A new buzzword around here (Web2.0 spin): “third generation of social-networking systems” as attested by this TR article by Wade Roush. Instead than focusing on this ‘3rd’ thing, the interesting point of this article is that it highlights the new important feature of social software: the ability to manipulate user-generated content:

“We’ve listened to our user base very closely, and we’re also paying attention to what the competition is doing, and we’ve formulated a new strategy that is really about personal media,” says Jeff Roberto, a marketing manager at Friendster. For example, users can now create blogs, control the appearance of their profiles, upload up to 50 photos, watch slide shows of the photos most recently uploaded by their friends, post classified ads that link back to their profiles, and share audio and video files stored on their PCs using peer-to-peer technology provided by Grouper.

“The uptake we’ve seen has been incredible,” Friendster CEO Taek Kwon said in October, about a month after the new features were introduced. “We’ve seen substantial increases in media being uploaded, profiles being customized, and people posting classifieds.”

It also talks about a new player: iMeem who puts this idea into practice, using an interesting model:

iMeem hopes to attract members to by building all their activities not around a virtual representation of their social network, but around instant messaging technology.

That’s exactly how iMeem works. A downloadable application similar to Yahoo Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger, iMeem is built around a buddy-list window that shows a user which of her friends are online. From that window, she can send and receive instant messages, join group chats, keep a blog, and share photos, videos, podcasts, playlists, and the like with other users using a peer-to-peer system related to the technology behind the original Napster.

Aggregating all of these functions into one program sounds like a recipe for information overload. But Caldwell believes that iMeem users will act as each others’ media critics, perhaps bringing real effectiveness to the much-heralded idea of “collaborative filtering.” “There’s too much stuff out there,” Caldwell says. “Too much data, too much content, too many blogs. Collaborative filtering is one of the most important things that’s happened on the Web over the past couple of years. It’s holding back the tide of overstimulation.”

This ‘iMeem’ makes me think of a 1st generation social software called Huminity I tested long time ago mixed with this user-generated content trend. I like the ‘collaborative filtering’ feature but I am wondering how it would work.

After the amazing statistically improbable phrases, amazon is at it again, this time releasing the web’s craziest concept of the year: Mechanical Turk.

The principle is simple: Artificial Artificial Intelligence. Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. An example: A9 (amazon’s lousy search engine) is looking for people to identify the best photo of the business that are listed. A computer can’t do it. Humans can, and get paid 0.03$ per action.

The fun part is, all this process integrates with the Amazon API, and you can actually connect real people to a computer program. Twisted. Amazing. I wonder who is the crazy person behind such an idea.

Yet another opinion on how Microsoft, by embracing a market constraint (technology neutrality), is slowly going away from being the IT industry’s punching ball. Smart move, and old wisdom. Listen to your clients, they know what is good for you.

CIO Magazine: Who Roots for Goliath?

[…] Microsoft has been a convenient target, a symbol for all the vendors with whom CIOs have struggled, a convenient whipping boy for many of IT’s ills.

This may be changing. […] Senior Editor Scott Berinato notes that CIOs who once feared that .Net was part of an evil strategy designed to eternally lock them in to Microsoft products are now applauding it as a nice, robust development framework upon which they can hang their Web services. Far from being a way to lock them in, it turns out that .Net “fosters the technology neutrality they’re learning to expect.”

Open-Source étant toujours mis en opposition à Microsoft, on en a cette image un peu idyllique de petits jeunes pleins d’énergie qui se mettent ensemble et collaborent sans soucis pour créer des logiciels gratuits et altruistes. Et l’on oublie que, comme toute chose, l’open source pose pas mal de problèmes d’organisation.

Journal du Net: Trop d’ouverture nuit à l’efficacité

[…] un projet ouvert n’est pas un environnement idyllique. On peut fréquemment y observer des altercations entre membres d’une communauté. Les personnalités sont souvent fortes dans le monde du logiciel libre, d’autant plus lorsque les participants travaillent pour la gloire. Chacun cherche alors à se mettre en avant et à pousser ses propres innovations, ce qui peut conduire à la zizanie dans le groupe.

Intéressant.

J’allais écrire sur Flock, un hypeware absolu: les bloggers de tout bord ont fait monter la sauce, ceux qui avaient vu la béta disaient que ça allait être RE-VO-LU-TIO-NAI-RE, et au final on a un navigateur qui intègre les flux RSS (incroyable, Safari le fait depuis 2 ans), permet de poster les sites sur del.icio.us (ce qui se fait avec un bookmarklet depuis belle lurette), sur son blog (pareil), le tout dans une interface mal foutue (ils ont voulu réinventer la roue et mettre des boutons “nouveaux” pour des actions pourtant banales). Et l’ensemble est lent.

Enfin j’allais me plaindre à voix haute quand j’ai vu que Steve Rubel l’avait fait avant et mieux que moi… Alors je vous renvoie vers son article. Flock ne sert à rien.

I was about to write about Flock, the super hypeware: all bloggers were preparing us for the next big thing. Anybody who had seen the beta was anticipating on a RE-VO-LU-TIO-NA-RY browser. In the end we get:

En tous cas c’est ce qu’affirme Marc Andressen, fondateur de Netscape et pionnier du Web, dans un discours qu’il a donné à la conférence Zend/PHP.
Bon, peut-être qu’il s’est un peu laissé emporter par l’enthousiasme du moment, mais en tous cas ça change des visions pessimistes du pas très sérieux Spring Development Survey .
(via Justin Flavin)

At least that’s what Marc Andressen, founder of Netscape and Internet pioneer, says in a talk he gave at the Zend/PHP conference.
Maybe he got a bit over excited by the setting (what else can you say at a PHP conference), but at least we get a more optimistic view than what we got from the recent Spring Development Survey .
(via Justin Flavin)

Excusez le jeu de mot plus que moyen… Mais je ne pensais pas lire une news de ce genre de mon vivant:

The Register

The Free Software Foundation has said new licenses for Microsoft’s pseudo open source program, the Shared Source Initiative, appears to satisfy the four requirements defining Free Software. Professors Larry Lessig and Ronald Mann, meanwhile, welcomed Microsoft’s changes saying they reduce the number of open source licenses in use by the community.

Apparemment il y a quelques bémols et autres nuances, mais c’est définitivement un pas dans la bonne direction.

The Register

The Free Software Foundation has said new licenses for Microsoft’s pseudo open source program, the Shared Source Initiative, appears to satisfy the four requirements defining Free Software. Professors Larry Lessig and Ronald Mann, meanwhile, welcomed Microsoft’s changes saying they reduce the number of open source licenses in use by the community.

Wow. I did not ever think I would still be alive the day that news would come out. Obviously there seems to be quite a number of fine prints, but it is a step in the right direction.