LinkedIn – the next step?

Those of you that have been following this blog, and its predecessor ikissnoise for a while, will know that I have been a big fan of LinkedIn as a social network for business people. They do seem to be lagging behind the rest of the social networking crowd in terms of features. A recent announcement that they will be releasing an API within the next 9 months has been met with some criticism that it is too little too late.

So what other strategies are open to someone who has seemingly missed the API bus? Jeremiah Owyang recently posted some interesting thoughts on his blog.

One key feature I see that LinkedIn from benefiting is to become the online source of the resume, not just the networks that are connected to the jobs. Help users to answer; “what skills have I learned, who else has them, where can I find others with these skills”. There’s an opportunity to expand the tool as the online resume.

If LinkedIn is to become the premiere social networking tool for businesses (as stated in this article) then they need to consider joining all the communities that existing in the context of business. If I were working at LinkedIn, I would be pushing an API to Facebook quickly and also universal login that web managers could integrate into their site. This identity systems could feed into recruiting systems, monster.com and even the ‘career’ pages on corporate websites –let me fill out my core information (or different versions of it) once and submit to many. It’s an API really, and would actually be a competitor to some identity management systems, almost like OpenID.

I believe that if LinkedIn doesn’t open an API sooner than 9 months, they may be falling back further than they think. Although the hResume move was interesting strategically as hResume has not been widely adopted yet.

Push vs Pull

Yes, I love Ajax, heavy downloads, gimmicky names and sites and all. Yes, the push vs pull debate is so 1999. Not in the Ajax world where heavy loads can bring your server to its knees in a matter of minutes unless your Ajax is properly optimized.

Engin Bozdag, Ali Mesbah, and Arie van Deursen of the Delft University of Technology have compiled a technical report on various push versus pull techniques of building Ajax applications based on an example application that they built.

Their conclusion?

We have compared pull and push solutions for achieving web-based real time event notification. The contributions of this paper include the experimental design, a reusable implementation of a sample application in push and pull style as well as a measurement framework, and the experimental results.

Our experiment shows that if we want high data coherence and high network performance, we should choose the push approach. However, push brings some scalability issues; the server application CPU usage is 7 times higher as in pull. According to our results, the server starts to saturate at 350-500 users. For larger number of users, load balancing and server clustering techniques are unavoidable.

Worth a read if your team is developing an Ajax application.

Top 5 Smartest Orgs on Google Earth

Its no secret that I felt that Seth Godin’s 59 Smartest Orgs Online was a little biased and lacked a wide enough perspective. One of the things that I remember mentioning at a morning meeting discussing the list was the almost lack of projects using Google Earth and KML, a really amazing tool to give a global context to phenomena. Since Google Earth launched its Google Earth Outreach Program yesterday, I though I’d present my Top 5 Smartest Orgs on Google Earth. In no particular order.

Appalachian Voices Mountaintop Removal in Google Earth

Declan Butler’s Avian Flu Outbreaks in Google Earth

Earthwatch – Sweetwater’s Rhinos in Google Earth

UNEP – Amazon Deforestation in Google Earth

USHMM Crisis in Darfur in Google Earth

The one thing I would like to see is a way to integrate a donation management system into the Google Earth solution which would allow the user to donate to a project, and maybe even specifically to sponsor a particular rhino, just as an example.

UPDATE: The fact that the users as well as the grant program is heavily biased towards US based orgs is a bit annoying, but is something that we have come to expect from Google.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Forgot to add BrightEarth who are doing some pretty cool things with Google Earth, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer and NASA’s World Wind.

Links for week ending June 23, 2007

Web app without makeup: iterations of TeamSnap – personally I prefer paper prototyping, that way when everything is laid out on the table and the client says how do I get from point G to point H and there isn’t a viable way, you know you’ve made a mistake somewhere. The client also gets a feel for the flow. Each to their own though.

Human-to-Human Design – Normally a design function, but still relevant if you’re putting together software.

How to write a Google Gadget – an excellent introduction. There isn’t an online product that couldn’t use a Google Gadget (or a Facebook one for that matter)

htsh: http shell – kind of geeky, but I love it. An HTTP shell using PHP on the backend and jQuery for the front end.

Firebug for the iPhone – I kid you not. Essential if you’re going to be developing web apps for the iPhone.

Top Spots for Hip Sugar Mommas – and they say that technology hasn’t improved our quality of life!

Dallas Real Estate Visualization

I am possibly moving to Dallas, Texas, in the next couple of months, and I have been looking around at the real estate market on that side. I’ve been really impressed by quite a few APIs, applications and search engines that have sprung around the real estate market. It seems to be a very exciting area in terms of APIs, visualizations and software, I suspect because the data has always been there and has been captured and analyzed to death, now its time to rework the interface.

