Using OrganIP

When you launch the application on the web, you're presented with a search box where you can type in the contact's name who you want to reach. Assuming you're connected to them on one of the supported networks, you'll then be presented with their profile name next to an icon representing which social network they were found on. To place a call, you just click on one of the three options provided: you can either call directly, send them a voicemail, or send a voice-to-text message.

If you're placing a call directly, it doesn't immediately ring the recipient's phone. Instead, they're alerted via a message in Gtalk or Facebook chat, if available, or via the OrganIP website. They can then choose to answer the call, send the call to voicemail, or have the voicemail transcribed into text and sent to them.

If you're worried about all of a sudden getting a deluge of call requests from online buddies, don't be. The options available for each contact are a direct reflection of how you've configured your profile and privacy settings on the social networks in question. For example, if you don't list your phone number in your Gmail profile, no one can call you directly, it will always go to voicemail. For Facebook and Gtalk, only those friends who are allowed to chat with you can send a URL via the chat interface to invite you to a phone call.

Unfortunately for the company, the actual demo of their technology didn't go so well on stage. The first attempt at placing a call didn't go through so it appears they may have some kinks to work out before they officially launch. However, they did give it a shot a second time and the call went through as promised. It's hard to say whether it was network issues causing the problems or the OrganIP software itself.

Partnership with OpenDNS

Through a partnership with the free DNS resource OpenDNS, any users typing in a telephone number in the address bar will be connected to OrganIP service and provided with shortcuts allowing them to make a call or send a voicemail. For a small startup, that's really hitting the ground running, as OpenDNS currently boasts about 15 million+ users.

Mobile Application and Future Plans

In addition to the web interface which works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, OrganIP is also launching an Android application which delivers the same functionality to smartphones running Google's mobile OS. The company is working on versions for iPhone, Palm Pre, Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, too, which will be made available in the coming months.

For now, OrganIP is a free application, but starting next year, the company plans to charge via a subscription service plan for a reasonable monthly fee which will hover somewhere around $5 per month. The service will be a "freemium" offering, keeping some aspects free while other features will only be available to paying customers. However, all calls made over Wi-Fi networks will remain free always.

OrganIP will be launched into an open beta on October 19, 2009. You can sign up to join at www.organip.com.

Gelato is the kind of web site that's going to make married and attached folks almost wish they were single again - it's that much fun to use. Getting started is one of the simplest processes we've ever seen. Not only does it offer Facebook Connect as an alternative to creating an account, it actually imports your Facebook profile information to create an instant dating profile on Gelato. (You can select and deselect which items you want to import, too).

However, Gelato doesn't stop with just Facebook - the site actually supports eight social services in total and has more on the way. Obviously, there's Twitter support, a key component to any good lifestream, but there's also Last.fm, Netflix, Flickr, Hulu, Amazon, and Seesmic. By adding a mix of these sites to your profile, it's much easier for someone to get an idea of what sort of interests you have than by reading some sort of self-created profile list. Think about it: you may have a rather typical list of favorite movies which include everything from "Forrest Gump" to "The Godfather," but your recent viewing of Dollhouse Season 1 on Hulu will out you as the sci-fi geek you are at heart.

Your updates on these social networks are combined to form a lifestream of your activities, just like they would on FriendFeed. Also like FriendFeed, you can "like" and comment on the items posted. And if you don't know what to say, various "icebreakers" are available to help you be witty on the fly. However, because Gelato is focused on making one-to-one connections, those likes, comments, and icebreakers remain private. The only person who can see them is the recipient. They can then respond to your comment if they want to start a conversation with you.

Real-Time Search

A real-time search feature, another borrowed idea from FriendFeed, helps you find topics you're interested in. For example, if you're looking for someone who's talking about the latest Harry Potter movie, you can search for that using keywords. Of course you're also able to filter your searches by age, sex, and location, too, so you can find someone local to chat with.

Legit Accounts and "Friendships"

One unique feature to Gelato that didn't come from elsewhere is what they're calling your "SCOOP" rating, aka the "social confidence of online profile." The higher the "SCOOP" rating, the better chance you're legit. This feature is designed to combat those who post fake profiles on dating sites. To bump your rating up, you can post to Twitter or Facebook and ask your friends to confirm who you are. Obviously, this isn't foolproof, but it should help highlight legit accounts as being so.

The only area that may need a little finessing is the way friendships work on the site. As with Facebook, you can send friend requests to other users and they must accept your request before you can be friends. This in and of itself isn't so bad...or all that different from how many other sites work for that matter. However, since a lot of online dating interaction is typically of the "try-before-you-buy" sort (live chats, email messages, etc.), it could lead to some sticky situations when you decide that the person you "friended" isn't someone you want to get to know better after all. To get them out of your friends list, you have to unfriend them and they will know you've done so. Considering all the other smart features in Gelato, it would have been nice if they could have come up with a less hurtful way of saying "I'm just not that into you."

Still that's a minor complaint in what is, overall, a unique entry to the billion dollar marketplace that is online dating. Despite the fact that much of the site's inspiration comes from FriendFeed, we won't hold that against them. In fact, we applaud them for it. Taking FriendFeed's innovations and applying them to a marketplace decidedly lacking in such technical innovation is a brilliant idea.

If you're ready to give the "stream dating" of Gelato a try, you can join now at ge.la.to.

In part 1 and part 2, we looked at how the real-time Web is a new form of communication, creates a new body of content, is real time, is public, and has an explicit social graph associated with it. A final characteristic of the real-time Web is that it carries with it an implicit model of federation.

It's hard to say whether this model has arisen because of a conscious strategic effort to build a new industry, or because building a fully closed world would have required just too many resources, or because of a collective effort among business friends and acquaintances to develop open products and open interactions so that cool new things could be created. It's probably a combination of all three, but considering the history of the people at Twitter and FriendFeed (Paul Buchheit, one of FriendFeed's founders, is credited with coining Google's unofficial "Don't be evil" slogan), the open and cool factors are probably a big part of the equation.

At this point, there seems to be a general willingness to accept and transmit messages from outside sources (carrying costs are not significant, and transmission is automated via APIs, and so overhead is minimal). That said, infrastructure costs are bound to increase, competition will heat up, illegitimate companies will spot opportunities, and monetization strategies will be devised, which will all put strain on this truly open exchange.

