Over the past month and a couple of conversations, I have had the opportunity to speak with Ross Mayfield, CEO for Socialtext. Ross has very rightly pointed out that there have been major changes since July 2006 when the original posting went up and I agreed that since I'm keeping the post up, that I should be current with where Socialtext is today. They have done a lot of work since my July 2006 post, including:

• updating the interface in version 2.0 which was released around August 2006. It is indeed cleaner and simpler than the original one by a long shot. Nice job on that guys.
  
• releasing an open source distribution of the wiki;
  
• they released a mobile version (I have not looked at this);
• they released an offline sync tool that allows you to take all or part of the wiki with you offline, make changes, and then resync them. I haven't tested it but that is a really cool feature. Now that we're building out a lot of pages in our wiki at our office, I can see the value in having that ability, although as with all syncing/replication, the devil is in the details.
• Basic text-editing, the core of the application is still really really basic. Tables are not functional at all, with no real ability to move rows and columns.
• They have also announced that they are working with Dan Bricklin on combining Wiki Calc with Social Text to create Social Calc. I pointed out to Ross that if they are planning on using a spreadsheet tool to also be a table tool, that I'm not sure I believe it. They are different animals with different behaviours (or at least, traditionally they have been.) He is attempting to use Social Calc to be a universal sheet / table editor right within the main wiki page. It will be interesting to see if that bet pays off. I'm all for simplification and innovation. If they can combine the two into one functional sheet/table editing mode, good for them.
  

So, what does this all mean? Has my opinion changed? Well in the days since I wrote this, Atlassian and Socialtext have continued to grow at reasonable rates, and the market for corporate wikis has heated up. Some of their competitors have been aquired and gone into the horizontal layer (Jotspot into Google). And they are now being joined by companies like Jive Software with Clearspace or Blogtronix and SystemOne. It's time for me to do a new vendor bake-off I think.... Until then, here is my one-line horribly opinionated overview of the vendors at the moment but I realize I'll have to do them all justice by reviewing them more fully very soon. Here goes:

• Atlassian/Confluence: solid enterprise wiki with on-premise and hosted options; an ecosystem of partners who extend the wiki functionality; a solid team running the company that is focused on revenue AND profit; and a somewhat dated interface which they are addressing in the next release; extensive management tools; really solid exporting functions. I  recommend this product, despite its UI quirks as they are focused tightly on being profitable above all and on knowing who their customers are.
  
• Socialtext/Socialtext Workspace: many deployment options: hosted, on-premise, appliance; nice looking and intuitive interface; focused on solving the hard problems (mobile, offline) but slow in dealing with the fundamentals (the text editor is still really bad - tables are awful and functionality is very limited); have been early and loud proponents of wiki use in corporations; very supportive of the open source movement; are working to integrate in Social Calc - too little too late? Jotspot has spreadhseets, Google has Google sheets, Zoho Office has sheets, everybody has sheets; less obvious management and administration tools; If you need mobile and offline use, Socialtext is your only option. The text editing is limited and the lack of useful tables is a non-starter for me but maybe not for others. Also the only remaining appliance/wiki vendor now that Jot is out of the picture.
  
• Blogtronix: doing some very interesting work by combining blogs, wikis, and social networking for the enterprise. I have not reviewed them but a friend called the other day to say, "These guys are "coooooooooooool" so I'm intending to check them out soon.
  
• Jive Clearspace: a single platform that combines blogs, wikidoc module (for creating documents collaboratively), forums, document management, identity, and reputation into one seamless whole. Great visual design; solid fundamentals (they are the forum technology used by Apple, SAP, and Citrix for example); new product though so may have standard v1.0 issues; wiki functionality is really aimed at document creation rather than large-scale wiki development. I'm just reviewing the product now but haven't made any final determinations at this time.
  

Stepping up to the bigger picture, there are two overall trends going on here. Much if not all of the features found in collaboration tools today is going to be heading either down into the horizontal players infrastructure (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM/Lotus), or else becoming features inside other industry categories (enterprise software for example!) Second, I believe we're about to see the same pattern we saw with enterprise applications many years ago: the rise and fall of stand-alone applications and then the rise of comprehensive suites, particularly as consolidation hits. In the social software space, I think that will play out as applications becoming suites and both of them being consolidated into larger vendors quickly. It should be an interesting year or two ahead of us.

Has anybody experimented with scarcity economies inside their reputation points systems? I wonder....

If you know of one, please let me know.

This site contains my general blogging, published articles, and information on speaking dates where I discuss how business, technology, and finance can be used to create an open, healthy, and environmentally and economically vibrant society. Please feel free to contact me at troy at troyangrignon dot com to rant, discuss, or have me speak at your organization.

