allows companies to monitor and control their Cloud Infrastructure within the Joyent Cloud via a new web interface.
 
Leverage Software will debut major updates to it’s business social networking platform including new conversation tools and enhanced privacy.
 
NewsGator’s Social Sites 3.0 beta, which is built on top of Microsoft SharePoint, will offer new features including self-assembling wikis called Socialpedias and the ability to rate Topic Experts.