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Orkut is planning to roll out a new interface in the weeks to come. It’s not live yet. To start the roll out will be applicable only to a select group of users initially, and will continue to do so until everyone is on the new site. Here is a screenshot of the new orkut interface

 For more information read the blog post at Google’s blog (link here).

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site which lets you to manage all your bookmarks in one place. You could also share them with your friends and could see what other people are bookmarking. Do you want to create something like del.icio.us? try Scuttle. Scuttle is an open source social bookmarking engine that you can run on your own site. It’s based on PHP and supports most of the del.icio.us protocol. If you want to get started on your own social bookmarking site right away, you can download Scuttle’s source code at SourceForge.

The installation is really easy. All you need to do is upload the files, create a new database, import the .sql file that comes with the download to create the required tables and change some default configuration values and off you go. You got yourself a social bookmarking site. I have never come across a site which uses Scuttle so far. I just tried this in my personal computer seems to work fine. And here is a screenshot from scuttle.

Since the day Tim O’Reilly coined the word “Web 2.0″ it has become a widely-used term to describe the perceived ‘second generation of the Internet’, focusing on new collaboration technologies such as blogs, social networking and user generated videos. In early 2007, Clearswift did a research to establish how popular these new Web 2.0 technologies and sites really were among office workers to determine the scale of the potential threat to corporate security. Here is the link to the complete 24 page report (click here). Following is the summary of the same.

Before I get to the summary of the report, read the following news.

Apple
In 2004, websites PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret published details of unreleased products, code-named Asteroid and Q97. Apple sued the sites in an attempt to force them to reveal their sources. (actual news link here)

Google
Mark Jen left Google under unclear circumstances less than a month after joining the company after candid comments on his blog about life at Google caused controversy. (actual news link here) Waterstone’s
Joe Gordon, an employee of eleven years, became the first blogger in Britain to be dismissed because he kept a personal blog, which occasionally included entries about bad days at work and satirising his boss. (actual news link here)

Delta
Ellen Simonetti was sacked from Delta Airlines after posting images of herself in her Delta uniform on her personal blog. (actual news link here)

So it’s somewhat clear that the sensitive data are getting outside of corporate walls by the increased number of employees using the social media and web 2.0 technologies and sites. Here is the summary of report that took place in two phases

Phase 1
Aimed to explore how popular social networking media are in a corporate environment and whether users are discussing sensitive work-related issues and therefore posing a threat to corporate information.

• In the US, 83% of office workers have accessed some form of social media from their place of work.
• Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia (46%), video-sharing sites such as YouTube (26%), IM (24%) and blogs (23%) are all accessed by significant numbers of workers.
• While using these social media, almost a third (30%) discussed work-related issues, potentially putting sensitive company information at risk.
• Almost two thirds (63%) of office workers accessed social media at least once a day – with 82% having admitted to accessing them at least a few times a week.
• 50% of those polled felt they should be entitled to access these sites from work, whereas only 36% felt they shouldn’t.

Phase 2
The second phase of the research explored whether businesses are aware of the popularity of social media and whether they were deriving business benefits from Web 2.0 technologies. The respondents were also asked what IT security measures they had in place.

• IT and business decision makers were broadly aware of the popularity of Web 2.0 social media among their employees
• 9.1% of those polled saying their staff did not access any social media
• A small 4.9% admitted to not knowing whether their employees accessed social media or not.
• A significant number were not taking action to protect themselves by educating their staff
• 19.1% of those polled admitted to not maintaining a best practice policy which provided staff with written guidelines on using the Internet, including social media sites.
• 35% of companies didn’t monitor employees’ Internet use
• Almost half of (48.3%) the IT and business decision makers polled didn’t know whether they’d lost confidential corporate information via social media.
• Only 32.1% of companies had content filtering solutions in place that allowed secure access to social media sites.
• Over 40.8% considered social media to be relevant to today’s corporate environment yet only 11.1% were already making use of it from a business perspective.
• 14.6% of organizations were not aware of social media and had no policy on it.
• 11.7% were encouraging employees to blog in order to benefit the business
• 41.6% actively discouraging or forbidding staff to blog and 46.7% not having a policy either way.

