I covered a book on Twitter last month and after seeing an excellent slideshare presentation on Twitter for Business (not related to this author) I was keen on reading Twitter means business: how microblogging can help or hurt your company written by Julio Ojeda-Zapata (website). First thing I noticed that the book not only covers the glory and success of Twitter, it also explains how it could hurt your business. I really like this down-to-earth view on the topic. The book itself is an explanation of Twitter and elaborates through  “Twitter lessons” how and why you should use Twitter for business. With this focus it clearly distinguishes itself from other books dedicated to the phenomenon. Much of the book is focused on specific cases like Dell, Comcast and Zappos and more general organizations using strategies like listening, speaking, engaging and evolving on Twitter. Two funny things about this book: for one the author itself was one of the best examples. Second the author respects Twitter language in his book by addressing both real names as well as Twitter usernames.

I don’t know how I could have missed the new book of Malcolm Gladwell last month… Outliers became an instant best-seller after its launch hitting Amazon’s Best of the Month in November 2008. Outliers: the story of success tries to answer the question why some become extremely succesfull, deserved or not, and others don’t. Gladwell argues that outliers rise on a “tide of advantages” like ethnic background, when and where you were born and other factors together with some luck to become truly successful. In his book, he talks about things as the 10.000 hour rule, Harlan Kentucky, and Rice paddies and math tests. As we are used from Gladwell, not (entirely) scientific but well researched and full of interesting and fun trivia make it a nice read.

After a book on Marketing on Facebook was launched in September 2008, Sean Percival is now publishing a book on Myspace Marketing: Creating a Social Network to Boom Your Business in Q1 2009. Not the first of it’s kind, but the contents of the book as well as the topic itself is absolutely relevant for organizations. With for instance 6mln+ members on Dutch social network Hyves, these social networks are a marketers heaven and the question how to effectively market those target audiences is more relevant (as well as more difficult) then ever. The book itself covers all the basics you would expect in a book on marketing: from an introduction to Myspace and an assessment whether your business is right for Myspace to a practical, step-by-step guide on how to market on Myspace. With inspiring mini case studies, the book shows you the tactics that work. However, the accompanying Ning Network could use some work though…

Books on Web 2.0, Social Media, the Live Web or whatever you may call it are released on a near daily basis. I’ve read many of them and really get the feeling I get the hang of it. It feels like I’ve read it all before… So I am done with the books who describe the übertrends and explain what is happining. I’m in search of books who explain me how to take benefit of everything 2.0. Books who show me the money! With unexpected cases, a niche subject and clear guidelines on how to approach the topic. I’ve found much of this in Advertising 2.0: social media marketing in a Web 2.0 world, written by Associate Prosser at Longwood University Tracy Tuten. Next to the more well known cases, you’ll will also find cases on Nine Inch Nails, Audi, 42 Entertainment, Vodaphone and Leo Burnett. In advertising 2.0 Tuten describes the advertising, branding, and marketing opportunities available so that advertisers and content publishers can take benefit of the Web 2.0 world.

A book with Twitter in it’s title. Gotta read that! I wonder if there has ever been a (online) phenomenon that got so much traction as Twitter got in the last two years with all its press coverage, third party applications and wide spread adoption (if so please help me :-)). Author Warren Whitlock must have thought the same when he decided to write Twitter Revolution: How social media and mobile marketing is changing the way we do business & market online. A book on how YOU can take benefit of the fastest growing social networking revolution in years. So if you ever need a book to get the hang of Twitter and it’s spin-offs, understand their value, get the most out of the services or convince your superiors why you should have a Twitter like service within your enterprise? Read Twitter Revolution.

I’ve been working on some smaller and larger scale online communities lately and one of the things I had trouble with explaining to my customers is online community management. I know it’s essential in developing successful online communities and the cases of organizations applying online community management are countless. But what do you do exactly? What types of people do you need, what are their tasks, how do you deal with Legal constraints, trolls, technical issues and the like? I’ve found much of the answers in Managing Online Forums: everything you need to know to create and run succesful community discussion boards written by (amazingly) 23 year old Patrick O’Keefe. O’Keefe describes all aspects of online community management from setting up the right organizational structure, promoting and attracting members, choosing and managing moderators to generating revenue. I believe Managing online forums is a must read for everyone who is slightly involved in setting up successful social sites.

Lots and lots is being written nowadays on all the positive things that are happening on the social web. Most of those books are descriptive: they describe the phenomena, throw in some cases and some best practices and that’s it. Few on the other hand, try to get to the (sometimes negative) bottom of a specific phenomenon. The future of reputation, written by Daniel J. Solve, is such a book. Solve is professor of Law at the George Washington University and has written extensively about reputation and privacy in the past. In the future of reputation, Solve thoroughly writes about the trail of information about our lives that is instantly available online and the implications of this on our personal lives. How it affects our being and how we are perceived in the information age. Well thought and well written. If you don’t want to buy the book you can always read the entire text online.

