Traditionally when a ship is launched, it splashes into the water with a nicely painted hull but with still quite a bit of work to be done on its innards. Thus it seems to be with Google Wave, the cutting-edge messaging and collaboration technology unveiled today in preview form to about 100,000 people who signed up to participate in its testing. I had signed up for the early access program the day that Wave was announced, so I was pleased to see this morning an invite to try it out. One quick click of an email link, and I was in to my Wave space. Great! It appeared to be pretty much what I had seen in the developer's preview several weeks ago, and the features overall seemed to work as advertised, albeit without some of the flashy edges like real-time text translation. Drag and drop contacts into waves, easy embedding of widgets, videos and images, easy editing and organizing - good stuff for something that was just a cutting-edge demo a few weeks ago.
But...now what? Who do I Wave with - or to? Fortunately Google had pre-populated my contacts list with a couple of social media mavens, so I had some hope for interactions right away. One of the pre-populated waves (message/collaboration threads) enabled me to invite up to eight other people to join Wave. That was the good news, but the bad news was that these people would be nominees for joining Wave - in other words, Google will add them as the technology allows them to handle more users gracefully. This is, after all a preview version of Wave technology, meaning that it's more about testing its ability to handle users at scale and basic features before they begin to invite people with less tolerance for the cutting edge of new technologies. I decided to put a message out on Twitter to see who might want an invite to Wave. Ooops. Everyone came out of the woodwork looking for an invite to the new hotness. Seven invites later (some of them grumbling that they couldn't play right away), I have one spare and a long waiting list of possible invites who I would love to Wave with, but still not too many people on the live system.
Even with these limitations, Wave is quite impressive right out of the box. There's a bit of day-one instability in the system, of course - sometimes waves notify you that they need to be reloaded and a mysterious resync icon pops up now and again - but for a cutting-edge technology that just got rolled out to 100,000 people worldwide a few hours ago, that's to be expected. What was remarkable is how intuitive it is to use Wave, though for those wanting step-by-step instructions on "how to" usage, there's a wave in your initial inbox with lots of videos and links to good support materials. You just click, start typing, drag this, tag that, and you're off and running. Most email and Facebook users should find Wave's features pretty easy to use. You can import contacts from your Gmail contacts list easily (assuming that they're on Wave, which is pretty hit or miss), which is nice, and some of your Google Profile information is imported automatically into Wave, though updates in Wave will not flow back into your main Profile page. In other words, at least on Day One, there's really not that much integration with production systems yet (sorry, C.C. Chapman, let's be honest about this).
What's particularly interesting is how Wave has layered the types of communications that you can receive and share. Your inbox works pretty much like an email inbox, overall, and there are expected email-like filters like spam, trash bin, and such, which are all wave collections. But then you notice that the Settings link pops up a list of waves. In other words, much of the functionality of wave will appear as collections of applications built into waves as opposed to separate features. That's a real, real important thing to watch, one-upping the embeddable apps and widgets that have been in use for a while on other platforms. It means that the architectural "bones" of Wave can remain very lean, while much of its functionality gets loaded as content "meat." This parallels some of the thinking that has gone into Google's Chrome browser and nascent Chrome OS operating system, as well: lean core technology, fleshy content.
The most interesting layer of communications, though, has yet to be populated. As you float your cursor over a navigation element called "Requests," the tooltip text that pops up says, "Waves from untrusted parties or sources." In other words, there will be a Wave channel in which you can receive less personal communications, presumably a combination of marketing messages and more public sharing of messages akin to that found in Twitter. While the phrasing of this description needs some serious work, the concept seems to be quite elegant. One set of waves from trusted contacts, others from more "out of the blue" sources, both of which are important, of course, but by default you get to manage your circles of trust on two levels. That's a one-up on both Twitter and Facebook, if Google can pull it off. Of course, using folders and tagging you can create filters that combine both trusted and more public waves, so you can mix up communities at will, presumably. That's an interesting and very flexible way to manage networks, enabling people to be marketing-oriented or downright spammy in their communications but not cluttering up one's primary inbox of trusted contacts.
