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Blurring people's faces may not be enough to alleviate lawsuits. Believe it or not, but the French droit à l'image extends to buildings, so any owner of a building which facade may be recognized in a picture can sue.

Each time I've seen the Facebook honchos live on stage, they left me with a bitter taste, confirming that they can't be trusted with personal information.

Now one may wonder how committed FB is towards third-party developers:

Nobody knows how committed Facebook is to improving the platform or the role applications are meant to play in the overall Facebook ecosystem. Signals like the reduced level of direct participation in the developer community, increasingly restrictive developer policies, and the Facebook profile redesign seem to indicate that they are trying to regain control over some, if not all, aspects of application development while maintaining an aloof demeanor towards developers.

It boils down to this: investing most of your man-hours into Facebook at this point in time is a mistake. The potential return on that investment, a year after launch, is a fraction of what it once was. And the fact that Facebook continues to change the rules and selectively break them for their own benefit means the risk is comparatively higher.

Also when Jessy writes that "Facebook was willing to hurt independent developers when it benefitted them", I'd say that with Beacon, they've shown that they are equally willing to hurt their users for a quick buck.

Think social networking sites are fun and useful? See what happens when things get a little out of control for one social networker who might just be over the whole social network thing. Let the social networking wars begin!

Social Networking Wars by Super Josh.

Yesterday during my presentation at Knowledge Management 2.0 / Content Management Arena @ CeBIT, I said something along the lines of "age does slightly matter in terms of adoption of enterprise 2.0 tools" which, thanks to a mix of fatigue, confusion and badly expressed ideas in a foreign language, was received as "50-something people cannot innovate". Ouch! Both Ulrich Kampffmeyer and Simon Wardley kindly told me this was bullshit. Of course it is, and of course it's not was I think, less meant to say. I apologize for the cock-up.

That age has any influence with respect to the capacity to innovate may be an interesting debate per se, but here the point I was trying to raise is about the generational cultural differences we can see between the analogs (people who've always used purely analogous communication tools their entire life), the digital natives (people who've only known and used purely digital communication tools) and the immigrants between them (people who've been born in an analogous communication era then had to switch to digital tools). This distinction has been brought up by Marc Prensky (author of "Don't Bother Me Mom, I'm Learning"), and it's valid only relative to our current point in time, it's not an absolute question of age.

The confusion came up, I think, when I was trying to highlight another factor that combines with this generational shift: that middle-management (mostly analogous and immigrants) is a slower mover than youngsters and top management. I mentioned an age range of 50-55, which actually is more something like 45-55. Giving age figures is touchy, as people in that range are entitled to take it personally and feel discriminated. Heck, I know people my age who are just incapable of doing anything useful with a web browser! The idea here, and it's something I have really experienced in several companies, is that middle managers who have made their way in the hierarchy without the help of all those new shiny 2.0 tools, and who lust on their next upper move to the top of the pyramid, see no reason to use them. Even worse, they (sometimes rightly) see all the dangers and threats to their position that those tools can bring. The potential of short-circuiting management, cutting off the stratus that add no value in a network, is an inherent feature of any social computing tool (and a feature that is not often discussed).

Top management is aware of a third force coming into play at the same time: the massive retirement of the baby-boomers (analogs), and their replacement mostly by young recruits (digital natives). From my discussions with CEOs and top managers, I see them pretty aware of the danger of acculturation (i.e. seeing the young recruits quickly fold into the existing culture of the enterprise and maintaining the status quo rather than challenging it) and willing to take the opportunity to plant 2.0 tools and foster cultural changes before it's too late.

To summarize, here are the three elements I wanted to point out:

• we live in a era where there are three generations with respect to social computing: the digital natives, the immigrants and the analogous
• the retirement of the baby-boomers and their replacement with youngsters represents both an opportunity (changing the company culture towards a better use of social computing) and a threat (loosing a lot of knowledge and missing the cultural shift by an acculturation of the young recruits to the "old" company culture)
• middle-management, who've succeeded without social computing and may be threaten by it, can be a strong resistance point against the adoption of social computing

Brief notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Hannover. Warning: those notes are very partial and may be innacurate, I tend to forget about or miss stuff that's obvious or not exciting for me. The shortness or lack of notes isn't in any way a measurement of the quality of the speaker!

