Looks like the rumours about Google gearing up to launch a 'GoogleMe' social networking site to rival Facebook may be true. Why else aquire yet another social networking website and add to its stable of social media/social networking experts? Google has been dabbling around with social networking for some time. It owns the Orkut social network website, which has been active since 2004 and is extremely popular in Brazil and India but less so in the rest of the world. Google Friend Connect was an attempt to allow users to connect friends together on different websites, which again has failed to make much impact. Howevere, these are all lessons learned and I think that Google is determined to get it right with Google Me.
Angstro, an experimental social-graph and news-crunching startup, has been acquired by Google to help lead the company's charge against Facebook in social networking. The acquisition was first reported on by Jessica Guynn of the LA Times.
The deal appears focused on snaring the considerable talents of Dr. Rohit Khare, a software engineer with almost two decades of technical and standards experience at organizations like MCI, the WorldWideWeb consortium, one-time enterprise RSS industry heavyweight KnowNow and CommerceNet, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to R&D in support of commerce online.
What does it mean to see someone like Khare join people like Joseph Smarr, Bradley Horowitz , Chris Messina, Brad Fitzpatrick and most recently Slide's Max Levchin? It means that Google's entry into social networking is going to be big, ambitious and probably engage heavily with the data-portability paradigm that has positioned itself as the strategic antithesis of Facebook.
What does it mean to see someone like Khare join people like Joseph Smarr, Bradley Horowitz , Chris Messina, Brad Fitzpatrick and most recently Slide's Max Levchin? It means that Google's entry into social networking is going to be big, ambitious and probably engage heavily with the data-portability paradigm that has positioned itself as the strategic antithesis of Facebook.
Google still doesn't appear to have hit that sweet spot of social networking. They should be applauded for persistence, but not sure how many bites of the cherry they will get before users grow tired of engaging with the latest beta product. I've been a long-time user of FriendFeed, so Buzz was not really a radical and compelling service. It's going to have to produce something pretty radical to shift users away from Facebook, which I still think is their long-term goal. Anyone out there who thrives on Buzz?
Six months after its debut, it's becoming clear that Google Buzz has yet to become the social-media breakthrough that Google craves.
Google Buzz went live in early February with visions of combining a stream of updates from services like Twitter with the engagement of services like Facebook or Friendfeed, giving Google a foothold in social media. Ever since Google said in February that "tens of millions of people have checked Buzz out" Google has consistently refused to state how many people are actively using Google Buzz, and it's still unwilling to reveal that number.
Only a few social-media services truly matter at the scale at which Google likes to operate, and Buzz is clearly not yet one of them. Google appears to have the same problem in social media that Yahoo and Microsoft have trying to compete in search: it's going to take a huge breakthrough to get the heaviest users of social media to allocate time to something new. Incremental advances can be quickly duplicated by the incumbents, just as when Yahoo and Microsoft roll out interesting new search features, Google can easily follow suit.
Google still hopes to be the tool that could unlock value from social-media updates and posts. "It has become a core belief of ours that organizing the social information on the Web is a Google-scale problem," said Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager, while demonstrating Google Buzz in February. With Google Wave having crashed on the rocks, and Buzz momentum faltering, Google is preparing to tackle this problem once again with the expected launch of a social-media service called Google Me.
On Saturday, April 24th, over 30 members of the Opera Company of Philadelphia Chorusand principal cast members from their upcoming production of La Traviataconvergedon the Reading Terminal Market Italian Festival in Philadephia. Wearing street clothes and blending inwith the crowd, the artists swung into action after the first orchestral strains of the famed "Brindisi"were piped through the market, giving a rousing, surprise performance for hundreds of delighted onlookers.
The four-minute piece won a thunderous ovation that included both laughter and tears from the audience.See it and hear it!
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I had the privilege if being invited to present at the EDO 2010 International Congress in Barcelona at the Centre for Legal Studies and Specialized Training on 12, 13, 14 May 2010. The conference theme was “New training strategies for oganisations” and I did a session on ‘Cultivating Knowledge Through Communities of Practice”.The slides I used are available for download from Slideshare and embedded in this post.
My sincere thanks to Jesús Martinez Marin and the organiser for the exceptional hospitality I received.
The following is taken from the EDO website and has been translated from Spanish to English
More than 350 experts and specialists in the subject mostly from Spain and America have actively participated in the five international conferences, the ten symposia and four tables of communications, analyzing and discussing the more than 75 selected contributions. The general conclusions:
The current society considers the knowledge and training of workers as strategic elements of organizations. Thus, intellectual capital has become one of the main resources that are available to institutions to achieve their ends.
The organization is an association of persons, governed by a set of rules, to be able to create, develop and disseminate new knowledge to increase its innovative capacity and competitive. Therefore, knowledge management should focus its attention on the possibility that members of the organization share the greatest number of sources of information and collaborate in the creation of new knowledge.
Knowledge management promotes organizations create intelligent, able to transform information into knowledge through collective learning processes. Included in this connection to distinguish between "managing" and "stacking" the knowledge of the organization between the various technological support
Organizations need to understand and manage the existing knowledge or which may be created from an impulsive reflective practice of co-construction of knowledge. The co-construction of knowledge involves not only a dynamic work that is scheduled and help to move from the informal knowledge to formal knowledge, but also requires experience in which you want to work.
The organizations have expressed new forms of living on the virtual network, which becomes an essential tool for the exchange of information, knowledge and experiences. The virtual communities of practice are considered in this connection, a good practice that encourages learning and promotes the integration of informal learning, in line with a change of training model.
Collaborative work is successful when it occurs among peers, there is a mutual commitment, the organization is flexible and e-moderator exercises its role effectively. It's about the content and learning processes that take place in virtual communities of practice, being the Information Technology and Communication (ICT) are just a tool that helps make communication more effective.
Organizational learning theories agree on the existence of certain internal and external factors that facilitate or hinder learning. Such factors include, among others, collaborative culture, leadership, collaborative and / or the existence of a flexible structure. Change does not preclude the assumption of error, nor problem-solving and competent incompetence.
The self has a high attitude component. Thus, self-learning experiences and networking are built among all participating members with the community and in the context of uncertainty. Is stressed in this connection the words of M. Benedetti: "When we thought we had all the answers, they changed the questions."
The importance of identifying informal learning has increased in recent years. In fact, there are already systems and methodologies, European and Spanish level, certifying skills acquired on the job. It is envisaged, therefore, other ways to access traditional knowledge related to the formal processes established.
The creation and management of knowledge in the educational system implies a paradigm shift which includes the participation and experimentation of new scenarios by inducing agents of change. In this regard, there is talk of optimal conditions for their development as transformational leadership and sparse, teamwork, collaborative culture and flexible structure, if and when they occur simultaneously and seamlessly.
It stresses the need to create models in the education system, combining knowledge management and quality management, address the objectives of the education system and teacher not only in itself.
Managing knowledge is synonymous with a continuous cyclical process of identification, modification, use and evaluation of that knowledge. The EFQM model or similar can help this by emphasizing its usefulness as a tool for self-evaluation. Barcelona, June 2010 contributions and specific conclusions can be analyzed in the book of Acts of Congress to which reference is: Gairín, J. (Ed.) (2010): New training strategies for the organizations. Madrid: Wolters Kluwer Education. à Review available in: http://edo.uab.es/PDF/FichasActividades/Formacion/Pub_CIEDO.pdf
Angstro, an experimental social-graph and news-crunching startup, has been acquired by Google to help lead the company's charge against Facebook in social networking. The acquisition was first reported on by Jessica Guynn of the LA Times.