I’ve read “Join the Conversation” and “Marketing to the Social Web” before, which I think are both very insightful and entertaining books on marketing in the age of the social web. No wonder I got excited by Paul Gillin’s latest work Secrets of social media marketing. Known from it’s best seller “The new Influencers“, Gillin has now written a true  handbook on social media marketing. The appraisals name Paul Gillin as one of the few who truly understand marketing to the social web. As you would expect, the book is chock-full of information, new cases and best practices. As The Future of Reputation, much of Secrets of Social Media Marketing can be read online so you can find out yourself whether you should by this book as well.

Bill Tancer is the leader of global research at Hitwise, so he should know a bunch about our online behaviour don’t you think? Well it seems he does and he wrote it all down in Click: What Millions of People are doing online and why it matters. Click gives a sneak peek into the works at Hitwise, a research firm with sample populations in the ten’s of millions of people. Clicks gives insights in what we search for, some cool online analysis, and what our online behaviour tells us about ourselves. One cool finding I got from Bill Tancer’s website is the following: “The combination of charting search and social network traffic to music artists’ sites provides a visual depiction of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point.” Entertaining, but not much more to expect.

We live in difficult times. The financial crisis seems to kill every innovative concept, Techcrunch declares Web 2.0 dead and Sequoia says RIP to good times… Fortunately, there is Google who helps us to make sense of all the information that is floating around us and who is constantly evolving to offer us more services to organize our information needs. Now  New York Times columnist Randall Stross wrote down the entire Google story in Planet Google - One Company’s audacious plan to organize everything we know: from it’s initial launch, its struggles to come up with a viable business model and its recent attempts to take over the Office Suite market. Planet Google is a simple, pragmatic but well written insight in Googleplex. Unfortunately the book does not offer too much depth like the implications of a world of ‘perfect knowledge‘ in which Google introduced us. But I guess we will leave that to another book.

Much is written about generation Y, generation Einstein (in Dutch) and the impact of  growing up in a digital world but few wrote it down so well as John Palfrey and Urs Gasser did in Born Digital - Understanding the first generation of digital natives. Born Digital is the result of a digital natives research project and describes the issues surrounding digital natives and their extensive use of digital resources, the Internet and social networks. It deals with issues around privacy, safety, learning, intellectual property and media creation. This is not a technology oriented book. Rather it approaches the topic from a sociologic perspective which makes it, in my perspective, rather interesting. It seems that the book mainly focuses on parents, adults and policy makers who are trying to understand the implications of what is going on but it’s also an interesting read for the more technology savvy people.

I love Joel Comm’s tagline on his website: Make Money online. In the end that’s what it all comes down to right? Now Comm published a book that should help you achieving just that by giving you a sneak peek in the world of the world’s most successful internet marketing entrepreneurs. The book is packed with inspiring and fast-paced stories on real success stories and gives you some usefull insights and tactics on how to achieve the same results with your own initiatives. Click here to order is entertaining, a nice read!

The fact that I’m covering a book that is set to be published in October says it all… Can I consider myself part of the Seth Godin tribe? I think probably not, but this line seems to cover his entire book. According to Seth Godin Tribes are “groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. Tribes make our world work, and always have.” Think Apple, Nelson Mandela, God. Probably Godin’s next bestseller and not to be missed…

Blown to Bits (not to be confused with Blown to bits), written by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis, is a book in line with the Future of the Internet. The book seeks answers to questions the information age draws upon us and claims to give us the knowledge we need to help shape our own digital future. All written from an MIT / Harvard perspective. The book not only describes 10 truths about digital data it also describes the implications of choices our governments are making right now. The book got some outstanding appraisal from among others Lawrence Lessig and David Weinberger.

The Long Tail, written by Chris Anderson is probably one of the most popular books of our culture. Despite some recent critique on the Long Tail and an extensive wikipedia entry that does a great job in investigating it’s relevance and statistical meaning, the book still holds a lot of value. The book describes how the digitization has transformed the future of commerce and culture from a hit driven economy, the high-volume head of a traditional demand curve, into an endlessly long tail economy. His revised and updated edition adds a new chapter about Long Tail Marketing and a new epilogue, which makes it even more worthwhile to read. A must own for the true fans.

Every once in a while a book is released that describes the history of “our” industry: the rise, the fall and again the rise of the web economy. Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, written by Sarah lazy, is such a book. Lazy describes the burst of the first dot com bubble in 2000 and the resurrection of the industry by telling the stories of the entrepreneurs who invented the web companies that bring us Web 2.0 today. Expect stories from Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Digg, Six Apart, Slide, LinkedIn, Twitter, Ning, and more.

The book has the same vibe as the best sellers describing the Apple and Steve Jobs success stories so it’s definitely worth a read.

I’ve watched some parts of the (not so short) presentation about The Future of the Internet and how to stop it, written by Jonathan Zittrain, thanks to Dutch marketing expert Marco Derksen and it looks quite amazing. Zittrain’s point is that the success off the Internet as we know it is bound to come to end due to the exact same characteristics (open innovation) that made it a success in the first place. We are moving towards a lock down of the Internet through proprietary platforms like iPods, iPhones, X-Box’s, GPS and more. To quote from it’s website “[The Future of the Internet] shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.” This book is worth your time when you’re interested in a vision on future developments of the Internet.