Looks like it's the first event on the subject in Europe, there's definitely place and interest for more.

Simon Wardley (who loves ducks) kicked off the summit by showing us how yesterday's hot stuff becomes todays boredom (see ya at Web 3.0 / E 3.0 soon ;-).

Dion Hinchcliffe -- How Web 2.0 Technologies revolutionize the Enterprise
E 2.0 comes from Web 2.0, rise of social media. Shift from institutional control to consumer control. Network effect: occurs when a good or service has more value the more that other people have it too (postal mail, phones, fax, email, IM, web pages, blogs anything that has an open network architecture). Reed's Law for social networks. E 2.0 applied successfully -> pronounced gravitational effect. Intranet: move from central production (institution) to peer production (communities of individuals) -> unpredictability, variety, volume. Main E 2.0 platforms: blogs, wikis, social networking. Andrew McAfee's definition of modern socila computing (E 2.0): emergent, freeform, social applications for use in the enterprise. E 2.0 Checklist: SLATES--Search, Linking, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions, Signals. Richer outcome (think of what's stuck/hidden in mailboxes). Rod Boothby's E 2.0 Communication Continuum: non-interruptible and leveragable (gosh, do I hate this word!), async apps that do not interrupt your work have more value. Open communications, shared knowledge, anyone can participate, web oriented, emergent/freeform/social.
100% guaranteed way of doing E 2.0: Do nothing, get out of the way, keep the energy levels up (from Euan Semple).
Common challenges: IT's "Maytag Repairman Syndrome", the "empty quarter (senior people with technophobia), the 2% troublemakers (who can use it negatively as a megaphone), the 9x problem (tools must be 10 times better before users have enough incentive to switch), concerns about productivity and security, managing management resistance.
Key Success Factors: start small, keep expectations low...
Future: Suites are coming, will go prime time, grassroots adoption continues, missing "enterprise context" arriving in 08, semantic web will meet E 2.0.

Euan Semple -- The Quiet Revolution
BBC intranet tools (I think it's the 3rd time I attend Euan's presentation and it's always a pleasure ;-). Forums used 7 years ago, because of frustration with email, did a lot for internal discussions for an investment of... 500€. "Connect", a social directory. Blogs (MT). Wikis (Confluence, cool way of putting up web pages without crying for resources to get a webmaster), RSS aggregator (Google Reader), external web 2.0 services like Flickr with use of tags, deli.icio.us, last.fm, Plazes, Twitter, Facebook, Innocentive.

Jeff Schick -- IBM, Lotus Connections
My own take: he pronounced a long litany of dreaded words as "features": control, workflow, retention rules, check-in/check-out etc. Scary! Well, folks who cannot buy E 2.0 without every conceivable lock built-in for total control should not waste time looking for shiny new 2.0 tools (including Lotus Connections). They already have them, these are the "traditional" KM tools that already power their intranets, and we all know how successful they are ;-). OK, I admit it looks nice and I should find out more if there's more than a new coat of paint with sexy tag clouds on top of a good old top-down portal-bloat-ware entirely controlled by IT.
OTHO I might just have got his presentation completely the wrong way.

Kenneth Lavrsen, Motorola A/S -- Collaborative Publishing advancing ISO 9000 Quality Management
Using Twiki for QM. Seen activity grow from less than 2 modifications and comments a year to a document, to 70 times more modifications and 30 comments per doc. Some problems with reluctance to change (erk, a new tool), Twiki has so many features and had no WYSIWYG editor at launch. Nice idea: an effective QM system is one that is up-to-date, and the wiki helped improve that.

