Thomas Koeppen Blog » 2008 » May

company blogs

Thomas — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:48:39 +0000

An interesting company blog can be a great way to draw in new people through relevant content of general interest – and some of them will stay to check out the service you provide.

Some companies just blog about updates to their own technology and that’s good for existing users to see. Others are fun to read whether you’re a user or not. Here are some of the company blogs we recommend reading for a good time, like 37signals, ning, viddler etc.

Every good company should have one!

See a list of company blogs at ReadWriteWeb.

Why do CEO’s fail

Thomas — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:45:11 +0000

Glen Waring, has summarized his observations on “Why do CEO’s Fail”. His thoughts are based on over 2,000 one-to-one meetings with CEO’s and over 200 all-day TEC Group meeting.

An Inability to See the Bigger Picture
An Aversion to Using Solid Financial Practices
A Lack of Clear Vision
A Lack of Passion
Lack of Clarity on the Reasons for Success
Too Many Distractions
Disconnecting from Customers
Integrity Outages

Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and MySpace Data Availability

Thomas — Sun, 18 May 2008 21:42:22 +0000

All three announcements of MySpaceâ€™s Data Availability, Facebookâ€™s Connect and Googleâ€™s Friend Connect seem to have the same fundamental strategy.

They are all keeping theire member’s data on their servers, while sending out notifications to as many sites as they can. These notifications may be widgets, apps, feeds, iframes – but its all the same strategy.

Davin Morin gave the first official statement about Facebook Connect in his blog post Announcing Facebook Connect on 9 My 2008.

Google Friend Connect Homepage shows a introduction video. The key features are a user can associate their OpenID with his account on a 3rd party site, combined with his OpenID friends and showing the user’s activity on the 3rd party site and/or broadcast in his friend’s news feeds (all without Facebook).

Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch post entitled MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners with Yahoo, Ebay and Twitter on 8 May 2008 gave some development notes on MySpace activities. But there were no details on an upcoming MySpace API like GData/OpenSocial and Facebook REST API)

By the way, Facebook has banned Google from interacting with their user date using Google Friend Connect. Read in Facebook Blog by Charlie Cheever’s Thoughts on Privacy on 15 May 2008.

What about interoperability?

The idea of social network interoperability isn’t visible in today’s Facebooks and MySpaces ot the world. They are still fundamentally data silos when it comes to the social graph.

It would be great if we can change that.

collaboration beetween teams in large companies

Thomas — Sun, 18 May 2008 21:20:19 +0000

this is a usual observation in large companies. There are two key issue that often hinder collaboration:

The first is misaligned goals.
The second are undisclosed concerns about the risks of collaborating.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life wrote a great story in his blog:

The truth is often that the so-called jerks are really just thinking “You’re not my manager, so I’m not going to ask how high when you tell me to jump.” Once you find out you’ve hit this problem then the path to solving it is clear. You either have to (i) make sure all collaborating parties want to reach the same outcome and place have similar priorities or (ii) jettison the collaboration effort.