Now we can all enjoy the benefits of having a brand new shiny iPhone the first thing we need to do is find ways to get the most out of this little machine, cause we need to justify our investment (ahum…). iPhone: the missing manual, written by David Pogue will get you quickly up to speed on how you get the most out of the hardware, software and interface of the iPhone. Together with Andy Ihnatko’s iPhone Fully loaded you are bound to become a true iPhone hero in no time. Nothing much more to say here…

It’s a great time for people who want to read social media and web strategy in general. Many books are released each month and to find the books that are worth your time gets harder and harder. Groundswell, a book written by Forrester Analist Charlene Li, seems to be such a book. As we know from Forrester, the book is full of hard analytic data to back up your social media strategy building thingy. The book provides many case studies (also ones we haven’t heard of yet), strategy roadmap development and a profile tool to map your (potential) customers with three general criteria on six overlapping levels of participation to find how to best interact with them.

Let’s face it: while we all can’t stop raving about the beauty of social media and Web 2.0, we are still not very good in monetizing this trend other than by selling ads or making a smashing IPO. Web 2.0: A strategy Guide, written by Amy Shuen (she’s publishing parts of her book on her weblog), tries to help us with this part by talking about Web 2.0 from a strategy perspective, the major Web 2.0 concepts and it’s effects (not technologies) and real life cases as Flickr, Google and Amazon. This book tries to bridge the gap between the yet relatively limited knowledge of business people on Web 2.0 so perhaps it’s not a book for early adopters as we might all be. But when you are in business, looking for a strategy book on Web 2.0 this might be the one you are looking for.

I’ve read an interesting review of Designing for the Social Web, written by Joshua Porter, on the blog of Web Worker Daily. They put it nicely: this book is about designing social sites from a higher level view of the process, which makes it more relevant than perhaps yet another book about building rails applications. We all know that the social web requires a different perspective on principles like designing for conversations for example and Porter outlines this nicely in this book. He talks about the usage lifecycle, users intrinsic motivations for participating on your site, getting users on your site, analytics and more. Definitely a must read for all social designers among us.

About three weeks ago I visited a Dutch conference on Enterprise 2.0. This conference focused solely on end users of Enterprise 2.0 related tools and concepts, and was free of charge for these end users. Free of charge, in my opinion, resulted in an entirely different crowd than say the visitors of The Next Web Conference where mainly early adopters spend a fee to network and see their Web 2.0 heroes in action. So we ended up with a crowd that had relatively fresh interest in Enterprise 2.0, but limited knowledge and could in no way be compared to a crowd of early adopters.

What struck me again during the conference is that there is an enormous crowd that is just discovering the possibilities of Enterprise 2.0 related concepts. At this point, many of these participants know not much more about Enterprise 2.0 than “the application of some tools like wikis as knowledge management initiatives” (despite the fact that there is an entire different world behind this). At the same time, there is still skepticism about the ROI and applicability of Enterprise 2.0. I sometimes think that it’s a crowd that we as early adopters seem to lose sight of too often. In this sense, spending too much time with the ‘in crowd’ who ‘get’ Enterprise 2.0 can result in serious over-enthusiasm and ‘lack of realism’.

As a relatively early adopter, despite the interesting line-up including Ross Mayfield and Andrew McAfee, I didn’t hear much news at the conference. At first I felt disappointed about this, but after I realized the aforementioned point about over-enthusiasm, it hit me that we might have to focus for a while on getting the followers up to speed before we move on to the next web 3.0, or whatever version number we want to associate with what comes next. Otherwise we all might lose an important shot at truly socializing the Enterprise…

Only once in a while a book is released in the Netherlands that has international potential. I think Me the Media, written by Jaap Bloem, Menno van Doorn and Sander Duivestein is such a book. Currently only available in Dutch but the book is being translated to English so put it on your watch list! Me the Media deals with the impact of web media on “hyper-individualization, ICTainment on top of ICTechnology, and of meaningful web conversations between organizations, customers and employees”.

The authors knows how to eat their own dogfood, since they launched a website, a weblog, a wiki and an exciting video channel on youtube about their book. Definitely worth a watch! Oh and if you are curious about the book itself? Feel free to read the outlines of the chapters online. for Dutch readers, entire chapters are available as PDF download.

It’s no surprise that Google seems to be seriously hammering Microsoft and it’s office suite by offering a less complex, less expensive and easier to use (my opinion :)) office platform. Even I use Google Docs and spreadsheets more and more with my colleagues although my employee provides me with a well-thought, ubiquitous Microsoft platform. Google Apps Hacks, written by Philipp Lenssen (famous guy behind Google Blogoscoped!), describes a whole bunch of clever hacks, workarounds, and other undocumented tips that help you get the most out of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Presentations, and other Google applications. After you read this book you will see how big the Google Universe really is.