It will be interesting to see how some of these features roll out into the enterprise-oriented version of Wave, particularly the Requests feature. Obviously there will have to be some additional plumbing installed on Wave to enable enterprises to enforce policies on who from outside an organization can join particular inner circles of waves. But assuming that this is in the works, Wave should make it extraordinarily easy to move resources outside of an organization into a circle of trust on very specific waves that can help them to collaborate very efficiently - without exposing other information assets that are meant to be kept more private. Clearly Google is thinking way down the road on how to integrate Wave with its other efforts to enhance workplace productivity.
So although there's really not much happening on Day One in Google Wave, it's exciting to be hands-on with these features and to get a sense of how Wave is going to fit in to Google's strategy in a more intuitive way. For all of its promise, though, Wave has a tough battle ahead. Increasingly mature competitors like Facebook and Twitter, already endowed with millions of users, can always decide to swing in their extensive feature and applications sets to add more Wave-like features to keep their communities happy. But Wave has the distinct advantage of being a platform that is part of Google's wide technology vision that encompasses messaging, email, collaboration, enterprise productivity, mobile applications, operating systems and more.
Microsoft and others will attempt to compete with this new technology, to be sure, but the contenders all have deep legacies of software and relationships that will be far more difficult to migrate to a fresh new environment than Google need worry about. Put simply, there just isn't any one else out there coming close to daring thoughts as big as those surrounding Wave. I certainly welcome more effective competition in any market, and Wave itself has much to prove in the weeks and months ahead, but when it comes to collaborative messaging that can span both media and enterprise markets, it looks like Google is out there on a huge wave all by itself. Again.
You are reading a blog post that started as a comment. That in and of itself is hardly unusual for people who decide to leave detailed comments on one blog and then expand on them in their own blog, but the way that I did it was through Google Sidewiki, a new feature of the Google Toolbar that is used commonly in the Firefox Web browser. Once installed, an icon on the Toolbar enables you to enter a comment-like bit of information relating to a blog entry or other Web page that you're viewing, either about the whole page or a section of text. Once you've had your say, your text (and it's only text, no links, images or other enhanced items are allowed) can be saved in Sidewiki and at the same time get pushed to an entry in one of your Blogger weblogs (finally, a small side-benefit for using Blogger). You can also easily share a comment with someone via email, Twitter or Facebook.
Tools like Sidebar have been in use for many years, but none of them have found that much of an audience. One of the reasons seems to be that comment editing systems that float on the side of a page tend not to draw your attention as you scroll down it. Sidebar may suffer this same fate in the short run, though its ability to be relevant throughout a page and contexutal to very specific parts of the page makes it an interesting companion tool that may escape similar disinterest given to other annotation tools. Its presence only in Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers also seems to limit the potential community of users, though versions for Chrome and other browsers such as Safari are likely soon. What is likely to save Sidebar from lack of interest is the fact that it's well, a Google tool, of course. Google has lacked a reasonable entry point into social media communities for some time outside of lackluster experiments such as Orkut. The voting, abuse control and integrated features that make it easy to share Sidebar content in lifestreaming services are ways for Google to play its strongest emphasis - putting all of the Web in context - alongside the strengths of other social media services. So, while it's still kind of an iffy play, it does offer some solid thinking
that may accelerate Google as a destination for valuable comment content extended out to all of the Web alongside its own Blogger blogs.
One angle where you can see how this can take on a new angle for building Google's destination content is in a feature that doesn't get much attention at first. After a bit of use I noticed a link in Sidewiki that says "view my Google profile." When you click on this link , you discover that your Google Profile page now has a tab that displays your Sidewiki comments along with links to the content that you were commenting on. This is an interesting feature, enabling Sidewiki content to act as a seeding mechanism for a Facebook-like stream of links and information. In typical Google fashion this is a subtle tool that builds content in places that you may not expect, integrating it both into the experience of visiting a Web site and visiting a friend's Google profile. This cries out for a widget-oriented implementation that can enable Sidewiki to integrate more closely with destination content as Facebook Connect enables through sites like the Huffington Post.