(For the most recent articles on Web 2.0, check out my full Web 2.0 articles category.)

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This posting has links to all of the Web 2.0 Summit 2006 blog posts that I wrote:

• Day 1
• Enterprise 2.0
• SMB Session
• Launch Pad
• Keynote with Eric Schmidt
• Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft
• Ben Trott of Six Apart, talking about Vox
• Discussion with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (Washington Post) and Barry Diller (IAC)
• Day 2:
• A Conversation with Jeff Bezos
• A Conversation with Bruce Chizen, Adobe.com
• Net Neutrality Debate with Vint Cerf and Robert Pepper
• Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker on the State of the Internet
• Fedex's CIO talks about logistics
• Microsoft's Debra Chrapaty "It's all about the infrastructure"
• Korea's MySpace Challenger: CyWorld Revealed
• Enterprise 2.0 mashups, with Marc Benioff
• Jeff Jonas explains how to give your company a Brain
• Don Tapscott discusses Wikinomics - his new theory of the global plant floor
  
• Meet Ning
• What GoDaddy knows, with Bob Parsons
• A Conversation with Ray Ozzie
• Day 3:
• The Database in the sky, with MySQL
• Yahoo! Technology Preview
• Disruption & Opportunity: Venture Capital
• From the eBay Labs
• Alumni Report: How did 2005s Launchpad companies do?
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence
• My Summary of the Summit
  

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes are in this square brackets.]

Harnessing Collective Intelligence with Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), Owen Van Natta (Facebook), Toni Schneider (Automattic), and Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media)

• On the panel:
• Jim Buckmaster / CEO, Craigslist
• Owen Van Natta, COO of Facebook
  
• Toni Schneider, CEO of Automatic
• Richard Rosenblatt, cofounder, chairman, CEO of Demand Media
• Buckmaster:
• We have made major business decisions (do we have sales people, do we get funding, do we expand the site) based on our customers discussions.
• We keep having people tell us we should be running text-ads. In theory we would make tens of millions of dollars. But so far...(in a deadpan voice)...none of our users are requesting those ads be there so we haven't done it.
• [This got a great response from the audience. It's funny. As audience members, we all want to monetize the web, but as users of Craigslist, we appreciate his user-centricity!]
  
• We have taken no VC money at all.
  
• Rosenblatt:
• Demand Media is going to build tools that will let people embed their knowledge and share it with like-minded people and then get paid for it. We're moving into all sorts of niches: hiking, outdoor sports, gradening,
  
• Question: You raised $220M. You bought 9 companies and rolled them into one big platform to start off with a solid base. So they bought "Trails" - that documents the 50,000 "professional trails" that are out there.
• Answer: Yes, we saw an opportunity and we moved to dominate it quickly and massively.
  
• Schneider:
• We only took a little bit of money (from Polaris)
• "User generated content" is too narrow of a term. It doesn't capture the ranking/sorting/sifting functions.
  
• Spam is a huge problem for blogs. We have seen a doubling on the blogs in THE PAST THREE WEEKS alone. We built a completely adaptive spam system. When you mark something spam, that goes back to the server and the server learns going forward. That isn't user generated content but it certainly is collective intelligence or community based ranking/marking/flagging.
• Van Natta:
•  We built some new stuff and our customers got very mad. We had to adjust very quickly. That's good. It's good to have your customers hammer you once in a while to make you realize how adaptable you need to be.
  
• Question: It sounds like you can be very adaptive. Talk about that.
• Rosenblatt: We consider product features as marketing. "Feature roll-out IS marketing."
• [I **LOVE** that!!! What's our marketing budget? What marketing budget? You mean the money we're spending on talking with customers and making this product "kick ass?"]
  
• Question: what about giving up control. How do you do it?
• Schneider: We let our users do the language translation. We set up Wordpress so that our users could hit the button and translate the page and post it directly and it went live that second. We reviewed thousands of lines of translation later and tweaked only a very few things and found only one intentional swap and it was a guy announcing his wedding date in German! It was BRILLIANT and allowed us to do a full language translation in 24 hours!!
  
• [That is a very powerful story!!]
  
• What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs?
  
• Schneider: Don't build a business that people think is a good idea. People will always tell you that it is a bad idea. Focus on what you think is important and ignore the advice.
• Rosenblatt: Follow the users. Early.
  
• Question: There is a difference between knowledge and opinion; How do you deal with the fact that a large audience can say a lot of stuff that isn't true?
  
• O'Reilly: Have you ever heard of Sturgeon's Law? A science fiction writer named Theodore Sturgeon had an audience member once say to him, "95% of all science fiction is crap", to which Sturgeon replied, "yes, but 95% of EVERYTHING is crap. So what?"
• [This parallells the comment in The Long Tail by Chris Anderson where he says: "The Long Tail is indeed full of crap. Yet it's also full of works of refined brilliance and depth and an awful lot in between." (p.116, The Long Tail)]
  
• Question: All of you have big communities. What is your role? Leader? Cop? Good guy? Bad guy?
  