Google Apps Hacks describes how you can benefit from the entire Google suite and makes you wonder how Microsoft will deal with these kinds of competition. At the same time we all know that Microsoft is working his ass off to stay relevant in the post-desktop, Internet era. Personally I’m extremely curious about how Microsoft will evolve the coming years since they have the appearances against them (Microsoft Bashing anyone?). So Microsoft 2.0, written by Mary Jo Foley (an American journalist, blogger for Zdnet and Microsoft analyst), is a great way to get a sneak peek into Microsoft’s future. For this book Foley interviewed many executives, partners, customers and competitors so she was able to write down a comprehensive picture of the company’s future. Foley offers insights into the people, products and strategies that will be key for the Microsoft in the next decade(s).

If we only had to identify one trend people on the Next Web 2008 were talking about the most it was probably about the oppertunities of the mobile (social networking) market. So if you want to take full advantage of this rising market, “Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market” written by Chetan Sharma is the book for you to read. What’s interesting is that this book not only describes the history of the mobile market and the enormous opportunity the mobile market offers, it also provides a blueprint for you to exploit this opportunity. Want to take a sneak peek into the first parts of the book? You can find the preface and first chapter of the book on the website MobileAdvertisingBook.com.

“If you believe the future is wireless, then this book is a guide to that future. Simple, fact-filled, and astute.” -Om Malik, GigaOM

As a business consultant, I’m always looking for ways to improve my skills on making use of the new tools and concepts the so-called Enterprise 2.0 wave has to offer us. And I guess I found in Wikipatterns, written by Stewart Mader, a handy guide to help people make the most out of Wiki software, or collaboration tools in general. What particularly appealed to me was the practical approach of the book. It offers many useful tips on implementing wikis, from a simple pilot to large scale adoption. It also describes many interesting case studies of wiki adoption in various enterprises. Written near the end of 2007, but still relevant today. Not for techies, but for the end users who are planning (or working on) wiki adoption within their organization.

Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB

I’m not a programmer, but one thing I realized during The Next Web Conference is that íf you are planning to built a global start-up, you should built it on cloud-computing technology. Or do you really really want to waste your venture capitalist’s money?* It looks like Amazon has just the right platform for you to do so (or perhaps you are planing on building on Google App Engine). Programming Amazon Web Services written by James Murty seems to be just about right to get you started with building your small to medium-sized platform on Amazon’s AWS. Nothing more, nothing less but invaluable if you want to realize a scalable platform that pleases our VC’s.

* anyone counted how much this phrase was used during the conference :-)

personal side note: I just recently started thinking on the topic of measurement, so my thoughts on this aren’t crystal clear. I”m looking for ways to make it more tangible so to speak. If you have contributions to the topic, please add them in the comments.

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Just of the presses The Age of Engage, written by Denise Shiffman deals with the premise that web 2.0 is reshaping marketing into a field where companies should truly engage their audiences in order to become successful. Shiffman radically alters the way we think of marketing by introducing her 6 V’s of marketing 2.0 as a replacement to the traditional 4 (or 5) P’s of marketing: Venture, Value, Voice, Verifiable, Vicinity and Vehicle. It seems that the book is launched at the right time, since the broader topic on engagement gets a lot of media attention lately with tools like Nuconomy and Microsoft’s efforts on engagement mapping. The book got great press coverage by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and Don Tapscott, famous for his Wikinomics book, who both dub it as a must-read for marketeers. With the book, there is also a new weblog, which writes about companies that get the engagement thingy.

One personal side note: Engagement is more and more presented as thé next thing in marketing and analytics. But is engagement all their is or is their more? I personally would say there is more when looking at theories of Communities of Practice for instance. Communities of Practice have similarities, but also go deeper, than online communities. I guess I’ll write a post about this topic in the near future…

Mat Mason, with a successful career as pirate radio and club DJ as well as tv show writer and producer, looks like a refreshing new appearance in the world of business slash entrepreneurial writing. His new book the Pirate’s Dilemma deals with the impact of open source on the distribution and control of information and is serious about piracy and copyright. The main point of the book is that piracy cán be productive in that it can create new valuable and viable mash-ups. The book got great press coverage by marketing guru Seth Godin. For some quick insight there is an interesting slideshare presentation on the website of the book. That’s a great example of eating your own dogfood!

Funny trivia: one of Amazon’s user generated reviews dubbed the book meaningful as the reviewer found out that his son was a pirate since he openly questioned college credentialism and stated that there was nothing he couldn’t learn on his own…

I’m a big fan of Dion Hinchcliffe’s writing on social media and web 2.0 so when he co-authors a book on Web 2.0 design patterns it must be good. In this book, author’s Duane Nickull, Dion Hinchcliffe, and James Governor describe core patterns of Web 2.0 together with an abstract model and reference architecture. It’s a great overview on web 2.0 and captures O’Reilly’s thoughts on the topic. But having read much of the posts of Hinchcliffe on this topic, I’m not sure whether this book offers any new insights altogether.

The more I appreciate the efforts of Ukrainian based NewsAlloy.com, who wants to offer “zero refresh features” and Gmail style navigation. Techcrunch covered NewsAlloy in January 2006 so they are around for quite some time, but it seems they just recently relaunched with version 2 of their reader.

