eXo Platform : Integrate Twitter and eXo Activity Stream

eXo Platform 3.5 provides many extension points and API for developers, allowing them to create very cool stuff.

I have developed a small extension that allows any user to associate his Twitter account to his eXo Platform account. This extension simply post on your Twitter account when you write a message with a special hashtag (#tw).

This is a very quick development that I have done while waiting for my kids, so I still have things to integrate to provide complete feature, but this is a good example to show how you can extend the platform.

You can view it in action in this video:

You can download the source code and the binaries from this GitHub project. I hope to find some time to complete the feature, and document this use case.

Enjoy!

Seesmic in action on TechCrunch's "great" Twitter post....

Like many of you I am following TechCrunch, and one of the latest post was quite "amazing":

• see the Twitter! post from Michael Arrigton.

More than the post itself, the comments that this single word generated is quite funny: so far we have 291 comments... As you can guess I have not read (all of) them... But something is interesting, you can see that many people have used Seesmic to drop a video comment.

I have to say that I am quite impressed by the large number of comments that have been made using Seesmic. Bravo to Loic Lemeur's vision for this tools... This is simply the new and easy way to really do the "read/write" Web, I should say "record/watch" Web.

One thing is still bothering me, how to I find interesting content that is saved using Seesmic? Yes, I can use social features to subscribe to people that are sharing similar center of interest. But I cannot find any folksonomy on Seesmic, am I missing it, or it is just not available yet? Or let's dream and imagine than Web search/index engine will be able to index these video content to help me to find interesting content -may be this exists but I have not found it yet-. Loic, is it your next big feature to transform Seesmic in the next killer app?

So far I do not have the feeling that I missed anything -watch the comments and you will understand-, but it looks like people love to use the video to discuss/share with others, and I can understand why... We have moved from technical tools: Complex Web Authoring Platform, to easy Blog publishing, to pure video recording tool, so very easy indeed. I can imagine my mother posting a comment to a blog or video now... thanks to Seesmic!

What is Twitter? It is a simple tool to turn off lights

Lately, I have been presenting Web 2.0 tools to my coworkers, and explaining how it could be used to improve the way we do "things" (especially business). Here a list of some of the tools I am talking about blogs, wikis, second life, social networking/bookmarking/tagging/rating,, facebook, friendfeed, youtube, seesmic, feeddo, flock and many others depending of the questions and the mood of the moment...

One of the tool that I love to present is Twitter... and now I have an good example of why we all need to be on Twitter ;)

Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.

Thanks to Justin from Twitter...

Portal Project: Time to Think about your Social Networking Enterprise Strategy

Most of the enterprises these days have already put in place a portal -- with more or less success. These projects have started most of the time, with the goal of providing personalized information to users and communities. When working in a Portal project you probably define many objectives, that are represented from a technical point of view by the following features:

• community and group of users
• easy content management, allowing people to communicate and share
• data integration of many types of data related to the information needed by each user/community.

I do not see anything special there except that is exactly the same goals that what most of the Web2.0/Social Networking applications do have:

• User management and creation of the community is something that you do on a daily basis with FaceBook and LinkedIn (and any equivalent sites). The key here is the fact that it is the user that define its own community, not an administrator that does not know “my” business that put me in a specific bucket.
• Content Management: Blogs are very good example of communication of a single person (or team) to the rest of the enterprise, (or the rest of the world). Wikis are tools helping you to share content with other people in a very efficient way. If you are working with OpenSource you see that most of them are using a wiki to communicate with user. This is true for the documentation, but also any type of content that is related to a project.
• Data Integration: Web 2.0 is all about RSS feeds and Mashups that are, at least today one of the most efficient way, from a user perspective, to integrate content.

This is why I do believe that if today you are thinking about an enterprise portal for your organization, it is probably time to step down a little and think more about:

• the “enterprise social networking strategy”, that is often also related to the “Web 2.0 enterprise strategy”.

So some ideas to approach this:

• create a community with some internet tools, for example start by creating a network in Facebook for your enterprise. Some if you will probably think that it is not productive for the enterprise... Hmm I have to say that it is not directly, but at least it helps people to be familiar with a new way of using the computer and the Internet. Companies I am working in or with do have their network already (Sogeti, CapGemini, IBM, Oracle, ...). An example of this is the way Serena is using FaceBook as part of their intranet and as a tools to do better business. (and some people reactions to this: FaceBook Friday:Bad Idea)
• if your challenges are around content management start by installing a Wiki in house or using an internet one. I am sure you will be surprised to see the adoption and use in your team. I have many experiences where a regular "Portal/CMS" failed regarding the "community sharing" where Wikis have been a great success.
• if your challenges are around data integration, I will encourage you to learn more about Rest/RSS and other technologies that are used in mashups. It is true that this one is probably will need more effort from IT to provide the good content feed, but instead of giving the data already packaged in an HTML view (portlet?) do send only the XML using a proper format (RSS/ATOM) and give correct tools to the user, to see how then will be consuming it.

I see this approach more business oriented, this is empowering the business user giving them an infrastructure to select their own tools. Portal the Darwin way kind of approach. So if you have an existing portal, or more important if you are thinking about starting a Portal project, add the “Web 2.0/Social Networking strategy” question to your plan. And to be honest, asking yourself this question about Web20/Social Network does not cost that much but could probably help yourself to satisfy your end users and customers... Note: It is voluntarily that I am mixing up the Web 2.0 (technologies) and the social networking (behavior), since these two are intimately linked. Web 2.0 being the set of tools and technologies facilitating the social networking.