As in the past, formal carrier agreements could be set down, governments could decide to regulate markets, or other forces could come into play that would transform what is now essentially a free-for-all bazaar into a marketplace with hierarchy. All the same, the expectation of openness and transparent transmission will be difficult to counteract or stop. So, new companies that enter the space, even bigger and better funded ones, will have to adhere to the same model of federation that these pioneering companies have established.

Summary

Whether Twitter will remain the focal point of the real-time Web or be supplanted by another or several companies (as happened in the social network space, first with Friendster, then MySpace, and now LinkedIn and Facebook) is unclear. The underlying characteristics of the real-time Web, however, are defining the next major stage of the Internet and will spread throughout its infrastructure in years to come.

Broader trends on the Web point to users having discrete data and services follow them as they move around the Web. Fred Wilson, a principal of Union Square Ventures, has called this the "de-portalization of the Web," and John Borthwick, CEO of betaworks, has co-opted Chris Anderson's phrase "small pieces, loosely joined" to describe the fast-moving risk-taking small companies that work in the space. Both individuals are leading investors in Twitter and other real-time Web companies.

The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information (e.g. people, organizations, articles and videos, product offerings, store listings, and blog posts) and associated meta data (e.g. images, addresses, reviews, ratings) that move seamlessly around the Web, being slotted where appropriate. These units of information can be organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences.

In some cases, locations are integrated into these units as supplementary information. For example, Google and Yahoo now include map locations and reviews as part of their search listings. Their search engine algorithms read markup formats in the form of microformats and RDFa that are embedded on Web pages. These formats contain tags denoting names of people and organizations, geo-locations, and ratings and reviews. Both companies report great results from the inclusion of this data, both in increased click-through rates and reduced bounce rates. Support for other structured data is almost sure to follow. Reading tags on a page and doing something useful with them in a search result is not a novel concept, but the rapidly growing support of these tags across the Web is a clear sign that data is becoming much more identifiable and actionable.

This trend towards open and accessible data is even more obvious when you consider the real-time stream for all of the reasons mentioned above: atomic real-time messages, public accessibility, attached social graphs. In a sense, this is similar to the vision of the semantic Web. Tim Berners-Lee said at the TED conference in the fall of 2008, "Twenty years ago, I asked everyone to put their documents on this Web thing... Now I want you to put your data on the Web." The difference is that the effort to make data accessible and more actionable on the real-time Web is being made through methods and interactions not necessarily prescribed by the W3C.

Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C use the term "linked data" to refer to the latter's initiative to expose data and make it accessible. "Actionable data" might be a better term to use for the real-time Web because it doesn't imply a particular approach but merely refers to the concept of making data more identifiable and independent. Linked data refers specifically to using RDF and other W3C protocols to link important concepts, a prescription that is overly complex and not likely to address many of the usage cases on the Web.

The real-time stream is a massive body of continously created and authentic content that by itself would be significant. But when it is added to and integrated with other information on other sites, and when derivatives can be created in a number of dimensions, this concept of actionable data reaches the tipping point. In non-Silicon Valley business circles, Twitter is criticized for not having a solid revenue model. Those on the inside (investors and advisers), however, believe the criticism is short-sighted. As with most communication platforms, the value of the network increases exponentially as the size of the network increases.

By having a low barrier to adoption, the network is able to grow quickly. Only after a critical mass has been reached, and after other companies and communities of interest have helped shape how the platform is used, will it become clear what people are willing to pay for. While they may not have a solid grasp yet of exactly how to make money, those who are building companies and investing in the space do know there will be opportunities. In their minds, the real-time stream is at an early stage in its cycle, one that will likely last 5 to 7 years.

If the real-time Web and its fundamental characteristics are widely understood, its benefits and opportunities can extend throughout the Internet and across all industries.

Read part 1 and part 2 of this series.

Guest author: Ken Fromm is a serial entrepreneur who has been active during both the Internet and Web 2.0 innovation cycles. He co-founded two companies, Vivid Studios, one of the first interactive agencies, and Loomia, one of the top recommendation, discovery, and personalization companies. He has worked at the leading edge of recommendations and personalization, interactive development, e-commerce and online advertising, semantic technologies and information interoperability, digital publishing, and digital telephony. He is currently advising a number of startups and looking at the next big thing in Web 3.0. He can be found on Twitter at @frommww.

In part 1 we looked at how the real-time Web is a new form of communication and creates a new body of content. The immediacy of the Twitter channel is a third fundamental characteristic of the real-time Web and one of its prime currencies, not surprising given the name of the space. Because of demand within the eco-system, quite a bit of effort is being made on storing, slicing, dicing, and disseminating information as quickly as possible. The fundamental implication of this activity (without any explicit markers being laid down) is that the velocity of information within the Web data system has just increased by an order of magnitude.

As Eric Marcoullier of Gnip Central points out, this is not unlike how stock and options trading has been conducted for years, where micro-seconds in receiving and processing data make a difference in gaining competitive advantage. The difference here is that, instead of real-time trading data, we have real-time social Web data: data from individuals and companies about events, theories, products, people, articles, videos, and other things and ideas, all getting passed around and publicly available.

This facet of the real-time stream is having a profound impact on the infrastructure of the Web. New storage and retrieval methods are being developed to overcome the time lags of writing not just to disks but to traditional databases. Adaptations to traditional structured query languages are being made to index items directly from the stream. Search engines and search capabilities are being modified to make use of real-time inputs to influence the search results. This isn't just a Twitter effect. This is an effect across all uses of the Web, because the expectation of access to real-time information is now permeating all websites and the infrastructure of the Web itself.

Unintended Consequences

The use of and overlay of real-time commentary and reaction with news and events is bound to have many useful benefits, as well as interesting and perhaps adverse side effects. Several news outlets have been quick to point out how a mob mentality can take hold when opinions on emotionally charged topics are instantly disseminated. Additionally, many attribute the severity of the 1987 stock crash to the lack of regulators that prevented automated systems from reacting to ongoing market conditions through an integrated loop of feedback. Even now, 20+ years later, unintended and unforeseen events continue to happen when derivatives and automation come into play.

For those prone to theorize, there are many fascinating questions to ponder. For example, the uncertainty principles states that the position and velocity of an atomic particle becomes less certain as that of another becomes more certain. If the analogy holds true, then does the veracity or truthfulness of news become less certain as the velocity of interest becomes more measurable. Likewise, what effects will the integration of the real-time stream have on the outcome of events, and how can conditions be influenced to ensure specific outcomes.