The latest version has a pretty slick interface with a useful navigation bar on the right of your feeds. It offers default features like sharing, pinning, tags, key shortcuts, OPML import and mobile support. The interface feels a lot like Google reader and is indeed lighting fast. But due to some tiny usability issues (for instance, the title of a post is pretty small and the interface is pretty overwhelming at first) I have a bit of a hard time getting used to it. Fortunately, the interface is pretty much customizable so much of the features can be altered or concealed totally.

It seems that NewsAlloy focuses on the feed reading experts with a complete and future rich ajax interface. Small trivia: It appears that NewsAlloy was for sale in late 2007, but couldn’t make a deal so they focused on developing version 2 of their service. But perhaps you can make them an offer they can’t refuse…

According to Jump Point, published in January 2008 and written by Tom Hayes, our next economy will arrive at an inflection point just 1000 days from now. Welcome to pandemic economics! Jump Point illustrates how this happens and how you could benefit from it. In his book, Hayes identifies five major discontinuities associated with the widespread adoption of the Internet by the entire world’s workforce. Those discontinuities include a fierce battle for consumer attention, competitive ji-hads, the rise of a global “mash” culture and the pre-eminence of trust as a business currency. This book is a must read if you want to stay on top of the game in the coming years. It’s the tipping point for geeks, says Guy Kawasaki.

This title might sound a little geeky, but according to the authors of this book, optimizing your landing pages can make you millions. Landing Page Optimization, published in January 2008 and written by Tim Ash, describes how you can make a lot more money from your online marketing investments without spending too much more on driving traffic to your landing pages. This book includes case studies of page landing optimization, practical strategies that show you how to identify mission critical parts of your website, and a thorough analysis of Google Web Analyzer to get you started. You can find some additional and relevant resources on the website associated with this book.

Always wanted to know how to tap in the potentially unlimited value of online communities? Smart Start-ups, published in May 2007 and written by David Silver, promises to be thé guide for Entrepreneurs and Corporations to profit by starting online communities. Why to read? The book puts it’s finger on one of the biggest business developments for the coming years and shows YOU how to tap into this powerful trend using visionary business plans to build social networks that will make millions! Okay, okay got that last part from the inside flap of the book… Small trivia: on its website, a scoring system is hosted with which you can determine the probability for success of your new venture community initiative.

Verwacht voorspellingen op het gebied van de onstuitbare opkomst van Internet televisie, online piracy, een vergrijzende markt is niet erg, fysieke muziek, groene IT en privacy. Voorafgaand aan dit evenement wordt iedereen uitgenodigd deel te nemen in een discussie over deze voorspellingen op het blog platform www.dutchpredictions.nl. De input van deze discussie dient als belangrijke drijfveer voor het event van 13 februari.

Although I, and perhaps most visitors of this weblog, don’t agree with the arguments Andrew Keen jotted down in his Cult of the Amateur, I do consider this book as a must read because it’s always refreshing to read a deviant vision on the impact of Web 2.0. Keen argues that all web 2.0 services produce nothing but bull and he shows hard facts on how it negatively impacts today’s business and economy by raising serious privacy concerns and invading copyright. This book also shows that many web 2.0 success stories, like Wikipedia, can be interpreted from multiple angles.

Social Networks and online communities are hot. Hyves just recently reached 5 million users in the Netherlands only and Facebook’s value is marketed around $ 15 billion. Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger is a managerial version of a more academic work written by the same author and describes how communities of practice, which are groups of people who share a certain passion on a specific topic, operate and how they can be cultivated. A must read for people who want to know more about the inner workings and success factors of social communities of practices.

Many books have been written about Google, but few of them describe the relevance of what Google and its Rivals accomplish so thoroughly as The Search by John Battelle. It not only describes how Google rewrote the rules of business by becoming the sole reason of existence for thousands of online companies, it also describes the potential value of the billions and billions of records of user data. It gives an interesting insight in how this data describes who we are and who we become as a society, something Battelle dubs as “The Database of Intentions”.

Update: after some comments we realized that the visitors of The Next Web Blog expect us to be visionary on new book titles as well. And you know what? You’re absolutely right! But because “older” (yeah time flies, also for books these days) titles are still relevant today, we want to include some “classic” reading as well. So next months we’ll discuss one classic and two more recent books. For now, see the responses for some more recent readings or leave your own tips in the comments!

• Online communities portable communities worden groot volgend jaar: Google’s openSocial, portable social networks en Facebook’s platform. Dat dit de nodige aandacht verdient in 2008 bewijst het recente incident met Robert Scoble, Facebook en Plaxo wel weer.
• Klant komt meer en meer in control: Conversational marketing wint terrein ten opzichte van advertising. Voor organisaties de noodzaak om de meer en meer irrelevante corporate website te innoveren.
• Synchronisatie tussen online en offline presence en werken. The ubiquitous web komt nog dichterbij. Adobe AIR, Google Gears en Microsoft Silverlight of zelfs Mozilla’s plannen.
• Presence everywhere: Twitter, Jaiku en Mobile worden groot.
• Data everywhere: Dankzij Amazon’s services als S3 en anderen is er straks altijd en overal toegang tot onze content.
• Open API’s, Mashups, Remix en widgetized web (zoals diensten als Netvibes maar ook Yahoo pipes / Microsoft Poplfy.
• Web 2.0 in the woonkamer met diensten als Hulu, Youtube of Joost. Zelf lijkt het me erg gaaf als er een soort Web 2.0 meets Vista MCE achtige dienst meets Hyves ontstaat, waarmee web 2.0 werkelijk de woonkamer binnentreedt.
• Semantisch web.

