There is a saying that setting up anything is really easy but maintaining it over a period of time and sustaining it is really tough.

And the same applies for social media/ networking side. Many companies started positively in the social space by simply getting the word out about the company through social media, hoping it will build brand awareness. But is that enought?

Well that is not just enough. The real trick is to build a loyal and consistent followers on social media sites by keeping them interested and engaged and providing constant feed in which they are interested in. If you are able to bind a loyal user group than you can very well leave it to the very group to spread your content across various media channel and bringing more and more within the valuable group.

social networking

Its all around constant and consistent flow of information and which ever company understand the mantra are able to exploit social media to their benefits than others. It is really important in today’s organizations that a dedicated team needs to be identified who constantly keep the flow of information, keeping themselves motivated, to explore the endless opportunities which social media can
bring on. The group should be on constant hunt to engage more and more people and utilize them for spreading the world: initiate discussions, blog posts, fun activities, like’s, plus 1 etc.

social networking sites

• CQ 5.4
• CQ5 Mobile
• CQ5 Marketing Campaign Management
• CQ5 Social Collaboration
• Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite (Omniture)

Adobe's WEM. Source: http://www.cmswire.com

Looking at the above list, it could be one of the leaders in the area of WEM providing all the capabilities. I will cover details about each of the modules in my next post. But one important module which I wanted to highlight is CQ5 Mobile. Here is some description about CQ5 Mobile from Adobe’s site:

It is increasingly important that websites offer specific “views” for mobile devices, where these “views” typically are separate sites that share some content with the “normal” website. CQ assists you in creating mobile websites: when authoring a mobile page, the page is displayed in a way that emulates the mobile device, called an emulator. When authoring the page, you can switch between several emulators to get a real view of what the end-user will see when accessing the page.

In the out-of-the-box version, devices have been grouped into three categories – feature, smart and touch – according to the capabilities of the devices to render a page . CQ allows to create new device groups. When the end-user accesses a mobile page, CQ detects the device and sends the representation that corresponds to its device group.

CQ enables you to create a mobile site based on an existing standard site. It can be simply achieved by creating a livecopy of the standard site.

This defintely links back to my previous post :Content Delivery over Mobile: Mobile Apps Vs Mobile Web? this definitely a step towards mobile web over mobile applications for future trends.

There is really some good information and comparison available on following sites:

• Mobile Web vs. Native Apps. Revisited
• The Mobile Application: Browser vs. Native

Here are my two cents. I think there is no clear direction around where we are heading: Mobile Apps or Mobile web. And I do not think there is going to be one definite direction but both will continue to stay. But as organizations, I feel that there’s absolute need to evaluate the ROI when going down the Mobile Apps way. Working through various organizations in past years, I have seen cases where organization wants to have a mobile app without putting much thought behind what’s and why’s.

There are lots and lots of mobile applications available in market and from my experience most of the applications are used few times before user switches to other. So, looking at the lifecycle for a mobile application vs its investment, there is not much justification to build them as there a whole set of investment required for hosting and upgrading the application on regular basis.

Also, the trend is around consolidation to make sure content/informtion presented to end user through different channels remains constant without any delay to any channel. Having mobile apps will not only take us away from the consolidation phase but will also present a challenge in terms of managing consistent information across multi channels. This could through new dimensions and new challenges to the CMS commuity.

I think going forward, mobile applications which provide facilities like search or online transactions (Example: retail industry) or location based information will continue to grow while others will just fade out in front of every increasing support for HTML 5, CSS 3 , JSON etc which is brining the usability near with not exact to mobile applications. And this will help in content consolidation as well for the organization on one common CMS platform.

The session covered from history of web to what is Next Generation web (Web 2.0) and what we should do towards it. Here is extract from his presentation:

HISTORY OF WEB

He started with his experience of Web way back when he started in 1975. From Lonely computers, which were self-absorbed applications to telephone lines (part lines to kids line) which lead to evolution of Internet and standards like HTTP and HTML.

MAINSTREAM WEB APPLICATIONS TODAY

This section of the presentation covered about how the current web applications are. Few main highlighting points are:

• Increasing support for cross browsers
• Key area of development happening around Mobile space
• Server side capabilities are growing
• Programming understanding in multi-threaded environment
• Storage capacity is effectively free, CPU nearly so
• Network infrastructure improving
• Development technologies maturity at a much slower pace and challenges are in coming up with a framework like Struts and IDEs for JS-DHTML developments
• More and more user personalization
• Standardization at different scales and complexities

NEXT GENERATION WEB DRIVERS

Craig stressed on using next generation web rather than Web 2.0 with emphasis on 4 key drivers:

Enhanced User Interfaces

The driving force is the limited usability of web applications compared to applications installed locally. Ajax and DHTML are the immediate solutions.