Public Conversations with Explicit Social Graphs Attached

Another characteristic of the real-time Web is that, unlike other real-time communication streams such as instant messaging, email, and the telephone, it is largely public. Also unlike these other channels, conversations within the real-time stream carry with them an explicit social graph. The audience of someone who publishes information on the real-time Web is not unknown, as might be the case in the blogging world. Each person (or company or organization) communicating on Twitter has followers, who in turn themselves have followers. Each message thus has a social graph attached to it, as does each echo or retweet of that message. Messages and message flow are for public consumption.

These social graphs also contain a fair amount of information identifying each user within the graph. The majority of Twitter profiles include a name, website, and short description. Additionally, third-party directories contain self-tagged categories, roles, interests, and specialties. (Profiles are identifiable because followers need enough information to be able to identify users within the public space.)

So many people and companies are interested in developing on top of the Twitter platform (and for the real-time Web in general) because of these characteristics (i.e. the openness of the channel, the availability of rich meta data, and the explicitness of the social graph) as well as the value derived from the content and interactivity. The value they get is in being able to monitor these streams and produce derivative value for Twitter users and news organizations, brands, retailers, organizations, politicians, and others who have an interest in what's being said, who hears it, what they do with it, and what others do with that.

In a strange twist, unlike the unregulated derivatives markets on Wall Street, which have run into skepticism and calls for greater regulation, the derivatives markets in technology and social Web circles operate freely and are booming.

Social Graphs, Reputation, and Trust

Social graphs provide mechanisms by which to infer reputation and trust. Because the graphs of followers on Twitter are public, Twitter and third parties can employ algorithms to identify which profiles are legitimate and which are spam or cons.

Algorithms based on the page-ranking algorithms that Google uses, for example, can be used to rate users not just on the number of their followers but also on the strength of their followers. It's almost a given that Twitter and other players in this space will have serious challenges in dealing with spammers and other disreputable users, but public social graphs are a great advantage in defending against these threats.

Read part 1 of this series, and stay tuned for part 3.

Guest author: Ken Fromm is a serial entrepreneur who has been active during both the Internet and Web 2.0 innovation cycles. He co-founded two companies, Vivid Studios, one of the first interactive agencies, and Loomia, one of the top recommendation, discovery, and personalization companies. He has worked at the leading edge of recommendations and personalization, interactive development, e-commerce and online advertising, semantic technologies and information interoperability, digital publishing, and digital telephony. He is currently advising a number of startups and looking at the next big thing in Web 3.0. He can be found on Twitter at @frommww.

Like cloud computing less than a year ago and social networking two years ago, the real-time Web is the new black on the tech circuit. The trend has been publicly bandied about this summer, starting with a few industry get-togethers, followed by several enthusiastic testimonials from investors (notably angel investor Ron Conway's widely posted list of ways for Twitter to monetize). It was then capped by a glowing report in BusinessWeek in early August.

The trend is not with Twitter alone. Just as the social Web was more than Friendster, then MySpace, and now Facebook, the real-time Web is more than just 140 characters bursts about what your friends and acquaintances are thinking and doing. The number of people using Twitter (44.5 million in June 2009) and the purchase of FriendFeed by Facebook for $47.5 million are eye-opening figures alone, but the number of independent developers building on top of and alongside the Twitter platform make it something worthy of close attention. Unlike the social networking space, these are not "Me too" networks or a mess of widget applications. The depth and breadth of the problems that independent developers are addressing are clear evidence that a serious trend has formed, one with significant implications for both the technological infrastructure of the Web and for the companies that rely on the Web.

As with other recent waves of innovation (Web 2.0 and cloud computing, for example) there is no single definition of what the term "real-time Web" means. As a result, it is used as a catch-all phrase for a number of developments underway. At this point, we can identify that the real-time Web...

1. is a new form of communication,
2. creates a new body of content,
3. is real time,
4. is public and has an explicit social graph associated with it,
5. carries an implicit model of federation.

A New Form of Communication

One obvious way of looking at Twitter is as a new form of communication, with its own protocols and ways of doing things, and with similarities to instant messaging (IM) and email. The timing of communications on it is near synchronous (i.e. it is a continuous stream of up-to-date messages), and its tone is conversational and authentic (marketing messages and ghost tweeting are frowned upon, at least for now). Like IM, email, texting, and even the telephone, technical constraints (in this case, a 140-character limit) create a rather special conversational structure, giving Twitter-speak its own distinct mode of communication.

This arbitrary limit also simplifies its usage, which has had a tremendous effect on the adoption rate. For one, the limit makes it easy for adopters to pick up the general etiquette, and thus the barrier to participate is much lower than it is for most things tech. Plus, the technology threshold is low: no authoring software or templates (as one might have for a blog) are needed, nor do you have to create an extensive profile, as you do with social networking. Figures suggests that many independent bloggers, especially in technology, media, and political sectors, have dramatically reduced their blogging schedules, preferring instead to publish their thoughts, or refer to the thoughts of others, in 140-character segments throughout the day, rather than regularly come up with 500-word blog posts.

One consequence of the 140-character limit (and a key reason why the real-time stream is so easily adaptable to other uses) is that messages are largely atomic in nature. Each refers to an individual item: a thought, link, event, product, person, or company. They also typically contain some evaluative or emotional component, such as "Look at X because it's cool or interesting" or "I support Y" or "I disagree" or "this is no good."

This discrete nature of Twitter messages means that items, and the sentiments attached to them, can be extracted and then aggregated, allowing us to measure the activity being generated around a particular subject and, in some cases, the general feeling about it. This is not unlike the way buy-and-sell orders signal interest in a stock; but in this case, any popular subject matter can be tracked. In combination with other factors, this discrete nature and emotional component allow for some interesting usage and applications.

This deconstruction of content is not limited to Twitter. The movement to expose underlying data and make it more actionable is gaining momentum across industries and platforms. One example is the move to report financial data in XBRL format (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Another is the growing use of microformats and RDFa, which are small patterns of HTML that represent data on commonly published subjects on Web pages, such as people, events, blog topics, reviews, and tags. Twitter's character limit and accessibility, however, are the simplest and most recognized example of how elements of connected data can provide value both individually and in aggregate.

The Power of Constraints

One of the more magical aspects of Twitter is that it reminds us that arbitrary constraints can have a liberating and profound effect on creativity. It sounds counter-intuitive, but coming up with a host of examples doesn't take long. If a group of high school students were given the choice between writing an essay about their summer vacation or writing a 300-word essay on the funniest thing that happened in the last three weeks, we could easily guess which would get their pens moving faster and lead to more imaginative results.