Wieland Stützel, Fraport AG -- Skywiki - Making use of the corporate knowledge ressources
Launching a wiki at the Frankfurt Airport (Wikimedia?). Preparation: no start without content and authors. They exchanged experience and opinions with the Club Wikipedia e.V. Deutschland. Biggest challenge: enthuse the employees. Getting mgt board to participate is time consuming. No incorrect use despite possible anonymous usage (anonymous usage? why such a choice?). 340+ users signups (1300 people, half blue-collar) in 7th months. Generate mgt acceptance (kill big discussions), get a small group en convinced companions together, advertise, get new inputs, talk to potential authors personally, take time to properly setup the wiki (otherwise don't bother). Co-admins: IT, HR, KM and several cross departments at the airport.

Dr. Willms Buhse, CoreMedia AG -- Paradigm Change: Enterprises as Social Networks
Promised to publish their presentaion on their website. Willms has also written a book that looks very interesting about the art of letting go, unfortunately it's in German only.

Olivier Creiche, Six Apart -- From Corporate Blogging to Social Networking
Presented several business cases on using their products as CMS and social software (e.g. Huffington Post).

Jenny Ambrozek, SageNet LLC -- Design for Network Effects: Architecting participation and leveraging the space between the tools
The think that doesn't change is the people. Why the Andrew McAFee-Tom Davenport debates REALLY bother me! 4 reasons: 1) it's an AND BOTH world, 2) omits discussion about value creation fundamentals: people, relationships & interactions, 3) ignores how the calue of collaborative working is captures and revealed, 4) their time could be better spent. The org challenge: direct control decreases as social technology increases. E 20.0 SLATES impact: organizational boundaries inside & out less bounded. (Funny slide where shee takes on Simon's ducks: Simon sees ducks, but consider the pond, ponds connected -> watershed ecosystem.)
Viewing org as networked people ecosystems (orgs as networks). Activity stats tell an incomplete story about interactions and how people use social tools. Open innovation increases as direct control decreases. Prediction markets adoption (The Wisdom of Crowds as a trigger). Architecting participation, using multiple tools created value, structural holes and space between the tools. Participation is individual & complex (Ross Mayfield's power law of participation, April 2006). Changing patterns of participation: real and virtual work worlds are one. Using those tools is messy, pay attention to you org's structural holes and the space between tools: 1) business purposes, 2) network thinking, 3) diverse minds, 4) connected intelligence, 5) success recognized. P.S. Jenny has posted some notes on her session, as well as her slides.

Cedric Blum, Société Française de Radiotéléphone Service Client -- Mass Collaboration brings Customer Service to a new level
Here I'll bug my dear client to get the presentation ;-).

Diego Gianetti, BTicino S.p.a. -- Sul Campo - Community of Practice innovates Sales and Marketing
Sul Campo = On the Field. Web 2.0 space for the community of BTicino sales force (350 salesmen) with 3 purposes: make useful info available in a common env, open a comm channel to collect (from network and clients) feedback related to market, products & competitors, to spread experience, skills, best practices.

For years I've been thinking of the mobile web as the next big wave of internet development, and I fancy the idea of seing Nokia gang up with Yahoo! infinitely more than with the Redmond monopoly. That would challenge Google and the mobile operators a bit more constructively (not speaking about Microsoft!).

Mac users and users of NetNewsWire Lite rejoice, the best feed reader for Mac (IMHO) is now free. Voilà NetNewsWire 3.1 in its full power, gratis, indefinitely. Kudos to Brent Simmons and NewsGator for offering this wonderful gem. I've been using it for years and couldn't live without it today.

P.S. I didn't notice at first, but NewsGator's feed reader for Windows, FeedDemon is now free as well. NewsGator has divided its product lines towards two targets: businesses and individuals (look at their URLs, very clear!), the later being free, including subscription synching to the NewsGator servers (a very cool feature for those of the news junkies who constantly move from one computer to another and want to remain in sync with their news feeds).