Trouwe bezoekers van BlueAce zullen ongetwijfeld bekend zijn met veel van de, zo niet alle, genoemde diensten en ontwikkelingen, maar wellicht is 2008 het jaar dat ze (eindelijk) doorbreken tot de massa. Zijn er eigenlijk ook voorspellingen voor de Europese / Nederlandse markt bekend? En wat zijn jullie ideeën voor 2008?

Op dit moment biedt Wauw! internet radio (ook via de normale browser te beluisteren), foto’s en muziek. In 2008 hopen ze daar video, webcam en tv functionaliteit aan toe te voegen. Een ambitueze doelstelling! En dit vraagt om een kleine test…

Tijdens de registratie krijg je een sms naar je mobiel gestuurd waarmee je kunt testen of je mobiel geschikt is voor het gebruik van Wauw! Het afspelen van de sample file ging, door het ontbreken van codecs, op mijn Windows Mobile device niet helemaal goed. De web versie van Wauw! registreert echter netjes dat ik geen audio kan streamen, maar biedt me wel aan de rest van de app te installeren en de features te proberen.
De dienst lijkt op het eerste oog wat complex: je moet best wat handelingen op verschillende devices doen om je muziek en foto’s vanaf je pc voor je mobiel beschikbaar te maken. Maar eenmaal je playlists en foto’s geshared werkt het toch wel erg gaaf.

Na wat spelen kon ik al snel mijn foto’s van mijn pc op mijn mobiel bekijken. De techniek werkt dus erg gaaf. Mijn vakantiekiekjes worden echter wel erg mini weergegeven. Verder zal je voor streaming muziek nogal een aardige mobiele verbinding moeten hebben, dus dat roept gelijk de vraag op wat een dergelijke dienst kan bieden (naast een hoop fun). Handig om al je muziek, internetradio en foto’s altijd op je mobiel bij de hand te hebben.

Daarnaast biedt Zie.nl niet alleen 175 televisiezenders, maar ook de meest opvallende filmpjes van het web, waaronder Youtube en Google Video. Daarmee is het de eerste dienst die traditionele televisie en webtelevisie met elkaar combineert.

Een kijkwolk toont op een slimme manier de meest interessante en relevante televisieprograma’s. Vanuit de kijkwolk kun je direct filmpjes en televisieafleveringen raten. De kijkwolk kun je bovendien volledig aan je eigen voorkeuren aanpassen door een eigen profiel aan te maken. Erg gaaf is ook de reactiemogelijkheden op filmpjes en afleveringen. Daarmee wordt een stuk interactiviteit aan een passief medium als televisie toegevoegd. Ik zie al eindeloze discussies ontstaan na weer een spannende aflevering van GTST…

Nou vraag je je af: hoe weten wij dit? Dankzij BlueAce blogger Tijs, die meewerkt aan het project (wat volgens hem te beschrijven valt als “een startup binnen KPN”). Via hem hebben we ook iets exclusiefs weg te geven: een code om in de beta te komen. Log hier in met inlognaam “betatest482” en password “preview4s85“.

In de komende maanden staat ons nog veel te wachten, zoals uitbreiding van de sociale features van de site. Maar nu al lijkt zie.nl een regelrechte tvgids.nl killer. Ik ben benieuwd!

Deze sites moeten vaak beginnen zonder community, en in het geval van iFeed bijna zonder plugin’s. Tegelijkertijd bieden concurrenten als Netvibes inmiddels Nederlandse varianten aan, die bij het publiek ook in de smaak vallen. Een dergelijke hoos van social media diensten hebben we ook gezien in de tijd dat del.icio.us en Digg groot werden, met diensten als eKudos, tagmos en Fisz.

Begrijp me niet verkeerd: dergelijke sites hebben misschien een markt in Nederland en helpen de ontwikkelingen op het gebied van social media bij het bredere publiek geaccepteerd te krijgen. En daar ben ik voor! Maar verder heb ik het persoonlijker meer op diensten die ook iets unieks toevoegen ten opzichte van de concurrentie. Ik juich het initiatief van eKudos om een sociaal netwerk te integreren dan ook toe. En dat is ook de reden waarom ik Watvindenwijover.nl zo waardeer (en waarschijnlijk ook de reden waarom ik zelf nog steeds geen web 2.0 kloon heb gelanceerd :-)).