Poetry shows a similar relationship between constraint and inspiration. Whether having to keep to a certain meter or follow a particular rhyming scheme, poets come up with turns of phrases and ideas that they might not have otherwise happened upon if they did not need to fit words into a pattern. The limitations also give them license to play with language in a way that would not make sense or be valued in other modes. The same goes for music, with its meter and form, and even TV shows and movies, whose time restrictions and story constraints can make for enjoyable, funny, scary, or moving experiences.

A New Body of Content

Another characteristic of the real-time Web is that it gives the world a new body of content, one that, unlike IM or email's, is largely public. Plus the underlying APIs allow third parties to make use of the data through programs, thus extending the reach of the content. (Only 20% of Twitter traffic comes from the site itself. The other 80% comes from users accessing the platform through APIs.) Ron Conway and other proponents of the real-time Web see this new body of content as a great opportunity for investment, with the potential for companies to shape, extend, present, and amplify it in any number of ways.

On the surface, people consume this body of content simply by reading messages from people they follow. Much like a stock ticker, these messages scroll across whatever client they use to access it. When it first launched -- without the scale, celebrities, and business leaders -- many people failed to see the value of this mode of interaction. It was interesting, but not compelling. Now with its scale, the personalities using it, and a better general understanding of how to use it (less about your breakfast, more insight, reaction, and commentary), the channels have become fascinating -- overwhelming if you follow a lot of people, but fascinating nonetheless.

The tipping point in Twitter's adoption rate came when its stream became searchable. This happened in July 2008, when Twitter purchased a tiny search company called Summize and renamed it Twitter Search. The acquisition made it easier for users and third parties to pull specific words and tags from the Twitter stream.

This new capability revealed another layer of value, because it enabled people to access particular threads of information. Users could now search for other users, words, and specific topics. An example from earlier this summer was the aggregation of the steady stream of messages about the green revolution in Iran. With APIs, we could create filters to keep constant track of a person, item, or topic. Real-time search and filtering are still primitive, though, and a tremendous effort is being made to improve them. As one investor puts it, a lot of investment is being made "to build filters that give you only the portion of the firehose that makes sense to you."

Content in digital format is not really new. We saw this with early Web pages, then MP3s, blogs, videos, social network profiles, and so on. The difference is accessibility. Web pages have to be crawled and indexed, which limit the derivative use and retransmission of their data. RSS provided a revolutionary way to syndicate content and made it much easier to process by machine. The accessibility of the Twitter stream via APIs extends this syndication idea even further by providing much greater immediacy and fidelity. As Twitter and third parties introduce better filtering mechanisms, that stream and, by extension, other content formats on the Web will be able to be more effectively harnessed and extended.

Inside Baseball Twitter

More advanced uses of Twitter, such as retweeting, direct messaging, and thread tagging, make it a bit more of an insider's game, but even their limits makes them not all that difficult to pick up. The interesting thing is that these uses (RT for retweet, @username for mentions, and #keyword for hash tags) can be followed mechanically and used to capture these derivative streams.

Read part 2 of this series.

Guest author: Ken Fromm is a serial entrepreneur who has been active during both the Internet and Web 2.0 innovation cycles. He co-founded two companies, Vivid Studios, one of the first interactive agencies, and Loomia, one of the top recommendation, discovery, and personalization companies. He has worked at the leading edge of recommendations and personalization, interactive development, e-commerce and online advertising, semantic technologies and information interoperability, digital publishing, and digital telephony. He is currently advising a number of startups and looking at the next big thing in Web 3.0. He can be found on Twitter at @frommww.

All iGoogle users in the U.S. will get access to these gadgets over the course of this week and Google plans to expand the reach of these social gadgets beyond the U.S. and Australia in the near future.

iGoogle as Google's Social Hub?

On the surface, this doesn't seem like a major announcement. However, while Google is slowly building out its repertoire of services that leverage the OpenSocial platform, the company never really tied all of these services together. With this announcement, though, it looks like iGoogle could become the central hub for social activities on Google's ecosystem. After all, iGoogle already knows who your friends are because it can tap into your Google Contacts, where you can manage your friends by adding them to the "Friends" group.

Keeping Up With Your Friends

iGoogle currently offers two interesting ways to keep up with your friends' activity: a timeline and an 'updates' feed. The timeline even allows users to post Facebook-like status updates. The good thing about the update stream is that users can see their friends' activity on iGoogle, even if they don't have a specific gadget installed themselves.

Social Gadgets

The current crop of gadgets is interesting in its own right. The ToDo gadget, for example, allows you to share a list of chores with your family members. Electronic Arts developed a nice version of Scrabble for iGoogle and the NPR gadget allows you to share news stories with your friends.

Another outstanding gadget is the YouTube gadget, which allows you to easily share interesting video clips with your friends. The problem here, though, is that the gadget doesn't directly tie in to your activity on YouTube itself. When you share something on the actual YouTube website, it doesn't automatically appear in your iGoogle gadget. This seems like a missed opportunity and exemplifies the problems Google still faces as it tries to centralize its users' social activities across the large variety of services it offers.

The fact that there is no social Google Reader gadget for iGoogle so far also feels like a missed opportunity. While the Google Reader team has been adding more social features to its product, a stronger integration with iGoogle would really take this to the next level. We can only hope that an enterprising gadget developer will soon create this link between iGoogle and Google Reader.

Lots of Potential

Overall, we get the feeling that these social gadgets have a lot of potential, but it will take some work from third-party developers to really make the most out of this opportunity. The 18 social gadgets Google released today definitely make iGoogle a more attractive start page and it will be interesting to see what gadgets developers will come up with. Google itself, however, still has to work on creating a more integrated experience.

In reality, open-source software provides stable solutions, created by people and for people and used by companies of all sizes. Use Firefox? That's open-source software. Google Chrome? It too is based on an open-source code. Ever look up a term on Wikipedia? The site is completely built on user-generated code and content. "In fact," says Allison Randal, Program Chair of OSCON, "chances are you're using a lot more open-source software than you know: on your computer or powering you favorite websites."

Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and social media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

What Is Open Source?

"The ideas behind open source are about freedom," continues Randal, "that people should have certain basic rights in the software that they use, the same as every other part of life. It's about people's rights to create things they're passionate about."

