Posts tagged Rest
Rest in Peace, Social Media ROI Doubts: 2006-2012
Jan 11th
Many of us would love to be trained to have more social skills in everyday life, whether at work or at home. Or perhaps we wish other people we know would recieve that kind of training. But is socializing online something that people need to be trained how to do? It might have sounded silly a few years ago, but social technology has now clearly become an important part of workplace activity and productivity.
Tech giant IBM believes that the socialization of business presents a big opportunity to train people to do it really well. The company announced this week a major new services initiative in social business.
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“Social business” is a trend and term that’s been emerging for some time now. More than two years ago, enterprise analyst Esteban Kolsky wrote: “Businesses are becoming social because society (led mostly by Generation Y citizens becoming customers and workers) is demanding it.”
If doubts about the ROI of social technology began sometime recently, we might as well pick 2006 as the date, when that silly distraction turned mega-platform Twitter was founded.
In 2012, things have now come far enough that it makes sense for one of the world’s leading technology services companies to jump into that market. Discoure about social and business used to be dominated by doubt of the Return on Investment. IBM may be resolving those doubts with its new campaign.
The web’s leading enterprise news blogger Larry Dignan summarized the initiative last night on ZDNet as follows:
IBM is planning to offer services to help customers develop skills and technical support for social networking. Naturally, there’s a heavy services angle here. IBM will offer live support, online courses and meetings with social business experts.
Among the key social enterprise items from IBM:
- Consulting services to develop internal and external processes and figure out social businesses.
- Education and mentor programs for business partners.
- Technical certification programs to cultivate skills and assess resources.
- Workshops that will revolve around becoming a social business. Some workshops will be conducted in partnership with The Dachis Group, which is a boutique consulting firm focused on social business.
Four-year old Austin-based Dachis Group has between 200 and 500 employees according to LinkedIn and has acquired a number of other hot social business startups. That company unveiled a new Social Performance Monitor yesterday, a web application Dachis says “combines big data and social analytics to meaningfully measure performance of social marketing.”
Is all of this really an effective subject of measurement and optimization? Cynics may disagree, but the socialization of business, specifically with regard to collaboration and marketing, seems of sufficient sophistication that optimization is a clear competitive opportunity. The new offering from Dachis appears to be a big effort to quantitatively resolve the question of social media ROI once and for all.
That which can be measured can be improved, too. IBM says that “the world now spends more than 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites per month.”
When that time spent being social is spent while at work, failure to measure and optimize it would be a big lost opportunity and potentially a competitive mistake.
The IBM initiative page reports, “McKinsey & Company observed that 9 out of every 10 businesses using Web 2.0 technology are seeing measurable business benefits from its use.”
Social business opens whole new worlds of efficiency,collaboration, productivity and innovation.
It also challenges top-down, command-and-control systems of working. Those aren’t worth saving on principle, so their adherents will have to compete in the marketplace to see whether they can really beat social businesses or not.
Now, let’s get down to business, together online.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
PPC Isn’t Just For Ecommerce: Holiday Trends For the Rest of Us
Dec 9th
This time of year, the search marketing blogs and PPC social groups are overrun with holiday tips and tricks.
Much of the hullabaloo is focused on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the marathon leading up to Christmas. There’s nothing wrong wi…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
CouchOne’s J Chris Anderson On Decentralizing Twitter – And the Rest Of the Web
Dec 14th
J Chris Anderson, CFO of CouchOne, has been hosting a curious CouchApp on his personal site: Twebz. Twebz is a “decentralized Twitter client.” We were curious about what that meant, so I did an interview with Anderson about the project. He says it’s a just a demonstration of what CouchApps are capable of. But it also hints at what CouchDB is really trying to accomplish: a radical re-architecting of the Web into a more decentralized system. Read on for the full interview.
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Klint Finley: Let’s start at the top: what exactly is Twebz? It’s described as a “decentralized Twitter client.” What exactly does that mean?
