This week in links - week 25, 2008

Midsummer is coming up (this Friday) which means that I will stay away from the Internet and this blog for a few days to celebrate Swedish midsummer in Kivik, so here are already my links for this week:

"Telco 2.0: The Future Of Telecoms" by Gerd Leonhard from Robin Good's MasterNewMedia, an inspiring read:

Telecoms: Will they be the owners of all future content distribution channels?

In a networked ecosystem that wants to serve and empower those pesky ‘always-on’ digital natives, telcos and operators have no choice but to branch out into adjacent or even completely alien sectors - if they don’t, other players such as device & handset manufacturers, web portals, social networks and search engines will feel compelled to fill the gaps and push the pipe & network guys further and further down to the bottom of a digital ecosystem that has only just now begun to flourish...//...Imagine a Facebook Mobile Network, a Samsung Mobile Video Platform, and (of course) a Google eBook Reader?

For telcos, it’s about time to get into a new game, and it’s called Media2.0...//... Deutsche Telekom, Orange or Telefonica should have bought Last.fm, not CBS!

"Enterprise 2.0: Three Thoughts on the State of Social Software in Business" by C.G. Lynch at CIO.com:

IBM enjoyed good media reviews for the look and feel of Lotus Connections, while Microsoft had many of its customers display the use of SharePoint's social software features in the enterprise. In addition, Microsoft announced a series of partnerships that allows Enterprise 2.0 vendors (including smaller start-ups) to hook their "best of breed"products, such as a wiki or blog, into SharePoint more easily.

Forrester Research has predicted that these two vendors, armed with deep pockets, will dominate the Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration market. In addition, because both Microsoft and IBM have built their products to integrate with existing systems they built (such as Exchange and Lotus Notes), customers with those products might find their social software more attractive than offerings from start-up vendors.

"Is SharePoint the end of (portal) history?" by Shawn Shell, Contributing Analyst at CMSWatch:

SharePoint has clearly caused a disruption in portal conversations in many organizations. The real question is whether SharePoint deserves this kind of attention. I think it does. Just exercise suitable caution: all portals, regardless of vendor, raise tricky issues of data integration, identity management, and application usability. (Some conversations, it seems, never go away.) In the end, you must truly understand SharePoint and your needs before dismissing other solutions in the portal space.

"Harbors in the Ocean of E-mail" by Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School:

The problem with using e-mail for all communications is that it gets used for, well, all communications, even those that aren’t time-critical, personal, private, or salient. It also gets used to coordinate the multi-person creation of documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, a task at which it’s abysmal. I often ask audiences how many people execute multi-person collaborations by attaching the (hopefully) most recent version of a file to a group e-mail again and again. Most hands go up. I then ask how many people are happy with this mode of collaboration; very few hands remain in the air.