Mozilla's founders, who spawned Firefox, walked away from the ashes of Netscape with a desire to change the Web browsing experience. Drupal and Joomla are content management systems that enable unlimited options in website building and publishing. Remember how difficult it used to be to build your own website? Now building one is free, open to all, flexible, and extendable: anyone with a passion or idea can build for it, and numerous companies are taking Drupal and Joomla and building easy-to-use website templates that anyone can use, no programming needed. Don't want to pay for Microsoft Office? You can use OpenOffice for free -- it will serve most of your needs.

In essence, these projects, developers, and organizations address mature, business-critical issues in better, faster ways. This form of crowd-sourcing enables businesses to use solutions that would otherwise have required a lot more time and/or people to develop at a much higher total cost.

Open Source Is Evolving

You may have heard the phrase, "Open Source is free as in speech, not as in beer." This phrase refers to the notion that while everyone can freely start and contribute to any project, the actual use of open source solutions may still come with a price tag -- often for services and additional product layers that a company bundles with the open code. But for corporations that already spend millions of dollars just to keep the lights on, investing in open source increasingly makes better business sense. For the CIOs and CTOs of these companies, it's not about the price tag of each solution but rather about the total cost of ownership over time, especially in a downturn economy.

In a study conducted by Gartner and reported by Matt Asay at CNET, CIOs reported they have increased investment in open-source software and decreased investment in proprietary software. CIOs reported that by investing in open source they were able to do the following:

• Reduce costs by 87% (while meeting or exceeding expectations),
• Improve quality by 92%,
• Ease integration and customization by 86%,
• Quicken pace of innovation by 82%,
• Improve support by 84%,
• Increase standards compliance by 91%,
• Decrease time to market by 82%.

Michael Fauscette, Group Vice-President of Software Business Solutions at IDC, recently highlighted changes in the adoption of open source. IDC found that as recently as 2007, CIOs were reluctant to adopt social media software for fear of IP infringement and poor support: two mission-critical elements of any enterprise. By 2008, says Fauscette, CIOs reported that they preferred open-source software precisely because of the quality of support it comes with. And as for their fear of IP infringement, that was no longer at the top of the list because of standards and self-policing.

Open source doesn't only serve IT companies, though. It is now being explored for government and health care data management and access. Open-source software, in other words, has moved from the basements of Linkin Park fans to the desks of the largest corporations in the US.

Sound familiar? The evolution of open source may sound a bit like the evolution of another web-related phenomenon, what has become known as Web 2.0 social media and social networking. Like open-source software, social media is about the basic human right to communicate, organize, and maintain control of one's own experiences. And both address the needs of companies to do more at higher quality with less money. Both social media and open-source software involve communities and are fed by content: code in the case of open source, and media content in the case of social media.

But unlike open source, social media has thus far primarily been a consumer play and is only now being explored by enterprises. Living on the Web, social media is also hardware and distribution-channel agnostic: it does not require pre-installation and does not compete with pre-bundled proprietary products. Historically, open source, being hardware dependent, has had greater distribution challenges: unless the software came pre-loaded on your hardware, notes Fauscette, you would rarely seek out alternatives to replace what you already have. Without a channel for hardware, distribution was driven primarily by hard-core tech enthusiasts.

Seeds of Change

Companies that erected insurmountable barriers to protect their source code now realize that the cost of innovation and competition may be just too much compared to that of their competitors that use open-source software. Take Google's Android, an iPhone competitor built on the open-source platform Linux. Android started off as closed-source software but very quickly became an open-source project. Developers can now build applications on top of Android's platform and then use the code for their own Android-like products, just as developers use Firefox code to build their own browsers.

2008 saw another significant milestone: the establishment of the Symbian Foundation to oversee the development of the Symbian operating system as an open-source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The Foundation's members include Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T. With this development, a once highly protected closed-source cell-phone operating system has opened up.

Caleb Sima, Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, calls this "a clear move on Nokia's part to try to catch up to the competition by using open source and the community to help evolve its features to those of smartphones." Companies are now realizing that open-source software is a competitive advantage.

What Open Source Means to Social Media

Open source is the natural platform for fast-evolving social media and social networking. Forget about having to scale the walled gardens of social networks or having to upload, download, and link together multiple applications. With open source, everything is seamless and transparent. Picture a huge festive dinner table, set with dozens of mouth-watering dishes for you and your guests to pick from. You can heap whatever you like on your plate or, better yet, just dab your bread into whatever dish your please, all while seeing what others are putting on their plate and seeing whether they're using a fork or a spoon and hearing the conversation around the table.

But with all of these capabilities and openness, people will face new challenges on the Web. One big challenge will be to make the Web more personal and make it possible to simulate live interaction. One of the most promising companies to address this is Kaltura, maker of the only open-source online video management platform, with a free community platform, now used on over 35,000 websites and soon to be integrated into Wikipedia for user co-creation of rich media content. (Disclaimer: Kaltura is one of my client companies.)

"Extensions like Kaltura make the Web real," says Fauscette. "Video is in fact one of the big things we'll see. This is an opportunity space, and first-mover advantage will be big." For Fauscette, trust is a major sticking point: with the proliferation of networks, friends, followers, and brands online, helping people figure out who and what to trust will be key to making the Web personal.

Whoever tries to control people's relationships will lose. Whoever enables people to create and share experiences that are relevant to them across any website, with anyone, the way they want will win. And open source will create many more winners than losers.

More About Open Source

OSCON is celebrating its 10th year anniversary this coming week in a four-day conference in San Jose, California. In addition to the usual technical tracks, OSCON has added people and business tracks and many free events. You can register for a free pass to the expo hall (yes, free as in beer) and attend the "Birds of a Feather" un-conference, Ignite party, Hackathon, and much more (all free). Check out the list of events.

Great resources online include Open Source Initiative Open Government, Open Data Initiatives, SourceForge (where you can find a list of ongoing projects and downloads), Open Video Alliance, and the excellent short and sweet write-ups by open-source experts such as CNET's Matt Asay.

Oh, and there's always Wikipedia (where smiles are always open).

In a recent study by Anderson Analytics, the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn were revealed. The ultimate goal was to provide marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today. Here we'll delve into the details about the specific networks studied.

Facebook

As we've heard before, Facebookers are older and better off. They are more likely to be married (40%), white (80%) and retired (6%) than users of the other social networks. They have the second-highest average income ($61,000) and an average of 121 connections.