P.S. 2 Greg Reinhacker has a good write-up on his blog that's infinitely better than the boring NewsGator press release (I agree with Tim Bray, why do we need those PRs?). The most interesting being the "attention" or activity data they're going to track with those readers (see the discussion in the comments, I believe this is very interesting if done properly).

A propos the social worm "Secret Crush" that was prompting users to unwittingly download spyware, Facebook in blocking the widget over abusing its terms of use, is saying this:

Users should employ the same precautions while downloading software from Facebook applications that they use when downloading software on their desktop.

Which basically means that Facebook (and your data on it) is secure as crap. At least someone had to set things straight, good to see it's coming from Facebook itself.

Oh Microsoft, you're such a WIMP. (I still wonder why anybody in their sane mind would want to pay for that to run a web front-end, anyway.)

Here are my notes and thoughts (telegraphic style) about the last edition of Le Web 3 I attended this week. I went there low tech: by bike with just a paper notepad, a pen, an embarrassingly old mobile phone and a few business cards.

Overall it was a good event, great organization, nice room, good food, and a setting in size and quality speakers that our american friends might be quite familiar with but which is not that common in France. Actually I don't know if there is a comparable event with the internet as a subject and a 1M€ budget here (as a comparison, I helped in the organization of the conference Paris Web 2007 which gathered about 250 people for three days for a budget less than 23K€, but we're a non profit and didn't provide foie gras poché for lunch :p). If I have one complaint, it's that the program is way too disparate, but it's always been like that since the second edition. But most of the people, myself included, where here equally (if not more) for the networking outside the conference tracks. The real capacity that Loic Le Meur has to bring high profiles on stage in Paris doesn't automatically translate into a consistent program, and this year is no exception, with several panels completely out of track with what was written in the program (exemple : “Making your information social” with Kevin Rose and Sarah Lacy had nothing to do with the subject, same with the chit-chat with Evan Williams). Loic told me he had nothing to do with this year's program as it was all in the hands of Cathy Brooks (mon oeil ;-).

Dan Rose from Facebook claimed that users have “good control on their privacy”. Regarding Beacon, he also said that they didn't listen to users complaints, didn't respond quickly enough and did a bad job of explaining Beacon because of the simultaneous launch of their advertising program (ah, and me who foolishly thought there was a link :p). He also said that “ads work when their part of the experience” (err... I hate the concept of "user experience", even more when it's ad-ridden), that “you can't share personally identifiable information with advertisers” (scoop, Facebook next mission statement will be: “Don't be evil” —P.S. Fake Steve says it's “Don't get caught”) and finally that there is no spam in Facebook because the filter is your friends and they tend not to spam you (ahem, someone needs to tell Dan about the constant, quasi spammy, pressure of requests, as well as the folks polluting any popular group with stupid arguments about the (non-)existence of god, just to cite my two favorite itches with FB). I really don't trust those guys.

Evan Williams gave what's for me the best explanation of what Twitter is: blogging with less features and 140 characters max. But after listening to its creator, I still don't know what the hell I can do with Twitter personally. I liked the approach "Think Less" and ideas that removing featurs or putting limits can lead to interesting sites and effects, such as Fotolog — which limits postings to one photo per day, which incites people to comment more on others' pics —or what would happen if a social network maxed the number of your friends at 20 (I like this idea, it would force people to really think twice before accepting total strangers as friends!). That panel had little to do with its subject though, “persistent communication and being social”.

I was totally lost with Kevin Rose (Digg) and Sarah Lacy. It was just a chit-chat between two friends on how cool Silicon Valley is, and gossiping about the cover of BusinessWeek she made of him (I wonder how many people in the audience had heard about it and why they'd care anyway). Nothing to do with the subject of “making your information social” and almost a total waste of time.