Volgens het persbericht biedt memoloop haar gebruikers een uniek en totaal nieuw community concept. Gebruikers kunnen memo’s in de vorm van tekst, tekeningen en foto’s plaatsen die gerelateerd zijn aan herinneringen uit het eigen verleden:

“We are permanently leaving our marks. Together with others we shortly populate and vitalize places, before everyone continues to go about his or her business, unless we accidentally get to know each other. memoloop offers the chance to revisit these moments, to use the power of the past. The memoloop users create a landscape peppered with individual memories by posting their very own past. That’s what memoloop is about: common experiences, a collective memory – a totally new way to connect within a community.”

Ik moet de founder bij deze een compliment maken: normaal gesproken is ons online leven vooral snel en informatie is vluchtig. Deze site biedt de mogelijkheid stil te staan bij gedenkwaardige momenten uit je leven. En dat in een flitsend web 2.0 jasje! Doet me enigszins denken aan Respectance, gepresenteerd tijdens de laatst Nextweb conference. Met dit verschil dat de herinneringen op memoloop vooral over de levenden lijken te gaan :).
Tijdens het registreren wordt je al gelijk aan het denken gezet… Er wordt een aantal vragen gesteld, zoals de meest belangrijke dag in je leven, je favoriete kostje en waar je zou zijn zonder het WWW. Ik zou in ieder geval zonder werk zitten :)

Interessant om te zien dat de community site volledig is gebouwd in Drupal open source. Ten miste, dat leid ik af uit de layout en het gebruik van de privatemsg module. Zo zie je maar dat techniek ondergeschikt is aan een goed concept en niet alle succesvolle concepten maatwerk hoeven te zijn.

Erg gaaf is de integratie met Google maps, zoals ook op de screenshot te zien is. Gebruikers die locaties met elkaar delen kunnen eenvoudig met elkaar in contact treden. In dat geval hebben ze in ieder geval één ding gemeenschappelijk. Aan het aantal vlaggetjes te zien kan de site overigens nog wel wat traffic gebruiken…

Het toevoegen van memo’s is heel eenvoudig: voer een titel, omschrijving en een datum toe en sla je memo op. Memo’s kunnen eventueel verrijkt worden met foto’s of video’s. Voor nu focust de dienst zich op micro-blogging en geo-tracking. In de nabije toekomst worden extra features, zoals ondersteuning voor mobiele telefoons, verwacht.

Memoloop.com is een interessante dienst, maar toch vraag ik me af of ze niet leidt onder haar eigen core concept… Immers, het posten van je herinneringen moet je doen nadenken over die herinneringen. Ik vraag me af of de internetgebruiker zich die tijd gunt… Wat denken jullie?

Tafiti maakt zoeken toegankelijk op een wijze die we naar mijn mening nog niet eerder hebben gezien en tegelijkertijd met een rijkheid van graphics die uniek is. De service laat duidelijk het potentieel van Microsoft’s silverlight platform zien en geeft ons een sneak peek in iets dat misschien wel de toekomst van search en het Rich Internet is.

Het commentaar is uiteraard weer niet van de lucht. In deze ben ik het dan ook totaal niet eens met de comment van Techcrunch dat de dienst niet gebruikt zal worden. Volgens Techcrunch is de dienst te traag (valt wel mee), niet functioneel (misschien even wennen) en te complex (idem) zou zijn. Volgens mij wordt daarmee volledig het punt gemist dat Microsoft wil maken met deze dienst, namelijk het tonen van de mogelijkheden van Silverlight en toekomstige internet apps.

Ik besef dat Google een standaard heeft gezet met haar simpele, witte interface. Maar dingen veranderen en misschien veranderd de perceptie van internet gebruikers en de bereidheid om Rich Internet Interfaces als Tafiti te adopteren wel net zo goed. Het past in ieder geval perfect in de lijn die Web 2.0 heeft ingezet.

In het kader van haar veertig jarige verjaardag gaat Sire geheel op de Web 2.0 tour met de actie “u mag het zeggen“. Met deze website kan het publiek zelf bepalen waar de volgende campagne van Sire over moet gaan. Gebruikers kunnen onderwerpen aandragen en stemmen op onderwerpen van anderen. En wat is er zoal hot? Dierenmishandeling, verloedering van de samenleving, richting aangeven en mantelzorg. Oftewel, de gebruikelijke onderwerpen.

De onderwerpen worden in een soort 3D omgeving gepresenteerd: populaire onderwerpen in het groot en op de voorgrond. Minder populaire onderwerpen kleiner en in de achtergrond. Daarnaast bieden ze een widget aan waarmee je een specifiek onderwerp op je eigen site of blog kan promoten.

Goed initiatief en ik ben benieuwd wat de resultaten van deze campagne zullen zijn!

Maar waar diensten extreem populair zijn, ontstaan er concurrenten die een graantje mee willen pikken. Zo kwam ik vandaag Megavideo.com tegen, een video sharing site die wel heel opzichtig de concurrentie met Youtube aan wil gaan.

