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Trends in the Living Networks

Ross Dawson's Trends in the Living Networks blog offers high-level commentary on developments in our intensely networked world, and how it is coming to life. The blog is primarily intended for a general business audience, in identifying critical technology, social, and business trends and their implications.

Who is going to take the lead in corporate virtual worlds?Yesterday

Since virtual worlds commenced, the promise of using virtual worlds in corporate settings has been evident. The first wave of business involvement in virtual worlds was primarily about marketing and customer engagement – I have written about marketing in virtual worlds and was interviewed on ABC TV about virtual advertising.

From here, a key focus will be how to use virtual worlds for meetings. I have no doubt that in the next decade it will be extremely common to hold meetings in virtual worlds. However those virtual worlds will be a world ahead of what we have experienced so far, being closer to merging high-bandwidth telepresence conferencing with the experience of immersion in a room of people from different locations.

Second Life essentially hasn’t gained ground for eighteen months, maintaining a dedicated core of users, but gaining few new users. The latest news is that Reuters is pulling out its Second Life reporter. Eric Kangel, who used to play that role as Eric Reuters, has some solid advice for Linden Labs on how to grow, including the interesting suggestion to ‘abandon the idea th

The Age: Social networking can help businessNovember 20

The Age has just published an article titled Social networking can help business, based on our Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Network Strategy report, released yesterday.

Much of the article describes the report, and takes some of the executive quotes used in the report. Then at the end, taken from a follow-up interview with me, it says:

Chairman of company Future Exploration Network Ross Dawson said there had been a transformation in the corporate attitude towards social networking over the past year.

"An initial scepticism and caution from executives has now shifted dramatically where they recognise that these can be extremely valuable for helping organisations perform more effectively," Mr Dawson told AAP.

Some Australian companies were not so positive about using social networking technology in the workplace, Mr Dawson said.

"There's a lot of diversity in the opinions of senior executives, some are still both extremely sceptical and extremely cautious."

That's the state of the nation. There absolutely has been a dramatic shift in attitude by senior executives towards social networks and similar tools in the enterprise over just the last year. However within many organizations there is a s

Launch of the Enterprise Social Network Strategy report: what senior executives REALLY think about social networks inside the organizationNovember 19

Today we are releasing our next major report, which distils - through unattributed verbatim quotes - what senior executives REALLY think about social networks inside organizations.

Future Exploration Network created the report for IBM, hosting a select group of top executives at a Roundtable discussion, and capturing the key talking points from the conversations.

Download the Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Networking Strategy report.

I usually don’t put press releases on my blog, but the one we released this morning gives a good summary of the report:

For immediate release: 20 November 2008

Australian senior executives say social networking has “real power” to change business

The majority of large Australian companies are trialing social networks within their organisations and senior executives believe that, rather than being a waste of employee time, there is substantial value to be harvested from connecting with Web 2.0, a report released today says.

Gartner on the Distributed Social WebNovember 18

Last week I dropped in to the Gartner Symposium in Sydney, and managed to catch the session by David Cearley talking about the distributed social web, one of my favorite topics.

Overall it was a very good presentation, swiftly moving from the basics to a quite detailed view of the distributed social web, including pertinent views on the challenges of data portability. The presentation was entirely from a corporate perspective, looking at how companies should be thinking about integrating open social networks into their websites and customer interactions.

This issue is only now getting onto the radars of consumer marketing companies, and it will be a while before we see significant corporate initiatives in the space, with the social networking platforms themselves still working out where the space is going. However the open social web will become an increasingly prominent topic for consumer-oriented companies over the next few years. David’s conclusion - that the biggest risk is to fail to engage - is absolutely correct.

The style of David’s presentation, as for many research vendors, was to throw out a lot of detail, clearly to convince their clients that they can’t work it out for themselves and need consulting assistance. I suppose this is probably quite true in this particular space, where it’s extraordinary difficult for

Rhetoric and realities of transparencyNovember 17

In my blog post on financial transparency in start-ups a couple of days ago I referred to a blog post I wrote last year on how Path101 was becoming a 'naked start-up', blogging their Monday meetings and being fully open about their business. Nigel Burke pointed out in a comment that Path101 had soon discontinued this, and questioned how much of the supposed transparency was hype. Fair point.

I have put a comment on the Path101 blog to ask them about this - see below.

In short, certainly some of the shift to openness and transparency is rhetoric rather than reality (noteworthy being large companies that are nominally supporting initiatives such as dataportability but are in fact reluctant) . However there is still a very real ongoing trend to openness in business, including in start-ups. Balsamiq releasing its sales and Graham Dawson revealing his iPhone app revenue may be very small examples, but they are far from being alone in being willing to share. I absolutely believe that there are tangible advantages to what I call 'strategic openness', and th