Lightweight Programming Models

• Strong preference towards simplicity; less code = less initial work, less update work
• Scripting languages again gaining popularity with many large application built with php, perl etc.
• Loose coupling and layer based design
• Increasing preference for quick, iterative approach (Agile model)
• Programming models  
• Ajax and DHTML (server side business logic)
• Ajax and DHTML (client side business logic ) i.e. making web applications
  available offline 
• Browser plugins (Flash/ Flex/ Java FX etc)

Web as a Platform

• Web applications to become more of a service
• Web platform providing Social network effect
• Reducing “local islands” of important data
• Users looking something bigger
• Identity
• Flexibility
• Ubiquity 

The read/write web 

• Web as a Bulletin Board

WHAT SHOULD WE DO

Craigs Top Ten Suggestion List

10 – Expose Data/Logic as services

9 – Incorporate External Content

8 – Seek QOS (Quality of Service) deals from Sources

7 – Give QOS Deals to users

6 – Adopt Agile Processes

5 – Test Driven Development

4 – Architect for Scalability

3 – Embrace Heterogeneity

2 – Reach out to Mobile Clients

1 – Enable User Provided Content

The session turned out to be good for users who do not have exposure to Web 2.0. The first 45 minutes where Craig covered History of web and existing applications was bit too extended and I was looking for more on Web 2.0. Let’s hope the other sessions lined up around Web 2.0 will be able to provide more insight.

• A Photo gadget which is designed to share a series of photos
• GoogleGram gadget that display a new greeting message for every day of the week
• Daily Me gadget which will show what you’re currently doing, as well as quotes, what’s on your mind etc.
• Free Form gadget that as the name suggest will allow free flow of information, image text layout background colour
• YouTube Channel gadget to share good videos on YouTube
• Personalized List Gadget to basically present your list of items. It could be list of your favorite songs, a list of items to buy today etc.
• Personalized Countdown gadget is more like a reminder to any event, happening with a countdown

Apart from this, it provides option to update the Gadget and re-publish so that it gets updated at the other end.

Pretty neat way to bring people togather !!!!

But few things to watch out for:

• Updation at receiving end took a pretty long time to get refreshed with updated information
• No intimation whether the iGoogle user has added your Gadget or not
• If the Gadget creator deletes the Gadget, will it get deleted at the other end?
• A way to establish two way communication rather then just one way for now

Scrybe is one such online/offline calender and organizer service that provides offline web application service.

Zimbra is another open source messaging and collaborative application. This powerful web client integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, VoIP, and online document authoring into a rich browser-based interface. Recently Zimbra announced launch of Zimbra desktop with the aim to enable offline access to its online Ajax powered collaborative suite.

This looks to be the trend in the near future. More and more applications are targeting to provide virtual desktop for their web 2.0 applications with the same look and feel. The idea behind all this is to remove dependency of “online enabled”. The idea is that user should not be bothered about whether his net connection is working or not. He should more be concentrating on his job and rest the application takes care. Whenever it comes online, it should sync up with the offline content changes. I am writing this post through Google Docs and I can see that this keeps on syncing up my updates with the back-end. I see this kind of behaviour with most of the Google applications. So, is Google already way ahead of others in the same race?

Thinking aloud there might be two ways to achieve this: The Web application build this functionality within them self and provides a separate desktop install for application/ or takes care within its web application to provide continuous app browsing experience. Zimbra, for examples, provides a Zimbra desktop to install locally. If you think about it, this is not the way forward to achieve. The installation will again be pain for users. The second way is to make browsers support online/offline mode for web applications. This sounds interesting and this is what Firefox 3 is aiming to achieve. The browser itself is trying to build in the basic infrastructure to support offline/online web applications. But I can see many challenges towards achieving this. To list a few:

This leaves me with a question, are we not going to face the same problems that we listed when Ajax was born??

Though the themes are pretty basic in nature, but the idea looks pretty powerful. The theme is actually an XML file which list down a number of CSS files based on weather condition. This CSS framework might open up opportunities for users to add their own themes. Thus increasing theme base will just be matter of time.

Is this another move of Google towards Web 2.0?

Community is heart of any product. Community consists of people from various walks of software company, like:

1. developers (working on it),
2. System Integrators (implementing solution for a client),
3. Stake holders(looking to evaluate product),
4. People who want to contribute to open source,
5. People comparing with other products etc.

Community is the place where almost 80% of technical queries,  queries for people evaluating product  etc. gets resolved without even reaching the product owners. Community also has strong saying on the road map of the product.

Already we see that community is doing a major support activity for a product. What lags is an effort from product owners towards community. What I see is, owners should make an effort to analyze the community users. One way, it will give more insight into who all and what all domains they are using in current offerings. This will definitely act as road map for the product. Secondly, they can get a bunch of people from community who understands the product well and can contribute heavily towards the future of the product together with the company. And thirdly, if they can arrange for a webcast/product information gatherings etc. of their product to a group of people from different walks of life, like SI, developers etc. it can help to promote the product many folds. Many clients now a days come to SI’s for a open source solution. So, if SI gets backing from product owners, surely it will be a big boost for open source product. One can argue, that this way open source product will loose their own revenue source. But I think that anyway there are lot of people implementing the solution without product owners so I do not think there will be much difference in that area. What will change is that the product will continue to grow due to its growing popularity. This will definitely start worrying Big fishes and will drive them to acquire product by paying handsome amounts.

Looking at the solution it is going to lay down benefits like

• Increase volume of multi-lingual content with their existing resources

• Content for multiple markets can be created and released simultaneously

• A global organization’s local market teams can have control over their content while maintaining consistent global branding