In general, there is no one area of interest for this group of social networkers. Out of 45 categories, national news, sports, exercise, travel, and home and garden skewed only slightly higher than the rest. This is likely because this network has the most users and contains a high number of users within each demographic.

Facebookers are also extremely loyal: 75% say Facebook is their favorite site and 59% say they've increased their use in the past 6 months.

MySpace

MySpace users are young and there are less of them on the site than there were in the past. Even those participants who reported using MySpace said they had used the site less in the past six months.

The users of this network are more interested in having fun, specifically in the areas of entertaining friends, humor and comedy, and video games. They're less into exercise than any other network. Oddly enough, despite the youth-skewed demographics, they seek out parenting info more than users of any other network.

The average income of the MySpace user is the lowest ($44,000). They're more likely to be black (9%) or Hispanic (7%) and single (60%) and students (23%).

Twitter

Twitter users are more likely to be employed part-time (16% vs. 11% average) and have an average income of $58,000. The average Twitter user has 28 followers and follows 32 others.

The Twitter group is especially interested in news, restaurants, sports, politics, personal finance, and religion. They're also really into pop culture with music, movies, TV and reading ranking higher than average. Their buying habits reflect those interests, with this group being more likely to buy books, movies, shoes, and cosmetics.

However, this group is not that loyal to the network: 43% said they could live without Twitter.

LinkedIn

It should come as no surprise that a network of business users is the one that has the highest average income ($89,000). Also not surprising is that LinkedIn users joined the network for business or work purposes, specifically for keeping in touch with business networks, job searching, business development, and recruiting.

They tend to like news, employment information, sports, and politics. They're also more likely to be into the gym, spas, yoga, golf and tennis. Interestingly enough - and perhaps because they can afford to do so - LinkedIn users own more electronic gadgets than users of any of the other social networkers. In particular, they enjoy digital cameras, high-definition TVs, DVRs and Blu-ray players.

However, when these guys unwind, they have some interesting interests: gambling and soap operas. 12% seek gambling information online (vs. an average of 7%), while 10% go online for soap-opera content (vs. an average of 5%).

This group is more likely to be male - it's ratio of male to female users is 57% to 43%.

Conclusion

The findings of this study have confirmed in some cases what we already knew about the different demographics of these networks. However, they're still helpful since the more sources that confirm the same demographics, the more likely they are to be accurate. In addition, by surveying social networkers' interests, the study reveals some interesting insights into the various groups, like how one group is more pop-culture focused and another spends more time at the gym. That info is invaluable to marketers looking to best capitalize on their social network ad spending.

Anderson Analytics will be releasing the full report next week. If you're interested, you can check their site for more details.

But what in this future scenario will Social Network XYZ be? As the sands of time wash MySpace into obscurity, with a wave of hundreds of employees being let go this week for example, now seems like a good time to think about what comes next. What could kill Facebook, the MySpace killer? We've identified four possible scenarios - which do you think is most likely? Most desirable?

Scenario 1: Incremental Change

In some ways, Facebook was just a series of incremental changes away from what MySpace offered. The same core functionality of messaging, media storage and personal expression is consistent across both sites - Facebook just purports to be classier, it's more about school friends than music and it came along at a time when being online was more universal than it was in the days of MySpace's rule. Perhaps another social network will challenge Facebook simply by making small changes in response to the most annoying things about Facebook. Perhaps they will more effectively deal with app spam and they will make preservation of privacy easier. It's about to get a whole lot harder at Facebook, if you believe Michael Arrington's report that Facebook status messages will soon be publicly visible by default. Facebook's privacy settings are already so labyrinthine that company watch-dog blogger Nick O'Neill's post on changing the settings has been viewed by millions of people and he's now selling a book on the topic.

Perhaps a challenger will make incremental changes to these kinds of policies and steal Facebook's thunder.

Scenario 2: A Smarter Technology

Facebook's technology is very smart already, but it could be a whole lot smarter. The future of social networking may come in the form of more sophisticated recommendations. If you liked this video that your friend just shared, then you might also like these other videos, these groups and these public figures to follow.

The Facebook news feed keeps users engaged by following the progress of their friends' lives - but most peoples' friends have pretty boring lives. The flow of information we get from our social networks could be spiced up a whole lot with smarter recommendation systems.

Unfortunately Facebook is moving away from the kind of rich user profiles and connections that sophisticated recommendations are built on. The company is removing geographic regional networks and no longer prompts users to note how they met the people they connect with on Facebook. (Its executives also speak to their users like children, in big vague terms like "we help you Connect.")

The future crown of social networking could be stolen by a system that offers users powerful features, options and recommendations. Think of how television is moving towards increased complexity of features and imagine social networking going that way as well.

Scenario 3: Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is one of those new buzz words that is going to get old fast, but the user experience is not. Social networking as a layer on top of real world experiences has a lot of potential to capture peoples' imaginations. Systems like Loopt and FourSquare are already catching on.

Why would I want to leave my network at home on my desktop when I could bring it with me and detect a residue of restaurant reviews written by my friends, wherever I go around town. Is this place I'm in just a fountain in the park, or can I click a button on my phone and see pictures of my friends smiling there in the past, read a short history of when it was built and leave messages for friends who come there in the future? On second thought, if you thought information overload was an issue today, an augmented future like that could drive us all even more insane.

Scenario 4: Distributed Social Networking

Imagine being an AT&T customer and being unable to call T-Mobile customers on your phone. Imagine being afraid to leave your phone provider because you'd lose your friends' numbers you'd stored and the photos you'd taken. (Heck, imagine having a great phone but being unable to use it on another network! But that's another story...)

That's where we're at with social networking today. They are essentially "walled gardens" little different from the old AOL days.

Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

The next step after Facebook may be no social network in particular at all - it may be social networking as a protocol. A set of standards that let you message, share with and travel to any social network you choose. Suddenly all the social networks have to improve because they are competing on quality of service, over customers that have free will and are able to leave at any time. Someone might even build an interoperable social networking service so compelling that you'd be willing to pay for it, instead of being served up ads.

This is probably the most radical vision, the riskiest when it comes to making money, and so the least likely to happen. But it sure does sound interesting.

What do you think the future of social networking is going to look like? Facebook can't rule the world forever. No one can. The marketplace and the internet are all about churn, innovation and cycles. Just like MySpace has fallen from the top, someday Facebook will too. What do you want to see come next?