Anyway, I came across this very interesting visualization called Hindsite by an real estate search engine called Trulia. It is based on public property assessor records for properties in Trulia’s database and typically includes the date that a house was built. Check out this amazing visualization of the Dallas/Fort Worth area, specifically Plano. It is certainely making searching for a house a whole lot more interesting.

Real Estate information and mapping are ideal partners for a mashup, and besides using Microsoft Virtual Earth for Hindsight, Trulia has a very strong integration with Google Maps for their search engine. All around a very nice application. And they even have an API.

Links for week ending June 16, 2007

MySQL AB : The 12 Days of Scaleout :: Day 5 – Wikipedia
Scuttle : Social Bookmarking
Social Finance
Case Study: ASW.COM – Monetizing Connectivity?

Poseidongroove

I’ve been getting into Poseidongroove’s posts lately. I think his comment on the Context of Use for Dynamic Languages pretty much sums up how I feel about software.

“… These days it’s not that hard to find something that almost meets your business needs. If you’re coding over 30% of the functionality, I think that’s bad !!! …”

Adoption through innovation

Yesterday eBay made a series of announcements regarding new APIs and developer tools, calling for the company to rebuild the technical guts of its eBay.com site as a series of modular services, rather than a single, unified application. Today, David Berlind chipped in with an interesting analysis of web based APIs from Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and eBay becoming the new platform providers in the way that in the desktop era it was the operating systems of Windows, Mac and Unix that provided the primary platforms for applications.

In a sense what he is saying is that if we compare the API providers to Windows, or Mac, then the next step in application development is the user interfaces that are being built on top of those APIs. Microsoftware.

the Holy Grail for companies like Salesforce, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, et alia: to be in the infrastructure business but to let developers be the ones that drive adoption through innovation. Sure, if you’re one of those or other API providers, it helps to provide prototypes or something that’s minimally functional to get new users started. But when I look at where Google is going with Google Apps (of which Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets are only a part), my sense is that there are innovators out there that will come along and build user interfaces on top of Google’s APIs that are far more compelling than Google’s native interfaces.

So where does that leave the nonprofit looking to leverage current trends and forthcoming trends? For a second stop thinking of the organisation as single unfied organisation based on a single platform. Start thinking of it as a technological enabler for a cause. The tools to enable that cause are developed and then the constituents are given these tools to develop their own version of the tools on top of them. In the way that Excel allows you to develop your own spreadsheets, rather than in the way that eBay releases a new API. If your constituents are savvy enough, you can always give them an API as well.

btw if you read through to the end of David Berlind’s article one can not help but think that he is arguing that the business to be in is the business of creating a better UI. I think Joel may agree.

Social Networks for Good

In the pre-social networking carnival that is today’s web environment, a NPO was usually lagged behind in terms of technology, simply for the reason that up to date technology required money and technical expertise, which your typcial NPO did not have. In the last couple of years, there has been a shift in emphasis towards something that NPO had more access to than your average for-profit enterprise, a community. We are looking to roll out a custom social networking tool in the next couple of months and I have been doing a lot of research into this area, I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with the tools that are currently out there – small focused experiments that have allowed me to evaluate and learn from before investing development time. We want to get this right the first time, or at least the second.

Most of the Social Networks that I have had a look at, have great tools, and I am really impressed by Facebook and the Facebook platform that allows for the writing of microsoftware for Facebook. There are also a lot of nonprofits that are using MySpace and YouTube and other mass market social networking platforms. The problem with these sites is that most of the users there are there for fun, to kill time and, on the more business orientated sites like linkedin, for networking. They aren’t really there to look for volunteer or philanthropic work or even to donate.

At the moment my money is on niche’d social networks, smaller more aggeressively orientated towards a particular group, subculture or cause. More of a support site, than a massive online community.

Resources I have been looking at:
Using Social Networking to Stop Genocide
Danah Boyd’s publications on Social Networking
The Power of Many
and many others that weren’t as informative.

eNonprofit Benchmarks

In the Web 2.0 World measuring success is fairly easy, how much profit did the company make. Its the same whether you are working on a google adsense campaign or monetizing via subscriptions or even donations.

In the nonprofit world it is a bit more difficult – what do you measure? How many people were educated? Informed? Served? Engaged? Activated? How much money was raised? Did legislative policy change? Corporate policy? Public opinion? Success or a ROI, is the cornerstone of most endeavours and being able to link your efforts to a reliable benchmark is key. Whether or not a nonprofit organization can and should be run as a business is an interesting question in itself, however the first piece of software that can benchmark in a consistant way would really corner the market.

The eNonprofit Benchmarks Study sets out to have a look at the effectiveness of major American nonprofit organizations using the Internet to raise money and influence public policy. At the same time it defines a set of criteria that can be used to benchmark a nonprofit effectiveness. Now we wait for someone to put together Google Analytics for nonprofits.