February 15, 2011
The social networking movement of the last half-decade has widely been seen as a consumer focused movement. However, with the consumerization of IT, we are starting to see consumer oriented tools, including social networking being used in a corporate setting. This brings up a fascinating question, what does the future of social look like inside the enterprise? Will employees be able to find five Turkish-speaking engineers in their company in the same way they can easily locate 100 fans of their favorite band in their hometown today? Will these internal networks break down the organizational barriers inherent in many large organizations? Will they allow easier and more natural collaboration between historically distinct departments like marketing and IT? We already know that many employees are unhappy with the current state of corporate collaboration tools. Today, 26% of all workers think email is overused in their organizations, 21% felt overwhelmed by it and 15% felt that it actually diminished their productivity. Additionally, only 44% of respondents agreed that it was easy to find what they were looking for on their organization’s intranet. This compares to 87% for users conducting personal searches on popular consumer oriented search engines like Google and Bing. (Forrester Research)
While there is much work to be done, many corporations already have the foundation for a robust social platform. With simple algorithms and the data derived email, calendars, IM usage, corporations can construct a detailed social graph. The challenging part is deciding what information and tools to make available to employees. How can the data derived from the social graph be useful, without being intrusive or cumbersome?
While there are still many challenges to overcome before social networking within the enterprise becomes widespread, we believe the concept will transform the way employees work, communicate and collaborate. Adoption rates will vary by industry and organization; some organizations are already using proprietary in-house tools or public services such as Salesforce.com’s Chatter or Jive, while others won’t adopt anything for years to come. Whatever way you look at it, this movement is still in its infancy, the platforms need refining and the usage cases are still evolving, but the groundwork and experimentation that is happening today will support the groundbreaking enterprise centric, social networks of the future.
Posted in Platform, Social |
January 26, 2011
It started with Google Buzz, and continued with Apple’s Ping service; just because you have 500 million users, each with a unique ID, doesn’t mean you have a social network. Mark Zuckerberg understands this all too well. He grew Facebook by expanding slowly, starting with Harvard and expanding only when he was sure there was enough user demand. This grass-roots growth strategy is almost the exact opposite of Google’s and Apple’s approach. Both companies hoped to take their large user base and simply add social tools on top of existing services. While this sounds great in theory, successful social networks have always been an opt-in experience.
So what does this mean for large corporations that want to make their products or services more social? They need to think carefully about how they promote their social services and what control they give to users. Google never gave Gmail users a choice, they just turned Buzz on and made users go into account settings to disable it. Social networking is a deeply personal computing experience, and users are quick to abandon a platform, when they feel like their privacy is being invaded.
We won’t go as far to say that it is impossible for large corporations to create a social platform. Many web services have successfully integrated Facebook Connect to bring social features to their product. We hope in the future that there are other social platforms out there that businesses can plug into but at this point, Facebook’s social graph is far more sophisticated than anything else out there and we strongly suggest that other web services take advantage of it, rather than trying to build something from scratch. Your users will thank you.
Posted in Platform, Social |
January 19, 2011
There has been a lot of talk about HTML5 this year; some say that 2011 will be the year of HTML5 while others say that it will take years for the web standard to gain widespread traction. At e(a+s), we certainly think that we will see a huge uptake in HTML5 web development, but it will be aimed squarely at mobile and tablet experiences, not full featured websites.
From a consumer perspective, the user experience on a PC will remain virtually unchanged and most users won’t be able to tell the difference between a site built with Flash and HTML5. It’s a totally different story when it comes to mobile computing. Up until very recently, to create an interactive mobile experience, you had to use a dedicated application. This app ecosystem makes for a disjointed experience. Want to do online banking, install an app, watch a movie, install an app, read the news, install an app, and so on. With HTML5, users can finally view their favorite websites in their full glory right in a browser – no downloads required.
For more information about our web and HTML5 development services please email info@easci.com
November 02, 2010
Welcome to the new Extreme Arts and Sciences website! We have spent the last few months completely redesigning our site to better represent our product offerings and our new direction. To learn more about Extreme Arts and Sciences explore the “about” and “services tabs. Also check out the work tab to see our videos and other work examples.
If you have any questions or wish to get in touch with us, please submit your information via the contact us form.