Behind Glass Walls

Socialmedia.biz has a summary of a presentation Stephen Jagger gave all about how he’s converted his businesses to use a wide range of web apps and online tools. It is a rather extreme example – hosting everything in the cloud, or removing the need for office space are probably not options for many companies. For small, active businesses though, these are some really useful ideas and discussions.

The base of the services is hosted Google Mail, plus Talk, Voice and Sites.Yammer and Skype are used for internal and client communication. It seems he has quite firm grip on how the services work and what they are best used for. The tools fit well into observations of what gives good results when exploring social tools and collaborative attitudes for business. Andrew McAfee‘s SLATES is the major guide in this area, along with some additions from Dion Hinchcliffe which cover the atmosphere required to allow the tools to function effectively.

I do have some questions about how open and sharing the businesses are. It seems that the tools are viewed more as promotion aids than enabling client feedback. This may not be true, but it is difficult to find a mention of how the Enterprise 2.0 tools and strategy involved the round trip from employee to client and back.

In any case, this case study ties well with this bnet feature: putting Web 2.0 to work. For a more traditional company, the four steps outlined in that article are quite helpful.

1. Begin by using a web 2.0 tool to address a current need. This could involve test-driving a free web-based app or installing an add-on for current software.
2. Any new movement needs support. Many employees just want to do their work and get home, but for those that like to experiment (I’m in this bunch – I always like looking under the hood), this is the perfect opportunity to help shape the direction of a project.
3. Experimentation is the key – many services and software are very cheap or free, so why not test a whole range of offerings.
4. “Decisions about which Web 2.0 tools to use within your company should be made centrally, but the question of how to use them should be left to individuals, says Harvard’s McAfee.”

This feature set is certainly worth a look.

There are a huge number of web applications, and more arrive all the time. Some of the ones I use on a regular basis:

• Google’s apps. I use these a lot. I know it’s not a god idea to put all your eggs in one basket, but Google’s Gmail, Calendar, Reader and Documents all work very well, and are more useful to me than some of the alternatives.
• I’m a developer, and the Internet has plenty of opportunities for free, open source software. Some of the better locations for finding software projects to tinker with are sourceforge, freshmeat, ohloh , launchpad and codeplex. Codeproject is not really an open source software host, it has many articles and examples on all sorts of programming languages and platforms.
• As to social networking, everyone knows the top couple – Facebook and MySpace. I’m quite partial to LinkedIn - it is a business-focussed network, which is very useful for professional networking.

I’ve found a few new ones recently that are quite good.

• Hunch is a decision helper – you choose you preference in a range of areas, and based on previous choices it gives you it’s Hunch.
• bit.ly is a url shortening service, one of the many built from the rise of Twitter. It takes things slightly further, offering analytics of the clicks.
• Youtube may be the most popular video hosting site, but there are other that take a more focussed approach. Vimeo is another video hosting site, dedicated to more polished and semi-professional videos.
• Geni is a genealogy website – a private family tree, that others in your family can add to as well.
• last.fm is a great place to find new music. (Pandora would be good too, if it was available in Australia). The last.fm scrobbler is a handy way to teach the site about the music you like.
• Whirlpool, while maybe not a web app in itself, is a great Australian-centric community for discussing all things phone and Internet related  (It has a very good wizard to help you find an ISP).
• And we can’t forget twitter, the top micro-blogging platform. I use it mostly to keep up with friends, and occasionally to post about something interesting I found.

If you know of a web app that does something cool, I’d love to hear about it.