J Chris Anderson: The aim is to allow you to interact with Twitter when Twitter is up and you are online. But if Twitter is down for maintenance or you are in the middle of nowhere, you can still tweet. And when you can reach Twitter again, it will go through.
If lots of folks are using it, then they can see each other’s tweets come in even when Twitter is down.
Mostly the goal was to show the way on how to integrate CouchDB with web services and APIs.
It seems like it could be really useful for people in situations where Internet access is spotty, though.
Definitely. It’s not production software yet, lots of rough edges. But it could be cleaned up and packaged like a normal desktop twitter client easily.
Do you plan on releasing it?
Not currently – I did it when I was around the house right after my daughter was born. So it’s really just to show other developers how to build these things.
So I guess the idea is that you’d run a local copy and it would connect with other instances of Twebz running on other people’s machines and everyone’s client would try to connect to Twitter when possible?
Yes. The hard part is ensuring that someone else can’t trick your client into tweeting something as you that you didn’t write. So I had to do some JSON cryptography stuff to protect against that.
I was going to ask about that – so your Twitter credentials are passing through other people’s machines?
No, your credentials are private to your machine. Potentially someone could send you a tweet that looked like it’s supposed to be from/by you. The crypto makes sure that the Twitter-posting code can’t be fooled by that.
So if you did release this, and people started using it, and then one day Twitter decided “We’re done. We’re going to go raise pigs in the Ozarks,” Twebz would actually still be up and running fine basically forever and everyone could keep reading each other’s Tweets.
Yep. And as a side effect you have a complete personal Twitter archive of the folks you follow.
There’s even a feature to pull in the complete history of a user, so you can get the back fill of your closest friends if you want.
The full history is what is used to power these types of word clouds for a user. Aside from the autocomplete, I think the word clouds are the best feature. It subtracts the global frequency of each term from the per-user frequency of a term. So for each user you see the terms that are distinctive to them.
How does the autocomplete work?
Autocomplete uses CouchDB map reduce to build a prefix index. Then CouchDB sorts the matches by popularity when each time you type a letter into the search box. So it may start out: aardvark apple alligator (as things that start with “a”). But CouchDB will sort it so you get apple first, as that’s the most popular. It was inspired by Google Instant.
If people want to try it, the code and instructions are here.
It says on GitHub that it doesn’t work yet.
That’s the same as on the site – it certainly isn’t ready for the faint of heart. But someone comfortable hacking node.js and CouchApp would be able to dig in and run it.
I wish I had time to clean it up for release, but this week will continue to be busy with all that actual business stuff I’ve got to do.
Could CouchDB and Node be used in conjunction to create some sort of decentralized darknet? Something along the lines of Freenet?
Node is a good fit for CouchDB because Couch encourages asynchronous background processes, but people also use Ruby / Python / Java for the same purposes. But yes, eventually the plan is that CouchDB will make web applications a lot more robust because they will no longer depend on a centralized point of failure. E.g., even if Twitter goes out of business, people can continue to share messages.
The turnover of Web 2.0 startups is so fast that I think users get discouraged from signing up for services. Why bother with a new photo share if there’s a chance it won’t be around in a year? But when those are CouchApps, users can continue to use them even if no one is maintaining them, which makes it more rational to invest time in using them. Imagine if Pownce or Dodgeball were still being run by fans.
Have you seen CouchAppspora?(Disclosure: CouchAppspora contributor Tyler Gilles is a ReadWriteWeb employee.)
Yeah, I like that project because the social aspects of it get to the core of the stuff that “comes for free” with the CouchApp platform.
For another example of how CouchDB is useful in low-connectivity settings, check out this case study on how Better Health Outcomes through Mentoring and Assessments is using CouchDB in rural Zambia.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
3 Services That Leverage the new Salesforce REST API
Dec 6th
Apigee, Hootsuite and Model Metrics are now integrating with the new Salesforce.com REST API.
