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December 10, 2003
Reports on the London event
Posted by Seb Paquet
"Lee Bryant":http://www.headshift.com/archives/000746.cfm and "David Wilcox":http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2003/12/blog_clusters_t.html have reported on last week's "Social Software event in London.":http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2003/11/21/selling_social_software_event_in_london.php
Writes Lee:
It went a bit like this:
- Will Davies provided some theoretical background and indicative examples of the ideas behind Social Software relate to individuals, organisations and
markets (Presentation link)
- I chipped in with a brief survey of what is going on right now and some ideas about how businesses might use these techniques in the future (Presentation link)
- Louise Ferguson looked back at historical problems with computer-mediated communication and collaboration to remind us that this is all easier said than done. (Presentation link)
Paul Birch, a founder of Ringo.com, which was recently acquired by Emode, shared some of his business building insights for online social networking ventures.
David Wilcox:
The consensus seemed to be that big and expensive IT-driven knowledge management systems weren't working well; the future lay (partly) with more bottom-up systems of blogs and email; and the place to start was with people's motivation (or not) to share; the dynamics of groups, and the culture of organisations. Unfortunately - for the commercially minded - you couldn't make any money out of the software (mostly free or low-cost), though probably lots of consultancy for organisational development folk, if they can get to grips with the DIY tech.
Comments (2)
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1. Lawrence Krubner on December 10, 2003 3:53 PM writes...
"Unfortunately - for the commercially minded - you couldn’t make any money out of the software (mostly free or low-cost),"
What's this supposed to mean? Is he saying that TypePad is doomed? How else to read "couldn't make any money out of the software"?
That would mean Social Text, Edit Me, and TypePad are never going to make any money, yes? What about LinkedIn or Friendster?
Am I misreading this remark? Could someone explain it to me?
Permalink to Comment2. Lee Bryant on December 12, 2003 1:02 PM writes...
OK. The presenters were not focussed on money-making (damn it, we're British! ;-) but some of the audience seemed to think that we were hiding some kind of formula for easy riches.
The best answer we could come up with was that the underlying software is getting cheaper --> free, but money could be made in services (e.g. YASNs) or consultancy (e.g. Headshift). As ASP plays, I guess both Typepad and Socialtext could be seen as services, whereas MT is software.
Of course, there will be software products that make money, and looking at Spoke et al (and our own R&D) there might be lots of them. What we were trying to say was that with the rise of open source and collaborative development, the basic software components are more accessible than before to those who can integrate them, but that the focus now is on *how* they are used and *how* they are integrated.
This was not a major feature of the evening. It was just a soundbite taken out of context.
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