sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

I’ve been having a conversation with a colleague at Agency.com about whether Facebook has established such a dominant position as the community site to use, that it won’t be knocked off that position. The idea we’re discussing is that so many people now use Facebook, that the hassle of moving would be too great for anyone, and the open application platform they’ve rolled out means that much future innovation will happen inside Facebook in future, rather than on new platforms.

I have a long-standing scepticism about dominant trends. Altavista used to be the top search engine, and IBM used to make all the PCs. I don’t think there are many unassailable positions in business, especially in a space as innovative as the Internet.

Yesterday I was reminded of the reason for my scepticism. I went to an event organised by the British Computer Society, about the next 50 years of technology. All sorts of exciting things are coming (including personal jet-packs, of course) and some of these will make serious impacts on our lives. Some of them, like the super-exponential increase in computing power and Internet bandwidth, will drive incredible innovations that we are only starting to see today. Video, interactivity, mobile, device convergence will all be important drivers for change

This is great if you work in digital business, but what has it got to do with Facebook? The answer is that all this innovation is going to lead to new social ideas, structures, devices that we can’t imagine today. Some of them will come this year or next year. And Facebook has as little chance, or as much, as anyone else of creating those innovations. In fact, because they have an operational business to manage and grow, their chances of innovating might even be lower than those of a couple of kids in a garage somewhere.

So if you’re thinking you’d never be able to survive without Facebook, it’s only a matter of time.

http://blog.markhopwood.com/wp-wap.php is the URL for my blog if you’re reading it on a mobile phone that doesn’t do HTML browsing.
I’ve tested it and it works well, but please do feed back.

This is a movie of slides plus video from my presentation last Thursday. It was weird spending so much time listening to myself speaking again when I made this: I hope it sounds better to you than it did to me!

I participated in a discussion last night about property and web 2.0, sponsored by my friends at Zoomf.com. I presented a personal view of what we mean by web 2.0, and Mike Carter spoke about how it’s impacting the property business here and in the US. We were joined by Andy Etches from Brightsale and Ben Brandt from Rat & Mouse, the popular London property blog. Annie Turner from GoMoNews hosted the conversation and it was a very enjoyable evening.

I never know what to expect from panel discussions. Last night I felt I was involved in a discussion about a rapidly changing business, which isn’t totally sure where it’s going to end up. Read more »

I’m one of the panelists at tomorrow night’s seminar on Property and Web 2.0, hosted by Zoomf.com. There are a few spaces left, I gather. I’m giving an overview of what web 2.0 is, Mike Carter’s going to apply that to the property market, and the other panellists will be introducing their work as well. Then Annie Turner from GoMoNews will chair a discussion. I’m expecting an interesting debate about how the property business can make the most of all that web 2.0 stuff.

We’ll be recording it all for later podcast.

at http://blog.markhopwood.com/i_love_web_2point0/

Not a spelling mistake, I promise…

I’ve had two contrasting experiences over the last few days, that both (weirdly) involve online marketing and gorillas. In the first, we downloaded London Zoo’s Gorilla competition, which involves feeding and interacting with a virtual gorilla on your desktop. It’s quite nicely done creatively, if a bit arduous to play, especially if you’re competitive and have to win at all costs. The problem is, it hasn’t been tested too well, and the whole thing stopped working for 3 days last week when the Zoo’s agency lost its Internet hosting. A really poor experience, and it’s probably put a lot of people off playing the game.

The second is the brilliant, brilliant Gorilla Protection blog. What a simple example of blogging being used by a business, in this case a charity. You send a donation, the next day you can see it making a difference. They put videos, photos and stories online of the work they’re doing almost every day. Why aren’t more charities doing this kind of thing? It’s so effective, and so cheap. Here’s one of their videos.

I helped to run a consumer forum for Zoomf.com last week. Poppy’s written it up here. I had a great time, and it’s always incredibly useful to listen to first hand comment. The group was young and skewed toward rented property, which means it’s not 100% representative, but it was terrific to hear the things they liked (simplicity, speed) and the things they wanted (trade secrets, of course!) 2 things that surprised me: the group is hardly using the mobile web at all, saying it’s still too slow and expensive, and how much they were using the web. Hardly any TV, hardly any print, they were all using the Internet for something like 6-10 hours per day.

And of course Facebook was the website none of them could do without.

I’d like to echo Zoomf’s thanks to the participants: I had a really good time and learned a lot.

This story at the BBC says that there’s evidence of Internet addresses at the CIA have been editing content about Iranian politicians, among other things, to make them more favourable to US versions of events. The report also says the Vatican seem to have been editing entries about Gerry Adams, the Irish Republican leader.

Why would anyone be surprised that this is the case? Open source software development leads to lots of people debugging code and generally making it better, of course. But why would people have the same high ideals when it comes to other sorts of content? Of course vested interests come into play. That ’s easy to sniff out when it’s the entry about a company like Burger King, or Agency.com, but it’s a lot harder when it’s political.

Again, the question of how reliable user generated content can ever be rears its head. In time, we will need some kind of classification system or provenance checking that means we can tell which street maps were made by the public, and which encyclopedias were written by spooks.

JP Rangaswami recently won a “CIO of the Year” title from Waters Magazine. I first came across him when I read that he’d opened up his email inbox to all his staff. This interview is pretty wide-ranging and interesting. It covers his team’s work on web services around BT’s 21st Century Network (which is “all dressed up with nowhere to go” if there are no applications that use it) as well as considering the organisational and cultural changes that are happening inside BT today especially the impact of blogging, wikis and collaboration tools within the company.