Hoewel je kunt twijfelen over de aanpak en wijze van profilering, had de dienst met hun slogans toch mijn interesse te pakken. Het design bijvoorbeeld ziet er goed en stylish uit en op de homepage staat bijvoorbeeld een video met tien redenenen waarom Megavideo beter is dan Youtube:

Om de punten even op te sommen:

1. verdien geld met je video’s zonder een reward program.
2. start een eigen adBrite program en verdien geld met je eigen. advertising in je video.
3. snel zoeken in je video’s. Anywhere, anytime.
4. ondersteuning voor 20 verschillende talen.
5. customizable embedded players, zodat ze inhet thema van je website of blog passen.
6. Geen maximale speelduur voor je geuploade video’s.
7. mega snelle video conversie, binnen 30 minuten.
8. batch upload en pause en resume van video uploads.
9. download de originele video files.
10. “Megavideo Loves you more”.

Al met al lijkt Megavideo een aardige case te hebben. Ze bieden namelijk een aantal handige features aan ten opzichte van de naaste concurrent. Met name reden 10 is er eentje waar ze consumers mee voor zich kunnen winnen. De vraag is echter of ze kunnen competen in een markt waar een concurrent zo dominant is als Youtube is.

coComment heeft met versie 2 een veel socialer karakter gekregen. Waar je in de eerste versie voornamelijk (een deel) van je eigen discussies kon volgen, ligt de focus nu veel meer op de mogelijkheden om informatie te delen met vrienden en in groepen. Ook is het makkelijker gemaakt om complete conversaties te volgen. Conversaties is duidelijk het sleutelwoord in deze dienst.

Voordat je gebruik kunt maken van coComment moet je eerst een kleine firefox extensie installeren. Vervolgens wordt er een aantal extra opties toegevoegd aan textareas, die normaliter gebruikt worden voor het toevoegen van berichten of comments. Met deze opties kun je een instellen of je een discussie wilt volgen, delen met anderen en van tags wilt voorzien voor latere retrieval. Erg mooi gedaan.

Op je personal startpage kun je uiteraard je discussies tracken, maar ook groepen aanmaken, friends volgen, favorieten bijhouden en recommendations bekijken. Daarnaast is een belangrijk deel weggelegd voor coCommunity functionaliteit, waar je de tool kunt gebruiken om interessante conversaties elders te ontdekken en te volgen. Ik vraag me af in hoeverre dergelijke functionaliteit echt waarde toevoegt. Het is eigenlijk net iets als met social bookmarking. Dat je bookmarks van anderen kunt bekijken is handig, maar je bookmarkt (ik tenminste) toch voornamelijk voor je zelf en de mogelijkheid om informatie zelf op een later tijdstip te kunnen terugvinden. Dat gevoel krijg ik nu ook een beetje bij coComment.

coComment werkt helaas niet helemaal lekker met Twitter, dus voorlopig kun je de tool nog niet gebruiken om je Twitter activiteiten te tracken. Toevoegingen worden wel in coComment getracked, maar niet meer op de Twitter pagina geupdate. Daar heb je dus niet zoveel aan :-). Gelukkig kan je de coComment optie ook afsluiten, zodat Twitter weer gewoon zijn werk doet. Helaas lijkt het op andere punten ook nog wat beta. Een blogpost toegevoegd op mijn eigen blog verschijnt op een of andere reden niet op coComment. Ook het tracken van comments (mijn coComment startpagina toont alleen links en niet de inhoud van posts) lijkt nog wat buggy. Een ander nadeel is dat coComment zich gelijk in ieder textarea nestelt. Dat lijkt misschien ook weer wat teveel van het goede.

Tot slot heeft de nieuwe coComment versie een handige optie om de discussie in een sidebar in je browser te bekijken. Daarmee is de functionaliteit nog eens eenvoudiger toegankelijk en wordt het makkelijker gemaakt om groepen en friends te ontdekken en te volgen.

Al met al is versie 2 van coComment voor mij een nifty little feature, die er goed in kan slagen overzicht te houden in de discussies die je op verschillende sites voert. Aangezien je met de extensie geen moeite hoeft te doen om je conversaties te tracken (het wordt immers automatisch aan je profiel toegevoegd) denk ik dat ik er met veel plezier gebruik van ga maken.

“We are tiny compared to them, but our community is growing and incredibly invested in making books and telling the world about it. I can imagine our Blurb authors wanting to promote their books in Facebook. What if we could port a cooler version of our book preview onto your Facebook page, and people could buy it and recommend it? I think there is an interesting roundtrip moment there.”

Met Facebook heb je in één klap een immense user base binnen je bereik om je producten of diensten af te zetten en daarmee is het dus een platform waar je als organisatie eigenlijk niet wilt ontbreken. Er gaan al langer stemmen op dat Facebook langzamerhand de nieuwe Google wordt. Het lijkt erop dat er zich langzamerhand een geheel eigen economie rondom Facebook vormt. Door nu widgets van 3rd party developers toe te staan kan Facebook langzamerhand uitgroeien tot een single point of contact en daarmee tevens concurreren met platforms als Netvibes of iGoogle. Zeker op haar directe concurrente heeft Facebook nu een voorsprong en lijkt het een kwestie van tijd totdat ook diensten als Myspace moeten volgen. LinkedIn zit het in ieder geval wel zitten.