Virtual Collaboration in the Workplace

Microsoft turns Windows Live into a social network

From Computerworld:

Microsoft this week unveiled a slew of new online services that essentially transforms its Windows Live site into a social network.

The changes, which include updated photo sharing, e-mail and instant messaging capabilities, have received mostly positive reviews from Web 2.0 industry observers.

Microsoft also announced that it is integrating activities from some 50 companies and Web 2.0 services -- including Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr photo-sharing service, LinkedIn Corp., Photobucket Inc., Twitter and WordPress.org -- into the site through new Windows Live profiles and a news feed.

I have no sense of what impact this will have on the social networking community, do you?

IdeaJam

Michael Sampson profiled IdeaJam from Elguji. [Note that Ed Brill, the Lotus exec who endorses it on the homepage was a gues speaker in this class two quarters ago.]

IdeaJam seems to be a recommender system for ideas within an organization.  You put it up kind of in an enterprise social idea network sense and people contribute ideas.  Then others vote the ideas thumbs up or down.  Kind of like a Digg for internal ideas.

Think this will catch on?

Somewhat related, Brett Young posts on the benefits of having internal employee blogs.

Change you can click on

Maybe slightly off topic, but Politico reports that Obama's transition team is using the web as effectively as his campaign used it.   I went out and checked at change.gov (a nifty short URL) and found that it takes only a couple of keystrokes to apply for a job in his administration.

15 Free Tools for Web-based Collaboration

Six Revisions just posted on 15 Free Tools for Web-based Collaboration  About half these products are old hat to me, and about half are new.  I note six new ones below...

Right now the free form tools such as Stixy are intruiging me (Stixy is new to me) as I am looking to integrate web collaboration into thinklet processes.  Perhaps Stixy gives me enough flexibility to do so.

Project2Manage and ProjectPier look at first glance just like the other 20 web project products I know about.  P2M seems to be standard SAAS and PP seems to be opensource roll your own, perhaps useful as a project centric content management environment.

Dabbleboard is new to me, but I remain unconvinced free form whiteboarding tools (other than ConceptShare) are much more than toys.  Such a tool requires a very tight thinklet to provide any value.  Twiddla integrates text chat, but seems to be in the same camp.

Spicebird seems to be a project centric team portal environment.  Again, there are already a dozen of these -what makes Spicebird better?

When you go to this post, check out the comments area.  Readers have suggested dozens of additional tools - most of them are new to me.  Do you find any of them to be gems?
 

How to get the most out of linkedin

Came across this while perusing election blogs this morning...  Should businesses care about LinkedIn?

Recently, I found two other social networking posts (for business) as well.  Web Strategy wrote about the impact of social media on corporate customer reference programs, and applying a social computing strategy to the entire product life cycle.