You can also interact with the items being tracked via the Glue plugin which features a "like" button and another "2 Cents" button which lets you leave a comment about whatever it is you're viewing.

As with the previously released Firefox plugin, the Glue IE plugin also delivers the same type of interactions as you would expect: the connected conversations around everyday things, recommendations, and web-wide "top lists" that include the top items across the entire Glue network.

You can grab the Glue IE plugin from the main page of the Glue web site here. Note: the "Download" button still features the Firefox logo only at this time, but clicking the button reveals the IE download is available as well.

Disclosure: Alex Iskold (@alexiskold) is the founder of AdaptiveBlue, the company behind Glue, and occasional RWW feature writer.

According to ReferenceBot,

"For a company hiring, it does not replace a background screening firm but automates and centralize the screening process and counts with tools to prevent impersonation and fake reviews.

For job seekers, it allows them to collect and showcase references and also gives them a chance to be found by prospective employers or clients.

And for references, they're just bothered once..."

We were able to uncover some fun facts about the making of this interesting new tool:

-It was designed in an hour
-It was developed in 7 days (after hours)
-Database with only 4 tables
-Total investment $6.99

This new service is certainly worth a look, especially if you are an agency recruiter. Be sure to check out the company's development blog for more information.

However we have heard very few stories about Zuckerberg and the inspiration behind Facebook during the period prior to February 4th, 2004, the day he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. In this post we tell that story.

The reason we hear so little about Zuckerberg's pre-launch vision for Facebook (which was originally called thefacebook.com) is likely because he has been a controversial target over the true origins of his business. In 2007, several of Zuckerberg's classmates came forward and claimed rights to the Facebook idea after reports surfaced that Yahoo had offered $900 million to purchase Facebook just two years after the founding of the company. Even though the suit against Zuckerberg was settled last year, given the nature of the proceedings, we'll likely never get an official answer from Zuckerberg himself about the true origins of his inspiration. But maybe we don't need one after all?

It turns out that Zuckerberg's academic history offers a great deal of insight into the inspiration for Facebook and why it was so wildly successful when it first launched. February 4th, 2004 may mark a major milestone in Facebook's history, but the story of Mark Zuckerberg's rise to fame in fact starts years before he stepped foot on the Harvard campus, and is much more complex and interesting than is usually portrayed.

Pre-Zuckerberg: Tracing the Roots of Facebook Culture

You may be surprised to hear that while Harvard was fertile ground for the launch of Facebook, the seed of the concept was likely planted in Zuckerberg in high school. You never hear about Zuckerberg's alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy in stories because Harvard was where the action really started (and the Harvard name, to some extent, validates Zuckerberg's smarts and makes for a more sensational story). But in fact, the time that Zuckerberg spent at the academy from 2000 to 2002 likely had more influence on the name and initial concept of Facebook than any of his classmates at Harvard.

Phillips Exeter Academy (or "Exeter") is a private boarding school for grades 9 to 12, located in Exeter, New Hampshire. The prestigious prep school is a member of the Ten Schools Admission Organization, which includes such famous boarding schools as Phillips Andover, Deerfield Academy, St. Paul's, and Choate Rosemary Hall. Like the other "Big Tens," Exeter has a tight-knit boarding community that lives on campus full time. Students refer to themselves as "Exonians" and have a strong group identity rooted in a rich culture of customs and tradition.

An Exonian for two years, Zuckerberg had plenty of time to observe and participate in the social culture and rhythms ingrained in Exeter's boarding lifestyle. Every year, the school says goodbye to a few hundred students and welcomes a few hundred more. Zuckerberg enrolled in the fall of his junior year and, like every new and returning student, received his own copy of Exeter's student directory, "The Photo Address Book," which students affectionately referred to as (you guessed it!) "The Facebook."

We interviewed several of Zuckerberg's peers this week, and they all confirmed what David W. Farrant (class of 2000) had to say:

"The front cover says "The Photo Address Book," but we all called it "The Facebook" all the time because "The Photo Address Book" was such a mouthful. Everybody called it that."

"Facebook" photo directories were (and still are) a huge part of the students' social experience and culture at prep schools such as Exeter. Every school in the Big Ten prints and distributes one for its students annually. When students arrive on campus each fall, the rhythm of their social lives is predominantly set by their dormitories, their class year (i.e. seniority), and their proximity to friends in other houses. Because students aren't allowed cell phones on campus and living accommodations are in such flux from year to year (they change houses and phone numbers annually), these "Facebooks" are a valuable resource for students.

Of course, not only do students need the directory to find and contact their peers, but the books become part of the culture of bonding between classmates and friends, as students use it to see where their peers live, who's hot and who's not, who lives with who, and who the new kids are. Sounds an awful lot like how people use Facebook online now, right? Of course, it also describes an early pre-Internet social culture, facilitated by photo directories, that students enjoyed long before Zuckerberg even made it to high school, a culture he happened upon and got to participate in by a stroke of pure luck and glorious opportunity.

But the story doesn't end there. In Zuckerberg's senior year, the student council, headed by student body president Kris Tillery, successfully lobbied the administration to have the school's IT department put the full contents of Exeter's Photo Address Book online. By the time Zuckerberg graduated, the website was put up at http://student.exeter.edu/facebook, with the URL directory (i.e. "facebook") named after the students' pet name for the physical book and effectively shortened to something useful. Tillery was unavailable for comment.

In our interviews, some of Zuckerberg's peers pointed us to this screenshot of the original website hosted on the school's .edu domain. The screenshot was posted in the public Facebook group "Exonians" in 2006 and is still there. Some of the comments about the screenshot (which date back to 2007) refer to it as "the original Facebook" and refer to the Photo Address Book as "the physical Facebook."

Of course, the school's student.exeter.edu/facebook website is no longer online, and none of our sources were able to confirm whether Zuckerberg himself was involved in, or responsible for, the student council initiative that got the directory online in the first place. All we know is that students were enthusiastic enough about an online version of the physical directory that the student council made an effort to lobby the administration, that the online directory was created during Zuckerberg's senior year, and that he was likely aware of its existence.

A More Complete Picture of the Facebook Success Story

Now that Facebook has graduated from its academic roots and been released to the world for free, its continued growth has many experts saying it will likely be the dominant social platform for the foreseeable future. At 200 million users (and counting), Facebook makes it hard to doubt that it will have considerable influence in the way we all connect and communicate in the future, both locally and across borders. While we may never know the true origins of Mark Zuckerberg's inspiration for Facebook, looking at the social culture of the prep school he attended and his experiences as a boarding student there offer us insight into where the explosion of global Facebook culture may have begun, why it was so successful when it launched at Harvard, and how luck and opportunity may have led one of the world's youngest visionaries to start coding in his college dorm room.

