Jeffrey Mann

I am doing a couple presentations on collaboration and social software at the Enterprise Architecture Summit in London this week, just before the Portal, Content and Collaboration Summit. I just got out of a roundtable on corporate blogging, which raised several interesting issues and a few solutions.
The most striking observation, although not unexpected, was that [...]

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Tonight I finally took time to watch the entire demo of Google Wave from the recent IO conference. I had already read a lot about it, but had not yet found an hour and a half to watch the entire presentation. This is a pretty busy period, so finding that much time to do anything [...]

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I talk with a fair number of vendors every month about their collaboration and social software offerings. Usually, these briefings have a familiar pattern (the easiest to use, the most experienced management team, growing ecosystem of partners, logo slide with lots of customers…), but I’ve noticed something new starting to creep in. Rather than talking [...]

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Every couple weeks, some industry observer or blogger declares that something that most people know well is dead, and generates a lot of page hits. Whether it’s the iPhone, Microsoft, the mainframe, or Paul, this is a popular meme.
More power to them, but I find it getting kind of old. Technological stuff rarely completely disappears, [...]

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It’s odd to see a powerhouse like Facebook scrambling to become more like Twitter, a relative upstart with no visible means of revenue. The reported rejected acquisition bid could play a role in a “If you can’t buy them, copy them” way. But clearly, this is what is happening.
First Facebook changed its user interface to [...]

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Last week saw fevered speculation about an impending acquisition of Twitter by Google, and just as much fervent debunking of those rumours. I don’t pretend to have any inside information, so I won’t comment on whether this will happen or not. We don’t like commenting on rumours anyway. But I do have some ideas about [...]

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Twitter famously has no visible means of financial support, aside from the money it has raised from venture capital firms. A viable business model for Twitter has become the elusive MacGuffin sought by many observers of social media, like the statuette in the Maltese Falcon. Fairly vague comments from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone have ignited [...]

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NOTE: This is a work of fiction. When I first heard about Facebook trying to change their Terms of Service to give them perpetual rights to users’ content, even if they delete their data, I was not too fussed. I figured it was to avoid any possible legal complications rather than a sinister secret [...]

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This New York Times article reflects an issue that has been lurking at the back of my mind ever since I started using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Yammer, Linkedin and my infrequent private blog. While I’m not a really high volume poster, I like to share a fair amount of stuff on [...]

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I just got back from the gathering of the IBM Lotus faithful in Orlando, Lotusphere. I find these conferences useful, energizing and bewildering in just about equal measures. Of course, I can find out what IBM has been up to, and what they intend to do in the coming year with the Lotus product [...]

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