Jeffrey Mann

A journalist for an industry publication in Chile asked me some questions recently about Web 2.0 business models, when there doesn’t seem to be  a lot of business actually going on. Here are some of the edited answers.
Do you think it was a bad business decision for Google to acquire YouTube, in terms of the [...]

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We have been experimenting with using Twitter at several of the recent Gartner events. I have the most experience with the PCC conference in London, but have also been watching what has happened at the recent CRM, Enterprise Architecture and BPM conferences.
I started to collect some of the best practices we have found to [...]

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As well as the Enterprise Architecture Summit, I had the opportunity this week to present at this year’s European Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit conference in London.  This is my “home” conference, since these are the topics I normally write on and talk with clients about as pat of the collaboration and social software team. [...]

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This is Hype Cycle season, which always leads to lots of comments on blogs and other social media sites. I wrote the Microblogging technology profile, and have been alternately bemused and amused about the reactions to its position this year. Talking about Twitter always generates reactions, especially on Twitter.
This year, Microblogging (which includes the Twitter [...]

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Before I was an analyst, I can remember lamenting why the people in our industry were so obsessed with chips and operating systems. It was around the time when DEC released the Alpha RISC chip, and rivalry between the different strains of UNIX and Windows was at its highest point. The horse race between BSD, [...]

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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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I wire this on my way home from 9 days in Hong Kong and Japan. It was a great trip, partly because I love traveling to Asia. It also is a chance to get exposure to some very different markets and trends than I usually deal with when talking with EMEA and North American customers. [...]

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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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