(photo by shahriarhkhan)

Social networking has grown and spread through all ages and fields since its birth in the market about 24 months ago.  Everyone, if not the majority, has adopted the social networking fashion. 

An interesting article talks about the social networking strategies that middle market companies are implementing these days.  Corporate leaders are beginning to see the value in social networking and how it can make business better by increasing business and employee efficiency, decreasing training and development costs. "Employees are actually interested in using social networking; thereby increasing the likelihood of adoption and decreasing the time, budget, and resources required for training and education."

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(photo by davemc500hats: Social Graph Platform Wars)

Charting Stocks Reports: "Clients of Ning are outraged over a  decision that Ning made public last week. The software maker sent out an email to all of its clients, those who have created a social network on Ning, stating that they would email all members of all websites who use the Ning software to promote the newly designed Ning.com."

 The email from Ning says:

"The new Ning.com will be accessible via www.ning.com  as well as at the top of your social network on Ning. If you have purchased the premium service to remove Ning promotional links, the links to the new Ning.com will not be visible to your members directly from your social network. Your members will still be able to access these new features via www.ning.com  To purchase the premium service to make these links invisible to your members, simply go to your social network's Manage page and choose Premium Services.

Because of these changes to the Ning member services, we will be sending an administrative email to everyone  registered with a Ning ID over the next two weeks. We wanted to let you know about this communication in advance."

  The article goes on to point out this is not the first time Ning has changed the rules on thier customers.  These Web 2.0 companies can hold your data and user base hostage.  With Open Source you are free to use the code, change the code and you own your data. 

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(photo by Irini Soulki of flickr)

Jeff Jarvis says that as Google makes search more personalized, search engine optimization will be less relevant.

"What does that mean to brands? The world gets confusing once more. But I think it means that true relevance becomes more important than SEO tricks"

James Robertson  says it has been irrelevant for awhile.

"Trying to "optimize" for Google (et. al.) is a game whose relevance is vanishing."

I agree, it has always been irrelevant if you were  actually providing useful content for your visitors.

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(photo by dcjohn of flickr)

Jakob Nielson writes about the issues facing designers who want to design Web user interfaces that are easy to use. He promotes user testing and defines 3 levels of a designer-user continuum. The first is where the user is the designer; the second, where the designer understands the product or domain; and the third, where the designer is unfamiliar with the domain. He then gives some examples of projects and problems that could occur.

There is one example that I did not quite understand. He mentions a Web site selling suits and says the designers were too close to the people who make the suits, instead of the people who wear suits. It seems to me, you could probably find a designer who could, at least, pretend he wanted to buy a suit while designing the user interface. Of course, you have to remember to do this.

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(photo by by Davb)

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(photo by acidcookie)

What to do when faced with a 40+ page RFP that has been clearly written with proprietary vendors in mind?  Have other open source vendors faced this? Usually, we are just too busy to play a very time consuming lottery ticket.  Is there education we can do for procurement people that will make it easier for them to find an open source solution that might be a significantly better deal?

I have found one excellent blog post on the web: http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/2006/07/when-open-source-meets-procurement.html

I recently had to decline to bid on a project that was trying to confederate a large number of state schools that could quite likely save a significant amount of money by using open source.  Here is an excerpt from the letter I wrote declining to bid:

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