Review of Tibbr social enterprise platform – keynote at Sydney launch on February 8

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The launch last week in San Francisco of Tibbr, the social enterprise computing platform from TIBCO, attracted an immense amount of attention from the leading commentators in the space. The offering is not directly comparable to any existing enterprise social software suites, and draws on TIBCO’s strong integration heritage to create an offering that works fully across an organization’s activities.

Tibbr global launch events follow in London (yesterday) and in Sydney on February 8 at the Opera House, where I will give the opening keynote on Why social computing will drive organisational success. Here are registration details for the Sydney launch of Tibbr next week.

I hope to offer some personal thoughts on the Tibbr platform after the launch event. For now I thought it would be most appropriate simply to review some of the more interesting comments on Tibbr since the launch.

To start, here is an interview by Dennis Howlett of TIBCO’s CEO, Vivek Ranadive. Vivek begins by saying that Tibbr is an extension of the vision he had since he started TIBCO (in 1985).


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The evolution of search will refine the spectrum of quality in media

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Search is not getting better, or it certainly seems that way. In the evolutionary battle between search engines and search engine marketers, the search engines are not keeping ahead, and crap content is finding its way into the top of search results. This makes search users unhappy, opens the way for alternatives to the dominant player in the Western world, AKA Google.

In a blog post on search engine spam by its principal engineer Matt Cutts Google says it is ready to respond, in particular to filtering out low-quality content. He says:

Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago.
…
However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months.

To the first point, people’s expectations are continually getting higher, and so they should be. And it turns out that people’s perception that the problem is getting worse is true.

Google’s response is two-fold: cracking down on duplicate content, and downgrading in search results what Google algorithmically determines to be “low quality content”. The video describes Google’s initial changes on this front that happened around 1 May of last year.

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ExaTrend of the 2010s: Global Talent

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

GLOBAL TALENT

Talent is everywhere. As organizations shift to networks, transcending workplaces, success will be driven by how well they can attract the most talented, those who can choose where, how, and why they work. Real-time translation software will enable true multi-cultural teams. Wealth will flow to the talented, wherever they are.

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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What are the jobs of the future?

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I just did an interview on the industries that will grow and shrink this decade – I’ll provide a link to the story when it comes out if the magazine puts it online, or if not write it up as a blog post later.

It made me remember an interview I did a couple of years for an article on the jobs of the future. They just took a brief quote from my interview:

Futurist Ross Dawson of the Future Exploration Network says that when social networks burst onto the scene, roles as community managers or social network managers became a necessity.

Such roles are still new, he says, but companies and celebrities alike are advertising for professionals to help them manage their consumer and fan online chat.

“You can have thousands of friends on Facebook and MySpace,” Dawson says. “A celebrity will have people that help them manage their MySpace site as they have a lot of people to interact with and not enough time.”

Here is the list of jobs of the future that I told the journalist about:
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11 themes of the Zeitgeist for 2011

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Our recently launch Map of the Decade triptych comprised three parts: the Map of the Decade, details on the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist for 2011.

I think may have been a mistake to put the Map of the Decade and Zeitgeist themes in the one document, as many only see the front page and don’t get to the Zeitgeist themes, and they come from quite different perspectives (1 year as against 10 years). As such, I’ve taken out the Zeitgeist themes here, with the image and full text below. Click on the image to download the complete pdf – go to page 3 for descriptions of the Zeitgeist themes.

Zeitgeist for 2011

Zeitgeist2011_500w.jpg

ZEITGEIST:2011

1. Networked or Not?

We are all facing a fundamental choice that will shape our lives. Many dive headlong into a world of always-on connection, open social networks, and oversharing. A few cry halt and choose to live only in the old world of tight-knit personal communication. The result is a divided society.

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Map of the Decade, ExaTrends of the Decade, and the Zeitgeist for 2011

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It is traditional at the turn of the year to look forward at what is to come.

We have crystallized our thinking on the year ahead and the decade of the 2010s in a new 3-page visual landscape.

Note on ExaTrends: Given the exponential pace of change of today we are far beyond a world of MegaTrends. Exa is the prefix meaning 10 to the power of 18, following Mega, Giga, Tera, and Peta. As such Exa is Mega cubed.

Download the pdf of the framework by clicking on any of the images. The full text of the ExaTrends and the Zeitgeist themes is below.

Map of the Decade: 2010s

MapoftheDecade_500w.jpg

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Transparency has long been driving business and society… but it’s only just begun

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One of the most surprising things about Wikileaks is that it took this long for the massive shift to transparency to have an impact on this scale. The trend to transparency has long been evident, and sites to facilitate leaks have been around for many years now. The inevitability of a transparent world has long shaped my thinking about the future.

In my 2002 book Living Networks, the final chapter was on the future of a networked world. The second of my ten predictions was: Transparency will drive business and society.

Even before the book came out I spoke at KMWorld in Silicon Valley on Creating the Transparent Corporation, and given my background in capital markets, I have been interested in and written and spoken about transparency in investor relations from the 1990s with the rise of intangibles reporting and beyond to the impact of the rise of social media.

One of the facets in my widely read 2006 article Six Facets of the Future of PR was Transparency is a given, while one of my Seven Megatrends of Professional Services was Transparency.

In both of these papers, as in a number of keynotes I gave earlier in the decade, I mentioning the now-defunct corporate leaks site internalmemos.com, which was launched in 2002, and had a significant impact for a number of companies (which are next target in line for Wikileaks and its peers).

The full text of my 2002 prediction on transparency from Living Networks is here, with the full book chapter embedded at the bottom of the post.

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ABC News: Interview on Wikileaks and the future

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Yesterday I did an interview on ABC News about Wikileaks and its implications.

A few of the points I discuss are:

* The extraordinary social polarization emerging from the Wikileaks debate

* How many people feel strongly enough about the issues to provide support to the cyber-attacks defending Wikileaks, a first for hacker attacks

* The existing long-term trends to transparency have finally crystallized in Wikileaks and the political and social response of today

* Wikileaks cannot be closed down and new platforms for distribution will emerge

* This broad dissemination of information is a reality that will not be reversed

I will write in more detail about the broad implications of Wikileaks soon.

The rise of mini-blogging in 2011: Tumblr will continue to soar

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SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.

I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogging.

Here are a few further thoughts on mini-blogs. I have written another post on the rise of social shopping, including 7 examples.

Here is an excerpt from the article on mini-blogging:

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The rise of social shopping in 2011: 7 examples of where it is going

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SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.

I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogs.

Here are a few further thoughts on social shopping. I have written another post on the rise of mini-blogs.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Shopping itself is also developing a social element thanks to services such as Shwowp, (www.shwowp.com) that lets a user keep track of their shopping history and then share it with others.

Social media researcher Ross Dawson expects strong growth from social shopping services.

“You can browse together what’s on the websites, look at different things, and comment on them,” Dawson says. “So you can go shopping with your friends, but do it in an online context.”

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