• Rosenblatt: you are a guide most of the time but you also have the ability to police it to remove/sanction the damaging elements of the community. Your moderators need to have that ability to do that.
• Schneider: Your most involved people will begin to feel that they are helping you build your COMPANY, not just your product. You need to realize that ownership feeling is there and treat those people accordingly. You might not actually give them shares but you definitely need to let them be involved in your business.
  

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes and analysis are in these square brackets.]

From the Labs: eBay Research Labs, Eric Billingsley:

• we now have 800,000 people making part or all of their living on that marketplace.
• labs employees are doing a 3 way split:
• 1/3 consulting; identify new research opportunities; facilitate rapid iteration  of ideas with the business
  
• 1/3 pure research; moonitor and expermient with emerging technologoies; create new technologies to aid the business; re-examine existing systems to find new problems
  
• 1/3 technology transfer Market technology solutions to the business.
• 50% of their technologies actually make it into production (!)
• Key Focus Areas:
• Core Technology: adaptive learning; information retrieval (finding);
  
• Operational excellence: systems management (grids); hew hardware platforms and deployments
  
• New Opportunities: Social commerce; Power of Three (?)
  
• They are building new measurement tools that can understand what is happening, how the users are using it, and what they're getting out of it.
• Their search system evolves. If you search for iPod Nanom, you get 25,000 accessories. We watch to see what people actually end up clicking on in the results and then those end up getting floated up to the top of the lists as "best match"
• Question: how do you decide which projects to work on?
  
• Answer: Typically during our consulting phase. We're known as smart guys. When people ask us to help them with projects, we identify new ideas at that time. We don't have a waterfall approach. The team is allowed to come up with their own projects. And they have added a ton of value. With a 50% hit ratio of converting ideas to actual projects, we think this has been successful.

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes and analysis are in these square brackets.]

Disruption Opportunity: Venture Capital: Roger McNamee (private equity) and Ram Shiram (seed investing)

• Shiram: I DO believe that it's cheap to start a company; it is hard to find talent though.
• Content companies are very hard to build; both Roger and Battelle (MC) have built content companies and they take a long time and they're very difficult to build and grow.
• Question: So let's pretend that Stikkit asks for (and gets) $5M. They only need $100K to build the company...but what do they do with the other $4.9M?
• Answer: Yes, having too much money is a problem for startups - "indigestion is worse than starvation."
• McNamee: "A lot of the most attractive ideas need less than $1M"
  
• Shiram: the math doesn't work today putting out $5-10M per deal in a $500M fund. There will be a lot of companies purchased in the sub-100M range. Another problem is too much money floating around there. If you have a great idea and a great team, you can go to an auction model. But don't equate money with success. If your valuation keeps going up, your exit becomes expensive and then there are only 6 companies that can buy you out. So be careful of increasing your valuation too quickly and pricing yourself out of the market from an acquisition perspective.
• Question: "We built an app for $75K and we're going to sell it for 20x. Why do we need you?"
• Shiram: "You don't need me. Building your business and serving people is your primary job. Raising funds is secondary."
• McNamee:
• Ram is talking about getting people to your site and keeping them there. What about the people who don't have time to go to your site and will never go there?
• User-generated content is an alternative to passive entertainment and will be huge.
• The amount of cool stuff going on to service that market of content producers is lame. I would look at enabling forms of user generated content.
  
• The second issue is time: We all have multiple inboxes. If you let it pile up for six months, 98% of it will go away and 2% will be important.
• The two important things are: a) saving time and b) connecting people who don't and won't use the web to the web to allow them to generate content
  
• [what does he mean, connect people who don't and won't use the web...to the web. HOW?]
  
• Question: IPO route: is it closed and why?
• Shiram: companies less than $1B don't get any notice from the analysts anymore. I suggest that if you are a smaller company, go for an M&A exit instead.
• McNamee: "Fear is transitory and greed is permanent" - the IPO route will come back. But my approach is: "Build something great and the exit will take care of itself. I don't worry about pre-building to exit. "
  
• Question: "I'm an entrepreneur. How do I ensure I won't get kicked out and how do I deal with valuation?"
• Shiram: "Most good investors won't kick out a passionate founder. Don't worry about valuation. Just find smart money and work, work, work!"
  