Philippe Starck. Ah, absolutely nothing to do with the web, but at least he spoke about design, and the part about sex in design was totally inline with the subject of “what is social about design” ;-). I happen to own a lamp designed by the guy, that I like. I also heard thinks from folks who've been working closely with him, so I take his nice stance about "no product", "no consumers" and ethics with a healthy truckload of salt. The guy's fun anyway, and it's not common to see sex pics in the middle of a slideshow nor to hear that religion is an insult to intelligence in such a conference (that seemed to rub a following speaker from Israel the wrong way, I would bet most of our American friends too while the French audience applauded, speak about social divide in meatspace :p). I liked his “Steve Jobs is a genius, me I look like a genius because of the leather pants” as well as his “It's almost modern” about the Amazon Kindle that Robert Scoble handed him, describing its designers as “not confident nor humble enough to disappear behind the product”.

Rafi Haladjan (Nabaztag) was under such a heavy attack from both Matthias Luefkens (moderator of the panel on "The internet's impact on design") and Brent Hoberman that it was embarrassing.

Nelson Mattos from Google gave an interesting, although sanitized, speach about Google's corporate culture. The key drivers of innovation at Google are:
- culture — users come first, and the world is a little bigger than Silicon Valley (someone needs to tell Kevin and Sarah :p)
- collaboration — “Some secrets are more valuable when shared” (Ed Mc Cracken)
- speed — “Big will not beat small anymore. It will be fast beating slow.” (Rupert Murdoch).
Some interesting traffic figures: 1 billion people connected from a PC, 3 billion from a mobile phone. 80M emails/IM exchanged everyday on the internet. 130M € spent on e-commerce in Europe (huh, only? I must have missed something, or it's everyday).

Jonathan Medved from Vringo, besides disagreeing with Starck on religious intelligence :p, said that the mobile phone is THE platform for personalization. “A web site is your personality in pixels, but mobile personalization has fallen behind the web”. I started to lose interest when I saw that advertising was at the top of the examples (if not the only example besides ringtones) he gave. If annoying everybody around with Jennifer Lopez is a strong act of projecting your personality to the world, well, so be it. Me I love Bach to much to massacre it as a mobile phone ringtone.

For Tarik Krim of Netvibes “everything will become a widget”, the iPhone being the perfect example (but of course when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, n'est-ce pas Tarik :D). Patrick Chanezon who was representing Google (I was surprised and delighted to see him here, we're friends and both former employees of Netscape) explained what Open Social is about: i.e. nothing to do with social networks portability as everyone seems to think it is, but just a common API for social applications. Tarik calls it "Open Widgets" (Open Nails for Social Hammers :p). Marc Canter asked VCs to stop funding business models based on lock-in (good luck Marc). Someone said that people within businesses want to use social networks but senior management doesn't grok it, saying that Michel-Edouard Leclerc (a famous French CEO who's been blogging for years) is an exception to the rule (I personally disagree with that common perception, it's the middle management which is the problem, not the upper one).

I was quite disconnected during the Fraunhofer presentation on MP3. It was as sexy as German TV :p. I got off during the music tracks, not willing to hear why the music industry is broken (it's the industry moguls who broke it, stupid, nobody else).

I missed most of the argument between Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) and Emily Bell (The Guardian) about “Social Media: Is it killing our society?" just to see them try to find some common ground on most subjects and kiss each other at the end. Loic seemed disappointed that it didn't turn out live into a polemic or at least a stronger disagreement.

Reading my notes, I realize that I attended Joi Ito's presentation but I have such a vague memory of it that I don't know what to say. MMORPG and their players seem cool, I'm just not interested. I'm still completely out with virtual reality worlds à la Second Life so I didn't attend the other panels about that. May be I haven't enough time on my hands nor dough on my bank account to care about it :p.

I was sorry to hear that Hugh Mcleod could not attend the conference, he's one of my favorite speakers. Sleep well Hugh!

I missed the beginning of day 2 (Nokia, compensated by the fact that I could play with a N810 later, a promising but disappointing device in its current design if you ask me), arriving at the end of the VC/investors panel.

