What's Rockin' in Singapore

Microsoft has recently announced two new free services that can greatly enhance your web site:

Windows Live ID and  Gatineau.

Windows Live ID provides the ability to leverage the Live platform to provide authentication services to your web site to enable personalization and profiling.  More details can be found from the Windows Live ID team's release announcement or the Live Development site.  Gatineau is Microsoft's new analytics tool that combines the demographic data enabled through Live ID with web traffic analysis.

If you want to see an excellent comprehensive overview the web analytics industry, check out this 50 minute presentation by Avinash Kaushik.

The Web 2.0 disruption is driven by social and business drivers and the increased level of broadband connectivity.  Web 2.0 is about enabling consumers through community collaboration and social aggregation.  New solutions to old problems are being discovered and embraced by a new generation of internet savvy consumers who believe in a global marketplace rather than a geographically constrained one.  OnLine communities are emerging like Prosper that may displace portions of the FSI.  Prosper is an online community that allows individuals loan money to other individuals.  The power of the individual is also being amplified through membership in online communities and Enterprises need to understand how to engage at a community level as well as a personal one.  Another example is a Hong Kong Web 2.0 startup called Bullpoo (so named because they believe that Bull markets are always followed by Poo markets). Bullpoo allows users from around the world to collaborate and share investing knowledge through blogs, discussion, and virtual trading. Bullpoo calls this "social finance" and considers itself as a type of social networking platform for the finance industry.

Yesterday I ran a workshop for a local SI on Emerging technology and MS vision in the Web 2.0 world.  Slides for the presentation can be found here. Part 1Part 2

Since I joined MS last year, I have been amazed at the range of new services and technologies that are being released.  The latest that I have discovered in a new platform for non programers to develop Web 2.0 Mashups.  Previously known as "Springfield", it is now being branded under the name Popfly ( Who came up with that one?). Utilizing silverlight as a plaftorm this solution allows users to dynamically connect services in the cloud to build applications.  Check out the video that decribes some of the features.  Here are some pictures of the development environment.

Sign up for the Alpha now...but be patient I believe there is a bit of a line.

The Web 2.0 world is one that embraces the collective knowledge of the community as a resource to making individual buying decisions. Marketing can be defined as the science/art of influencing these decisions.  Traditional approaches have embraced mass marketing as the primarily way to economically address the consumer with this messaging.  These traditional campaigns sometimes claim to be “Segmented” by the fact that they differentiate their message based on demographical information but ultimately they share the common thread of mass distribution of one way communication to a large audience base.  This is becoming less effective as the Enterprises ability to influence a single consumer is becoming overshadowed by the effect of communities on their members buying decisions.

Enterprises need to start thinking about how they engage communities of interests with their products and services.    This level of engagement needs to be more than simple messaging; Enterprises need to be seen as part of the community and share in its overall well being.  Enterprises that merely “prey’ on these communities with differentiated messaging become a disruptive “noise” to the general collective.  This “noise” may have the reverse affect and too often results in the general collapse of the initial community that it is targeting.

Communities cannot be “created”.  They can be grown, facilitated, enhanced, and disrupted but communities by they’re nature are organic to a central idea or concept.  Enterprises interacting with these communities need to respect the boundaries imposed by the social system at work and seek to enhance the general experience rather than capitalize on revenue opportunities presented.  Enterprises that find ways to embrace these concepts will ultimately find revenue opportunities in these interactions that will be seen as adding value rather than detracting from the general experience.  The challenge for enterprises to do so is to find means to economically support these types of interactions by leveraging technology in innovative ways.

In future posts I will try and explore how Enterprises may use emerging Web 2.0 technology to achieve this goal.