http://www.imswiftblog.com/tutorials/

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The new model creates a more trusted environment for reaching high-value, frequent purchasers, whether of airline tickets, electronics, clothes or other items. Where does that leave the less-frequent purchasers? Probably looking to their friends rather than to advertising for advice. I’m an expert on travel; my friends may look to me for hotel choices. When I’m in the mood to buy a book or a new computer, I’ll check out what my friends on Facebook are doing.

This does not mean that traditional online advertising will go away, just that it will become less effective. Value is being created in users’ own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks. The new value creators are companies — like Facebook and Dopplr — that know how to build and support online communities.

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More than one-quarter of respondents also said they viewed online video daily, which explains why many students listed YouTube as their favorite Web site.

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Tim Berners Lee: a cloud around connections between computers and web documents.

New set of complexities. New social sites being built all of the time.

We assume email is part of the web and part of your default experience. Younger people hate email. They only use email to talk to us. We think of email being us. But they think of their social network as being them.

All these things on the web we think of us as documents are actually people. People have links between them. Links between web sites that are people are expressing relationships. XFN and FOAF.

Social Graph API: finds web sites that can be treated as people (blogs and social network profiles) and returns the links between them. These are the publicly declared links on the web. The Social Graph API allows you to find out the friends they have and have already expressed.

The Social Graph API puts a cloud around finding me and finding my friends on the web. These connections can be discovered and used in other places. Open Social abstracts out these relationships and enables you to build this into your application. The cloud is people friends, actions and data.

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The future of enterprise social computing looks like it will involve a combination of internal systems and tools augmented and extended by cloud computing and services. The interaction and adoption models for this will look less like Outlook and more like Flickr or Delicious. Google has bet big on cloud computing, which may eventually form the basis of an appliance business as well for inside the firewall; but Microsoft holds the ring right now with their dominance of internal email (Exchange), the desktop (Windows and Office) and the rise of Sharepoint.

Yahoo currently have some amazing assets that could be deployed to transform Microsoft’s stale, C20th enterprise offering. First, there is Zimbra - a really good communication platform with over 11m mailboxes, according to the company. It provides an excellent Exchange alternative to act as a centre of gravity for a number of enterprise collaboration and interaction modes. Then there is Delicious, Upcoming and some of the other recently acquired services, plus others being developed in-house. Each of these has the potential to make enterprise web apps a lot more useful and interesting than they are right now. Finally, there is the Yahoo interface and design patterns libraries, and the company’s knowledge of how to make useful and compelling Web-native applications that users will enjoy. The problem is, Yahoo have had neither the will nor the culture to turn these assets into valuable enterprise offerings.

Rather than segment the new business into clearly delineated enterprise and consumer divisions, I think there is real scope for throwing the pieces up in the air and recombining them in a more imaginitive way. Enterprise needs the innovation and user experience of consumer-facing web apps, and the consumer side could benefit from the experience of enterprise apps in suporting the basic needs of less motivated and web-aware users.

Only time will tell whether such a coming together of different groups, cultures and tools is possible.

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1. Set the theme. “There is something in the air today.” With those words, Jobs opened Macworld. By doing so, he set the theme for his presentation (BusinessWeek.com, 1/15/08) and hinted at the key product announcement—the ultrathin MacBook Air laptop. Every presentation needs a theme, but you don’t have to deliver it at the start. Last year, Jobs delivered the theme about 20 minutes into his presentation: “Today Apple reinvents the phone.” Once you identify your theme, make sure you deliver it several times throughout your presentation.

2. Demonstrate enthusiasm. Jobs shows his passion for computer design. During his presentation he used words like “extraordinary,” “amazing,” and “cool.” When demonstrating a new location feature for the iPhone, Jobs said, “It works pretty doggone well.” Most speakers have room to add some flair to their presentations. Remember, your audience wants to be wowed, not put to sleep. Next time you’re crafting or delivering a presentation, think about injecting your own personality into it. If you think a particular feature of your product is “awesome,” say it. Most speakers get into presentation mode and feel as though they have to strip the talk of any fun. If you are not enthusiastic about your own products or services, how do you expect your audience to be?