• McNamee: "Focus on the size of the pie, not on the size of the slice. If you're focusing on control, quit now!"
• Battelle: "I disagree - keep >51%".
• [Troy: Battelle's comment is misleading. One can own 99% of the company but there can be terms on the term sheet that are so onerous that you effectively have no control of your company. I know of one case where an entrepreneur had signed a term sheet that dictated that his VC had signing authority for everything over $5000 AND that the VC had all the controlling votes. Don't just focus on the ownership percentage! Battelle's comment is fear-based - was he burned in his content company that he mentioned?]
  
• Question: "What is smart money?"
• Shiram: "Try making judgements - you will make mistakes";
• McNamee: "Don't focus on the fund - focus on the person. Find the person who you want to call at 2am with bad news and also with great news and who have the contextual expertise about your business."
  
• Question: "We're looking for $5-15M and have been having a hard time finding it even though our technology is great. Where do we find that capital?"
• Shiram: "You shouldn't have trouble raising money because there's so much of it out there."
• McNamee: "Don't complain if it's hard to do. Entrepreneurship is not for lightweights. Life is hard."
  

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes and analysis are in these square brackets.]

Yahoo! Technology Preview

• Brad Garlinghouse
  
• Web 2.0 is about people and emotions
• Technical specs have never been less relevant
• Email was sent in fall 35 years ago
• [I use a rule of thumb that I think I got from Nicholas Carr, author of the infamous IT Doesn't Matter article, that the first forty years of any technology are the least interesting and that it is the second forty years where all of the interesting stuff happens. So I think that the fact that the internet was born around 1969, making it 37 years old and email in or around 1970/71 (according to the above comment), that we are about to see these technologies finally begin to turn into something larger, more important, and even more valuable than in the first forty years. Can't wait!]
  
• Geeky applications are not relevant; people connections matter the most
• Yahoo mail has 250M active monthly users
• Ethan Diamond:
• demoed the new Yahoo Mail, showing a nice integration between email and IM/chat back and forth. When emailing somebody, you can convert it into IM right away.
• [It's nice to see the fluidity being designed into the tools to allow users to switch effortlessly from one mode to another (IM to email or vice versa.) But I wish these companies would get out of their silos and connect their IM networks to each other.]
• [See my Technology Buyer's Manifesto from Oct 2004 where I asked companies to start doing this.]
  

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

Meet Ning: Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen

• Gina Bianchini:
• we want to empower people to create their own social networks.
• the biggest thing is that rather than having your stuff sitting on Flickr branded or Yahoo or Google branded sites, you can put all of the stuff together so that you can have it branded as a complete social network with your own brand. The "me" photo/video/blog site.
  
• By December - fully customizable / configurable build-your-own social network administration tool.
• Andreessen:
• this is allowing the web to fragment and specialize (rather than just using one-size-fits-all services such as MySpace.) This is our big bet.
• [This was the only key point in their presentation. People want to build "the cute fuzzy bunny community", they want it all in one place, and they want it branded as their site, not somebody else's. I agree with their key principle here.]
  
• Ning is completely programmable. Full REST API; every piece of the interface is customizable; you can modify the source code so that at any level (interface, API, code level) it can be customized.
• We are disrupting MySpace and YouTube six months after they hit the big time
• [Which begs the question: who will disrupt you 3 months after Ning launches?]
  

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

CyWorld Revealed, Hyun-Oh Yoo, CEO of SK Communications, owners of CyWorld

• We have 20M subscribers, 40% of the population of Korea (!); 96% of 20-29 year olds (!); 20B monthly page views; [Wow - those numbers are unbelievable.]
  
• We are Myspace + iTunes + Google + IM + eBay in that we are offering social networkinng + music downloads + search + commerce engines.
  
• Key success factors: young women in their early 20s were the early population; we brought young women (who didn't use the internet) to the internet. We made the entire system appealing visually to young women.
• [So they went after non-consumers rather than trying to convince people to switch from competitors; they used the principle of "know your customers" (it's not everybody - it's young female non-internet users) and build the service to appeal to them; they also made it visually appealing which both fits their customer and also adheres to the principle in "A Whole New Mind" -  beauty is just as important as function in this era.)]
  
• business model: the base service is free...but charge for the personalization (downloading of wallpapers, gifts, avatars, etc.)
• [The cell phone market could probably soon get away with this model. Give away the phone and the service and charge for personalization and ringtones only! This personalization/identity stuff is coming up more and more often.]
  
• New service: Town Service is being used for companies, They also have an online marketplace.
• Integrated with the number one IM service (NateOn) which is now overtaking (and causing a decline in) MSN. 2002:-20006: NateOn went from 0 to12M users; MSN went from 10 to 6M. WOW. That's a shocking number. Nice to see that Microsoft is getting some serious challengers on some fronts.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Have now launched in China, Japan, Taiwan, and US
• 3+ million users
• Planning to launch in Europe, South Asia, and South America in 2007
• Our goal: "Connecting everyone to One Global Network"