The API is a new frontier for Salesforce.com. The company was finding that its SOAP-based API, though valuable, was not as applicable as REST is to mobile devices and social applications.
“We needed to make sure we could participate in that movement,” said David Carroll of Salesforce.com. “The REST API allowed us to do that.”
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Carroll spoke at Cloudstock, the cloud developer conference being held today in San Francisco.
Apigee, Hootsuite and Model Metrics presented with Carroll, showing integrations with the Salesforce.com API.
Apigeee
The Apigee integration allows developers to view requests and responses to the API. Developers may explore the surface area, drill into errors, debug and share what they see with others. Authentication is done within Apigee so users may explore the API.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a Twitter client that has focused on building an app platform. In November, the company announced a new API and App Exchange. Hootsuite now integrates with Salesforce Chatter via the API. That means a user may view a Twitter stream and Chatter in the same interface.
Hootsuite is a natural fit with Chatter. Both use the same river of news style. And both have a direct tie in to the fast adoption of social technologies in enterprise and business settings.
From Hootsuite:
Model Metrics
Model Metrics extends Salesforce.com applications for mobile use. it has developed an iPad application that uses the REST API to do on-site transactions. They showed an example in which a customer can use an iPad to buy a car at a retail location. The buyer chooses the color, interior and other features of the car. The customer may use the iPad app to sign a contract using the iPad app. One signed, the information about the transaction is fed into Salesforce.com.
Alex Williams’ travel expenses were covered by Salesforce.com to attend the Dreamforce event.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Two fallen marines laid to rest – Korea Times
Nov 28th
 Korea Times |
Two fallen marines laid to rest
Korea Times By Park Si-soo The funeral for two marines — Sgt. Seo Jeong-woo, 22, and Pvt. Moon Gwang-wuk, 20 — killed by the sudden shelling by North Korea of … The two marines killed last Tuesday by the North Korean bombardment on Yeonpyeong Fallen soldiers' families to receive 200 million won Yeonpyeong victims' families in grief and anger |
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A Letter To Facebook From The Rest Of The World
Aug 31st
Dear Facebook,
A couple of weeks ago you launched your new location service, Places. We all think it’s great and are really excited that you’re opening up the world of location to a whole new audience. We can’t wait to start finding new and exciting ways of using Places to connect consumers and brands. But we [...]
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Search Engine Marketing, Standing Above the Rest
Jan 10th
Introducing the Searchlinqs. com Web Blog. As a member of the searchlinqs Internet Marketing team, it’s an exciting time to be a part of our emerging Internet Advertising Industry. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Placement (SEP) & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are shaping the way we work, play, shop and market ourselves online. That’s a pretty big statement to make! The content that appears on Google, Yahoo and MSN are by no means accidental or arbitrary. The algorithm/formula for sorting what appears on the Search Engines, are closely guarded secrets worth millions of dollars of marketing revenue and can turn the most obscure site or gossip into international results. Much like a newspaper editor or publicist, a decision is made on what content is relevant or invisible to the rest of us. The search engine results only begin with the selected keywords entered into a Search Engine. Careful observation and analysis of those search results are part what the SEO industry and Search Engine Optimization companies do. Google, Yahoo and MSN has become the defacto portals and gatekeepers for the online service world. The sheer volume-combinations of search terms, keywords and related keywords can only be managed by software agents. When these giants move, the Search Engine universe shudders. Google has released no less than 10 updates in the last 2 years; each change shapes the search engine landscape. We have created this SEO blog to showcase Internet Advertising, Internet Marketing tools, showcase Tutorials & Recent Articles, Keyword research strategies and offer opinions on that we feel are major issues affecting our industry. We hope that you find us a useful source and hope you visit us often. Search-Engine-Man www. searchlinqs. com
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Resident SEO, Search Engine Marketing Blogger
Resident SEO, Search Engine Marketing Blogger
