Last year’s model:
eMusic
Still subscribed and still happy – not a lot of mainstream stuff, just the way I like it.
last.fm
A few more people have taken it up. A little flicker of apprehension when CBS bought it, but so far no obvious ill effects. My conclusion: I don’t listen to enough music …
VRM
The customer-centric and controlled idea has gained quite a lot of traction – not as much concrete ‘product’ from it as I hoped, but a lot of smart people are involved.
Linkedin
Was pretty freaked this year by the number of work colleagues who got into Linkedin this year – it got a bit strange when I invited our CEO to connect whie he was using his laptop for a presentation … damned Outlook notification all over the projection screen! LI still hasn’t done as much to improve its socialness as I would have liked, but it’s still my preferred “professional” profile.
Freemind
I don’t think I’ve drawn more than a couple of mindmaps all year, but I used Freemind for them.
AttentionTrust
Well – this is a puzzle to me: the Attentiontrust stuff still seems to be alive, but my ‘attention history’ has disappeared with the vanishing
of root.net and I can’t see any replacement for it, nor do I know how to get that data back … anybody know more than that?
Office2.0
Ishmael put on a second, bigger conference in 2007, and gave away iPhones! While this was a fun thing, it created a great deal of work for his team, so he’s decided to design his own web device for the next conference – I want one already!
SOA/ESB
Well the promised ESB project went ahead (and continues for this vintage as well) – although it was a small project, it got me 15 mins of fame, and a couple of speaking engagements (a couple still ahead of me). I’m right in the middle of testing of the next phase, which extends our vintage planning to our growers via webservices.
Flickr
Still using, still happy and have opened up tagging to all at Steph’s suggestion. My conclusion: I don’t take enough photos …
del.icio.us
ma.gnolia is prettier, and does some stuff better, but it doesn’t do ‘for:’ and ‘via:’, and most of my network is on del.icio.us – no change. My conclusion: I don’t follow up enough of my network’s tags …
coComment
Gave itself a facelift through the year, and nearly lost me. Lots of hiccoughs, crappy UI, and a few things broken. I know a few people dropped it, but I hung in and they seemed to fix most of it up, and you can get it to work with most commenting facilities. There was a little panic when people realised that this included input boxes for requests on your bank’s website …
thingamy
Much to my chagrin and embarrassment, still not much investigation of Sig’s baby, although he’s had a great year picking holes in SAP’s offerings in the ‘easily repeatable process‘ (ERP) space, while pegging out a claim for himself and Thingamy in the ‘barely repeatable process‘ arena.
Redmonk
Well, Anne Z found Redmonk TOO ‘enterprisey’, and moved onto Web Worker Daily, while rejuvenating her Anne2.0 blog (now rebranded as “Anne Truitt Zelenka”) AND adding a cooking blog to her repertoire. The other Monks carried on terrorising tech conferences, celebrating World Series baseball wins, and providing illumination on enterprise software. I really need to sit down and work out how we work with these guys better …
This year’s model (in no particular order):
Twitter
Looking back at that earlier post, I am astounded that Twitter didn’t appear – which means that I’ve only been using it since then. It seems like there’s not been a moment when I didn’t have it open either on the web or via (my current favourite client) twhirl (which uses Adobe’s AIR runtime). Started by following the usual suspects (see the blogroll over on the right), but found a bunch of others over time, including that doyen of software development Ed Yourdon, which seemed a bit freaky – I mean who knew he really existed? – as well as few Australians – check out my ‘following’ mosaic to find out more. A few of us have had a crack at explaining Twitter in Twitter, but still the best so far is Leisa’s “ambient intimacy“.
Plaxo
Derided by many as a spamming roach motel, Plaxo has its good points, not the least of which is providing a way (albeit messy) to synchronise my calendar and contacts between Outlook at work, Google Calendar on the web and Thunderbird/Sunbird (Mozilla Calendar) at home. Improved it’s spamminess a bit, and introduced Plaxo Pulse, a social networking facility that keeps you up to date with your network’s activity. About the only time I visit it is to ignore a connection request (I have enough trouble keeping up with the socnets I REALLY like).
Spock
Spock seems to be the new Plaxo, taking over as the most-hated social network. I was alerted to it by an unsolicited email saying that somebody had looked for me on Spock. If you weren’t careful, it would pillage your address book on sign-up and spam all your contacts with all the finesse of a 12-gauge shotgun at close range. Joined up so I could have more control over what it knew about me.
Sametime/Connections/Quickr
The IBM/Lotus collection of social software for behind-the-firewall use. We started using Sametime at work during the year, which met with the normal array of emotions – some hate it as being incredibly disruptive and don’t like people knowing they are available, and then you have me at the other end of the spectrum – logged onto 3 different Sametime servers: IBM’s external ST server, our channel partner’s ST server and our own. Attempting to get Quickr and Connections on the radar as well …
OpenID
URL-based
identity management. While not necessarily as complete a solution as Kim Cameron might like, it has the benefit of early release and feedback and fairly wide-spread adoption. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a start that will hopefully be built on quickly. Sxip, myopenid and a few others are pushing adoption of standards such as OAuth (for delegation) and OpenID (for authentication), as well as interoperability with CardSpace (Infocards) from Microsoft, originally developed by Cameron. Watch out for more developments here and with Higgins and SAML. Trust and identity management are critical for more serious adoption of the internet as a global platform.
ClaimID
One of the early adopters of OpenID – it gave us something to try our shiny new OpenIDs on! Allows you to claim sites/information that are BY you and/or ABOUT you (and the corollary – things that AREN’T BY/ABOUT you) so that people can ‘recognise’ you from them.
Dopplr
One of the echo chamber’s darlings of the year – share your travel destinations with people on the chance that you might stumble upon some of them in meatspace. Can be useful to use in conjunction with Tripit, which can create itineraries from airline confirmation emails. Early steps in the social networking of travel, this could get more interesting. At time of writing, Matt Biddulph still owes me Dopplr stickers …
Jaiku
An example of ‘life-streaming‘ – jaiku accepts RSS feeds from just about anything, and presents all of the activities in a single place, complete with its own RSS feed. You can create ‘jaikus’ directly (similar to Twitter ‘tweets’, also character-constrained). So if you want to know what I’m doing, you could follow me there, or on …
Tumblr
Which has a similar intent to jaiku, but allows you to create longer posts. I don’t use either jaiku or tumblr directly, but as aggregators. At some stage one of them will probably fall by the wayside.
The observant among you will notice that this retrospective is somewhat more delayed than the previous year’s … I can only apologise and hit ‘publish’ forthwith …
Technorati Tags: 2007, retrospective, for:hortovanyi