Dan Dubno from CBS said “People here have no idea what their job is gonna look like in six months. Those are the kind of people I want to hang with.” I want to hang with this kind of guy too ;-) and I absolutely despise those people who ask what you think you're going to do in five years (those are good candidates for a post-dreaming reality wake-up call in their 30s or 40s).

J.P. Rangaswami from British Telecom was brilliant, definitely the best speech of the entire conference from my perspective (I'm too business oriented nowadays). He's using Ripplerap (Tiddly wiki) for his slides, practical for publishing online but not that great for a slideshow. Some tidbits and quotes:
“The empowerment of the individual is at the heart of the web 2.0.”
“Two ways to predict the future: invent it, or prevent it to happen.”
“Enterprises reduce standard deviation instead of allowing individuality.”
“Individual incentives kill team work.”
Enterprise apps for him are of 3 types: search, change alerts (RSS) and fulfillment (services).
“Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.” (David Weinberger)
The new generation comes already trained, you don't have to tell them how to use the tools, but learn how they use technology and import it in the enterprise.
The Company Pen: 100 years ago in banking, you were only allowed to use the company pen. This is still the same today with the company IT tools and policies.

The "Premier prix" of the startups competition went to Goojet.

Dave Winner gave a very simple definition of RSS I quite like: “automated web surfing”. He showed an interesting application of RSS he's working on, pulling a flux of photos to a TV set (someone in the audience said it was irresponsible to let your TV set burn electricity while you're not watching it).

Note on interaction with the audience: it's really too bad that we couldn't ask questions to the most interesting speakers, or that there was only one mike for a giant room of 2000 attendees :-(. Your chance of being able to ask a question at Le Web 3 were:
- 0% if you sat on the second half of the room (stairs)
- 50% if you were sitting in the front and on the same side of the only hostess holding the mike
- 99% if you were sitting in the front row
- 100% if you are Robert Scoble!

Jason Calacanis gave a quite interesting speech about web pollution (spam) and hope this can be a wake up call for VCs about putting spam protection into startup development. Not sure he'll convince them, apart by the fact that when you seek to sell your land, it's better when it's not filled with toxic waste (good imagery!). Of course, Jason claims that his new human-powered search engine, Mahalo, is entirely spam free. I like his response to some question about clueless managers: “We shouldn't waste time with people who don't understand the internet, they'll be dead soon.”

Doc Searls spoke about Project VRM. Need to look into this, I like the idea of reversing CRM and doing a better job than faceless enterprises for which you're just an ID in some CRM software.

Martin Varsavsky and Loic showed some mutual entrepreneur love for 15 minutes.

Shahram Izadi from Microsoft showed MS works on the Surface and horizontal screens. Very interesting glimpse at new directions in I/O interfaces that have otherwise not changed much in the past 40 years.

Yossi Vardi gave a hilarious presentation on “new and improved methods for organic data transfer”. I can't wait to replace my ADSL 2+ link with snails (warning, research insanities wrapped in PDF ;-p).

I did not attend the panel on TV reborn, television interests me even less than the future of music industry moguls.

Janus Friis and Loic showed some entrepreneur love for 30 minutes.

Tom Raftery from the Cork Internet Exchange gave an interesting (though at time obscure, e.g. I fail to see why burning diesel to make electricity is any green) speech on how to build a greener datacenter. Lots of food for thoughts about using the wind as an alternative power supply, and why electricity utilities may start to pay you for consuming electricity at times of weak demand to properly manage the grid.

I was very disappointed to see that David Weinberger was here and ready to talk but couldn't, because of some "misunderstanding" as Loic said. Too bad. David says it's his fault (and Loic apologizes in the comments).

Finally the UNHCR presented the Nine Million initiative to help giving refugee youth the chance to learn and play, recognizing that education and sport can improve their lives. They're asking the tech community to help: you can start by a simple link to the site, and tag it with "ninemillion".