What really bothers is that, almost half of (48.3%) the IT and business decision makers polled didn’t know whether they’d lost confidential corporate information via social media and only one third had content filtering solutions to allow secure access to social media sites. Here is the conclusion of the report

Never before has it been more important for companies to consider controlling use of the web as well as email and protecting against outbound threats as well as inbound. There is no doubt Web 2.0, in the form of social networking technologies, is a growing phenomenon and popularity among users continues to increase. The Web 2.0 world brings with it significant data leakage risks and the research clearly shows that the scope of the mass usage of Web 2.0 tools by employees. While it is cause for concern, it is not cause for alarm. By taking a smart approach to web security, businesses will be able to unlock the power of these new Internet services for competitive advantage.

I’m right now reading a report about the impact of Web 2.0 on corporate security. It’s really interesting, will write details about it in my next blog post. As I was reading I came across information about companies such as BMW, Shell, General Motors, IBM, British Airways and French Newspaper Le Dauphiné Liberé are already using social media and podcasting strategies to reach out to the rapidly expanding community of consumers that expects companies to engage with them. And here is what they do.

BMW
BMW created www.bmwfilms.com which it uses to showcase its Hire film series – eight short films made by acclaimed Hollywood directors. It also has www.bmw-audiobooks.com where customers can download exclusively commissioned audio short stories for free.

Shell
Shell uses webcasts, downloadable video and forums on its website.

General Motors
General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz communicates directly with customers by writing a blog. Here is the blog link (click here).

IBM
IBM has a website dedicated to its several wikis for the IBM community, where questions and comments can all be posted.

British Airways
British Airways added a Google Earth mashup to its website to provide customers with more information about their destination. Also, Google Earth users can add the BA layer which provides details of the airline’s flights to destinations around the globe.

Le Dauphiné Liberé
The newspaper organized a debate about the French elections in virtual world, Second Life.

SlideShare.net is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web. It’s based out of Mountain View (California, USA) & New Delhi (India). The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies published a list of the Top 100 tools for learning professionals and Slideshare shares the No 26th spot along with FaceBook, Wikipedia & Ning. Here are links for further reading about this information

http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100.html
http://blog.slideshare.net/2007/08/16/slideshare-ranked-26th-most-useful-learning-tool-along-with-facebook-ning-wikipedia/

Business 2.0 in its August issue tried to identify a list of clones of Digg.com, Facebook.com, LinkedIn and Youtube, from different countries. See the snapshot on what they have identified from India

BestOfIndya.com - I have been using BestOfIndya.com for a quiet a while and it’s really a good. It’s based out of Pligg, an open source content management system. However I believe that Indianpad.com is the closest to Digg in India. It gets more page views per day when compared to BestOfIndya.com.

Minglebox.com - Facebook is not only a social networking site it’s also a social networking platform on which other services / software’s could be built and deployed. However Minglebox is not. It is just a pure social networking site. We could say Minglebox.com as a clone of Myspace or Orkut but definitely not Facebook.

Rediff Connexions - This is somewhat closer to LinkedIn.

Rajshri.com - Rajshri is definitely not a video sharing site like Youtube. It’s run by Rajshri Media. And they stream the self produced videos. There are lots of other Youtube clones. For an entire list please click here.

Apple iPhone has lot of features in it, however it does not have an IM application, which is exactly what Mundu does, it provides an IM application for the iPhone. Mundu, an India based web chat provider, provides a comprehensive and feature-rich platform that can power consumer businesses to use Instant Messaging to build, grow and monetize their user communities.

Mundu supports all the major IM applications like ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, MSN and Gtalk. The application consists of three different pages log in, contacts, and chat. You could sign in to multiple accounts simultaneously. FlickIM also provides an IM application for iPhone, however it supports only AIM. So far Mundu is the first IM application for iPhone that supports the entire major IM platform.

Mundu has other products and services as well. One of them is Mundu Radio (radio.mundu.com). It allows you to tune to tens and thousands of radio stations, right on your wireless handset. Mundu Radio has recently won the C|Net Webware 100 award. I believe soon we will be seeing an iPhone edition of Mundu Radio.

There is a lot of buzz and lot of people talking about web 2.0 and online social platforms. However there is not much information about companies that provide web 2.0 related products to enterprises and big companies. Krawler Networks, founded in 2002 by a group of IIT’ians, has just now released their Enterprise and Consumer Social Platforms.