Steffan Antonas is a technology anthropologist, writer, and blogger who currently lives in San Diego, CA. He began studying human behavior in virtual communities as a graduate student in Georgetown University's Communication Culture and Technology (CCT) Program in 2003. He has worked in Southern California as an IT Professional for the past three years. You can contact Steffan at steffanantonas@gmail.com and on Twitter @steffanantonas.

Image credits: Phillips Exeter Academy by etnobofin. Book cover and Mark Zuckerberg photos by Alex Demas and Mark Flores.

True, Twitter traffic has gone through the roof. True, Twitter is the new killer app, the new cool kid on the block. And yes, even Oprah now loves Twitter. But does this mean Facebook should be worried? Well, maybe yes, but likely no, because Twitter and Facebook are two very different services.

It is always hard not to be the cool one anymore. Whether you're a movie star or an NBA player, going from #1 to #2 is hard. It is even harder not to be near the top at all. Aging is pretty hard and something we all have to deal with. But change is inevitable, part of the cycle of life. The new comes in and replaces the old.

The history of the software industry is a classic illustration of this kind of transition. IBM was replaced by Microsoft, which reigned for decades. Its strong grip was taken over by Google, and for a while Google was cool. With the rise of the social web, things have changed again. MySpace, Facebook, and now Twitter are taking over in people's minds as the newest, coolest kids on the block.

But IBM is still around and doing well. So is Microsoft, which now looks more like IBM. And, of course, Google, despite not being so cool anymore, is still king of the web. Not so cool, perhaps, but certainly very solid and with enviable revenue.

So maybe Facebook should not feel the need to be so cool and look like Twitter.

Why Did Facebook Take Off to Begin With?

Facebook emerged out of Harvard and was initially a network for college students. It started out as a simple way to keep in touch, to see what was going on around campus. By the time its doors opened to everyone, Facebook had a few things going for it:

- Unlike MySpace, it had clean and elegant profiles.
- It made sharing pictures easy.
- It made sending private messages to friends easy.
- It made posting public messages on walls easy.

In short, Facebook solved basic problems of communication between friends. And it solved them very well.

But it felt compelled to continue evolving. Perhaps it felt threatened by Google's foray into the social space. Perhaps it was enticed by the prospect of being bigger than Google. Or perhaps it was the $15 billion valuation offered by Microsoft that set the bar too high. Whatever it was, it kept rolling out features, including the Facebook platform and Beacon, which aimed to make the web revolve around it.

Facebook blew past MySpace and managed to keep Google at bay. It firmly won the race for the social web. But now it has begun a brand new race, this one against Twitter.

Twitter and Facebook Are Just Different

The thing is, though, this race makes no sense. Facebook and Twitter are simply two different services that need to co-exist on today's web. The only thing they have in common is that their users have a limited number of hours in the day in which to socialize.

At its core, Facebook is about closed sharing between a group of friends. That is why my sister, one of Facebook's first users, felt so compelled to use it, not because of apps or Beacon or tabs within tabs within tabs. It was simply about photos and messages on walls between friends.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter has not added new features. It has stuck to its core product: connecting people via short messages. And unlike Facebook, Twitter has allowed uni-directional connections: if you want to follow someone without him or her following you, you can. Twitter was never about sharing between friends in the first place, but rather about sharing news. And if you look at Twitter today, it has clearly changed the way the world consumes news.

So, Facebook is chasing a rival that is playing, in Gartner-speak, in a different Magic Quadrant. And that does not make sense because even if it refocuses on streams, Facebook at its core is about friends, not news. Even if it had public pages for celebrities that everyone could follow, Facebook would still not be about news. It's just different.

Focus on What You Do Best

Chasing Twitter could be costly. Facebook likely won't overtake Twitter and what it has built up today. Twitter has won that race already. But if Facebook continues to spend too much time trying to re-position itself, its core business (i.e. connecting friends) is in danger of becoming vulnerable.

Clearly, MySpace, with its brand new management, is not wasting time. AOL is cooking up some interesting new stuff itself in the social networking space. And Google may just decide to make Chrome more social than other browsers.

So, it seems that Facebook's best path to preserving its strength is to not waste energy chasing Twitter. Instead, it should return to its roots and core strength: being the #1 social networking site that makes it easy to network with your friends.

Reporters are shocked by the findings. We're in shock that this is where the state of academic study is concerning social technology use vs. workplace filtering technology when it comes to productivity. A 9% increase in productivity? Try using these social technologies for on topic work and you'll see productivity increases that make 9% look like nothing.

"People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don't," said Dr Brent Coker, from the Melbourne Department of Management and Marketing. Got that? You can spend as much as 20% of your time at work dorking around on the internet and still end up 9% more productive than people who don't! Print this article and put it in your wallet for the next time you get in trouble for browsing on the job, eh?

In fact, this isn't an entirely worthless insight. We like to use StumbleUpon every once in a while just to run some cool water through the pathways of the brain associated with imagination.

Really, though, reading news feeds at work and using social networking sites (especially Twitter) can lead to so many multiples in productivity that any surprise over this 9% finding is hard to wrap our heads around.

On-demand access to geographically dispersed, topic-specific knowledge and feedback through both synchronous and asynchronous communication over multiple technology platforms is what social media use at work can be and that is a game changer. Could someone please study that?

What this study says to us is that the social web is so incredibly powerful that even people who don't know how to use it find themselves made 9% more productive because of it - on accident. Studying that seems like missing the point, though it is interesting.

Photo: Shock-ed by Flickr user CarbonNYC.

Youth watchers have long argued that for young people, email is how you communicate with elders in formal situations, while social networks and SMS are the preferred method of communication among peers. Nielsen found, however, that Facebook in particular saw greater growth among older people than it did among the young.

Our take away from these findings? People prefer the clean, controlled, multimedia and publicly social experience of social networking communication over the relatively open, individualistic and spammy medium of email. The fact that there is effectively no data portability allowing communication archives to be ported from one social network to another as there is with email doesn't appear to be bothering people in the short term. We wonder if it will in the long term.

For a more in-depth look at this phenomenon, check out Danah Boyd's latest analysis titled "Social Media is Here to Stay - Now What?."