3. Provide an outline. Jobs outlined the presentation by saying, “There are four things I want to talk about today. So let’s get started…” Jobs followed his outline by verbally opening and closing each of the four sections and making clear transitions in between. For example, after revealing several new iPhone features, he said, “The iPhone is not standing still. We keep making it better and better and better. That was the second thing I wanted to talk about today. No. 3 is about iTunes.” Make lists and provide your audience with guideposts along the way.

4. Make numbers meaningful. When Jobs announced that Apple had sold 4 million iPhones to date, he didn’t simply leave the number out of context. Instead, he put it in perspective by adding, “That’s 20,000 iPhones every day, on average.” Jobs went on to say, “What does that mean to the overall market?” Jobs detailed the breakdown of the U.S smartphone market and Apple’s share of it to demonstrate just how impressive the number actually is. Jobs also pointed out that Apple’s market share equals the share of its top three competitors combined. Numbers don’t mean much unless they are placed in context. Connect the dots for your listeners.

5. Try for an unforgettable moment. This is the moment in your presentation that everyone will be talking about. Every Steve Jobs presentation builds up to one big scene. In this year’s Macworld keynote, it was the announcement of MacBook Air. To demonstrate just how thin it is, Jobs said it would fit in an envelope. Jobs drew cheers by opening a manila interoffice envelope and holding the laptop for everyone to see. What is the one memorable moment of your presentation? Identify it ahead of time and build up to it.

6. Create visual slides. While most speakers fill their slides with data, text, and charts, Jobs does the opposite. There is very little text on a Steve Jobs slide. Most of the slides simply show one image. For example, his phrase “The first thing I want to talk to you about today…” was accompanied by a slide with the numeral 1. That’s it. Just the number. When Jobs discussed a specific product like the iPhone, the audience saw a slide with an image of the product. When text was introduced, it was often revealed as short sentences (three or four words) to the right of the image. Sometimes, there were no images at all on the slide but a sentence that Jobs had delivered such as “There is something in the air.” There is a trend in public speaking to paint a picture for audiences by creating more visual graphics. Inspiring presenters are short on bullet points and big on graphics.

7. Give ‘em a show. A Jobs presentation has ebbs and flows, themes and transitions. Since he’s giving his audience a show instead of simply delivering information, Jobs includes video clips, demonstrations, and guests he shares the stage with. In his latest keynote, the audience heard from Jim Gianopulos, CEO and chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, and Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel ((INTC). Enhance your presentations by incorporating multimedia, product demonstrations, or giving others the chance to say a few words.

8. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Despite your best preparation, something might go wrong as it did during the keynote. Jobs was about to show some photographs from a live Web site, and the screen went black while Jobs waited for the image to appear. It never did. Jobs smiled and said, “Well, I guess Flickr isn’t serving up the photos today.” He then recapped the new features he had just introduced. That’s it. It was no big deal. I have seen presenters get flustered over minor glitches. Don’t sweat minor mishaps. Have fun. Few will remember a glitch unless you call attention to it.

9. Sell the benefit. While most presenters promote product features, Jobs sells benefits. When introducing iTunes movie rentals, Jobs said, “We think there is a better way to deliver movie content to our customers.” Jobs explained the benefit by saying, “We’ve never offered a rental model in music because people want to own their music. You listen to your favorite song thousands of times in your life. But most of us watch movies once, maybe a few times. And renting is a great way to do it. It’s less expensive, doesn’t take up space on our hard drive…” Your listeners are always asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?” Answer the question. Don’t make them guess. Clearly state the benefit of every service, feature, or product.

10. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Steve Jobs cannot pull off an intricate presentation with video clips, demonstrations, and outside speakers without hours of rehearsal. I have spoken to people within Apple who tell me that Jobs rehearses the entire presentation aloud for many hours. Nothing is taken for granted. You can see he rehearsed the Macworld presentation because his words were often perfectly synchronized with the images and text on the slides. When Jobs was showing examples of the films that are available on the new iTunes movie rental service, one poster of a particular film appeared at the exact moment he began to talk about it. The entire presentation was coordinated. A Steve Jobs presentation looks effortless because it is well-rehearsed.

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Swift integrates with Facebook and enables users to identify what conferences they are attending and then have those conferences appear in their Facebook minifeed. This feature has been quickly picked up on by our first customers as a great new market development tool and it fits with Tim O’Reilly’s point about creating and harnessing viral marketing:

How do ad agencies, publishers, and advertisers take advantage of the conversational nature of the internet, where word of mouth may carry more power than even the best crafted ad campaign? How do you create and harness “viral advertising”?

Swift also encourages users to add content to conference pages with tagging. This gives the pages much more relevance without being intrusive:

Given the breakthrough that Google’s attempt to select advertising for relevance rather than simply for reach, with a model of pay per click rather than pay per impression, how are you rethinking the basic model of intrusive advertising? Will other media also need to adopt the relevance model rather than the intrusive model? How will they accomplish this technically?

And this kind of tagging boost the natural search results for the conferences pages (something most conference web sites do very poorly).

Technorati Tags: c2O-08

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I’ve been following the discussion of data portability in the blogosphere and this post is my attempt to make sense of what is happening.

This table is a summary of the various types of portability offered by the large social networks. It is a good starting place for thinking about what portability means and what is planned.

Right now the action seems to be focused on the Data Portability Workgroup which includes all of the key social networks (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn) and large web 2.0 service providers (Flickr, SixApart, and Twitter). The group seems to be working toward a use case where personal data and privacy settings can be shared across the applications.

Under this use case, you can add new contacts to your central profile that then populate across your social applications and networks. When you join a new network, you define your identity and then data associated with your identity (network and privacy settings) gets populated to the new site.

I can really see the value as a user of having this kind of centralized identity that can cross sites. But I can also see how resistant the big social networks will be to making it easy to transport this data across networks and applications. Google’s Open Social initiative is designed to make this possible but it is not yet clear that it will happen. Until data portability is easy and seamless, we will have to work within the confines of multiple networks and apps.

Technorati Tags: c2O-08, puppy

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1. It will be cheap. The introductory machine, a small, general-purpose Apple-branded computer, will go on sale for $199 and in short order the price will fall to $99. There will be no monthly charge for all the applications you use or the data you store - Google will serve all of that up, along with advertisements, naturally, for free. Premium business accounts, without ads, will go for $50 a month, the same price that Google Apps currently goes for.

2. It will be highly energy-efficient. The Cloud Computer, outfitted with a low-power chip, a flash drive and a superefficient LED screen and lacking any optical drive (plug in a usb drive if you need one), will consume a small fraction of the power that a traditional PC burns through. The first model may well be marketed as “the Prius of PCs” and flaunted by celebrities. (Watch for an ad featuring George Clooney.)

3. It will be low-maintenance. With few moving parts and software served up from distant data centers, the machine will be highly reliable and basically immune to viruses and other nasties. Eventually, it will fail, of course. At which point you’ll trade it in for a new one (recycling included), which as soon as you plug it in will precisely replicate the former one. You’ll be about as concerned with “PC maintenance” as you are with refrigerator maintenance. Upgrades and patches? Forget about ‘em.

4. It will be flexible. Because your data and applications are stored centrally, you will automatically have full access to them whenever you buy a new Google-Apple device (maybe they’ll license the system to other manufacturers, too) or walk up to a public terminal. Forget about syncing, forget about thumb drives, forget about backups. You’ll never think about that stuff again. All your data is with you all the time.

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