Enterprise Social Platform
Enterprise Social Platform from Krawler, powers your enterprise with collaboration fostering capabilities of Web 2.0 to realize improved productivity and work environment through enhanced team work and cooperation across your organization. Some of the key features are

Connect

• Allows employees to create profiles, communities
• Create & Manage Employee, Partner and Customer Profiles
• Create & Manage Team & Community Profiles
• Manage & share bookmarks
• Subscribe and search community bookmarks
• View visual graph of your people, teams and groups
• Krawler Integrates with Microsoft Outlook

Collaborate

• Give users the ability to create & collaborate based on project groups & teams
• Coordinate teamwork with shared calendars, alerts & notifications
• Communicate with team members in context, using in-built forums, chat & instant messaging
• Manage the document lifecycle with integrated Enterprise Content Management capabilities like versioning, archiving and search.
• Create and organize surveys

Security

• Krawler provides a secure role based access to the system making it easier to enforce company security policies and guidelines
• All actions and events – including those of the administrators – are securely logged and archived for later review and inspection
• Krawler implementation adheres to Sarbanes-Oxley Act and helps enforce the IT Controls in compliance with the Act
• Krawler sets up a virtual private network (VPN) between user desktops and the server to communicate securely over the network

Consumer Social Platform
The social platform from krawler will help you to transform your website into a bustling ecosystem by leveraging dynamic social networking capabilities of Web 2.0 that provide users with collaborative avenues to explore and spend more time at your web-site. It allows users to create communities, you could add a rating mechanism like Digg, add podcasts and mash-ups.

Following are the several Youtube videos that explain the Krawler Social Platform in detail.

Introduction to Krawler

Communities and Team Spaces 

Social Network for your Enterprise 

Project Management using Krawler 

Document Management with Tags in Krawler 

RSS Feed Reader 

I really love the Project Management and Document Management aspect of the platform. Believe me, after using tagging in social web sites, it’s really difficult for me to use document management systems at my workplace as they are not that search friendly. You could only search based on titles of the document. The document management aspect of Krawler provided tagging to your documents and is really wonderful. If you are looking out for a social platform, I would strongly recommend the Social Platform from Krawler Networks.

RealEstateNewsInIndia.com (link here), is a Digg like site for real estate news in India. It’s a basic Pligg implementation. I recently came across this site while I was browsing related to real estate in India. Seems like a new site, not many users are there. I got some good information about real estate market in India. A good place to get information, if you are watching the real estate industry in India.

What do you expect if Google gets to design the next generation Car? Is it Car 2.0? Yes it really happened. About a year back, Think Nordic, a battery electric vehicle company located in Norway, had a brainstorming session at the Googleplex in Mountain View. The question on the table was

“If you could build a car company from the ground up, with all we know about the Web and mass customization and social responsibility and localization and sustainability and viral marketing, what would that look like?”

The result of that brainstorming session is, Think City a little Web-enabled (yes, I said web enabled), carbon-free electric driving machine, which will be in the market later this year. More about Think City is in business2 (link here). However I’m more interested to talk about the web-enabled feature of Think City and it’s resemblance to the Web 2.0 world.

Read the question that was posted in the brain storming session, It has words like ‘with all we know about the Web’ , ‘mass customization’ , ’social responsibility’ , ‘localization’ and ‘viral marketing’ which are closely related to the Web 2,0 world. And the result out of this, the Think City is nothing but Web 2.0 on wheels. Let me highlight the web enabled features of Think City here and then we will discus them in detail

• Every car will be Internet and Wi-Fi enabled making this as a rolling computer that can communicate wirelessly with its driver and other networks or any other Think City
• The company will sell cars online (like Dell for computers). No showrooms. Built to order.
• You could text message your vehicle to, say, check its battery charge. The city will reply back.
• The City will e-mail you if it’s time for service. It will also provide you best offers available near to your location
• Think CEO, claims that, the main thing they want to sell is not a car but the whole concept around the car
• Think City provides a platform where users could come up with features; I mean write small useful software applications for Think City. The world’s first open-source car.

After reading the web enabled features of the Car, I cannot stop comparing this to the Web 2.0 concepts. Here is a comparison

• Web 2.0 is all about communicating to the Web. Think City same way revolutionized the communication to the car. You could text message it and communicate with it.
• Web 2.0 is also about building Software as a service not as a product - Right now we buy car as a product. However Think City will be built to order. It’s a service not a readily available product that you could buy.
• Web 2.0 provides a platform to build up on. Like Web 2.0 sites providing API’s to build on top of them. Same way Think City provides a platform where in which developers could build unique applications on top of it

You know what, In the future, I won’t be surprised to see, a social networking site for Think City owners, which will allow the owner to register for free and keep track of where you are. And possibly let you know real time if anyone in your friend’s network is close to you while you are traveling. I bet there will be all sorts of different applications coming out of the imaginative brains of the entrepreneurs.