All of this points to the elephant not yet in the room but waiting in the hallway: Google Wave. It's clear that Sidewiki and its integration with Google Profiles is custom-tucked for Wave technology, which would enable highly sophisticated real-time content sharing with trusted peers. That's a relatively long-term strategy, though, leaving lots of room for other comment sharing tools to gain market momentum. Sidewiki is yet another interesting piece of the Google puzzle, a puzzle that encompasses so may individual little pieces popping out of the Googleplex one at a time that it's hard to appreciate at times what it is that Google is trying to do. Perhaps that's the way that they want it - a charging elephant might be a little more alarming to people. But in the meantime, a lot of people have a hard time seeing even pieces of Google's social media strategy making sense.
I found Michael Arrington's comments on the new Google Sidewiki feature to be an oddly neutral and superficial analysis, albeit with a bit of inside scoop. While this, like many other Google projects, may not seem like much at first, it has the potential for major impact. First, it comes at a time when comment spam is becoming a major problem. Technologies such as "captcha" character graphics that weed out automated comment spam are failing, as spammers are hiring people who work cheap enough to defeat these mechanisms cost-effectively with manual entry of spam. The Digg-like voting and ranking will help to push such garbage to the bottom of the comment pile.
Secondly, comments are becoming a major source of content unto themselves, as seen in platforms such as Facebook and Friendfeed. Sidewiki is an ingenious play to get that kind of community content embedded almost anywhere, while at the same time enabling the community to develop a personality of its own. This is a unique kind of platform play that defines a "between the raindrops" approach to these competitors.
This all points to one key factor - most technology platforms have done very little to improve the value of comments or to address long-standing technical issues. They're not a sexy tech feature by most techie standards, so the glory goes elsewhere. Google sees them as a major opportunity, and may have a major play as a result. I feel somewhat uncomfortable about the disintermediation factors, but the ability to post a comment as a blog entry on your Blogger weblog (finally a reward for having stuck with it!) enables you to shift the conversation to focus on your own content fairly handily. Key weakness in this feature: you can't post links or graphics in your Sidewiki content, so your entries won't be very rich. I am sure that this will be addressed in time, perhaps as a part of Wave technology being introduced.
At the end of the day, if it makes your core content more valuable and it's better technology than what you can get yourself, it's probably a good thing. I welcome better comment solutions that can compete with this, but right now we all need a little relief from comment fatigue - especially if you're trying to keep the spammers away.
It's been a busy week for attention-getting events in content technologies, with the Google I/O developer's conference in San Francisco vying for mindshare with the All Things D conference in San Diego. Both were important events in their own right, with Steve Ballmer's announcement of a preview launch for Microsoft's new Bing search engine facing off against Google's announcement of Google Wave, a new technology that promises to deliver a new standard for common messaging and collaboration infrastructure for both the Web and enterprises. Hmm, yet another stab at launching a Live.com successor versus a reworking of email, wikis, real-time messaging and file sharing in one swoop. Which event should Walt and Kara have been covering in more detail? I think that I'll take door two, though Bing is worth taking a gander at in its own right. Mind you, Google giving away free Android phones with a month's free call and data time to developers at I/O certainly upped the attention-getting factor a little bit, as well.
Google Wave is important for any number of reasons, but it's important first and foremost because many major technology companies could have done this, and probably should have, but chose to stick with incremental improvements to older software technologies. Back in the 1970s, for example, when it was a big deal to get messages from one person to another person on a remote computer, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was an important tool to facilitate widely different computing platforms to pass messages to one another. Good stuff in its time, to be sure, but today the fundamental concept of email is entirely out of step with today's communications methods, where message content tends to be shared and stored in Web cloud infrastructure rather than being scooted around to storage devices at the edge of the Web. Add in mashups, instant messaging and the real-time broadcast capabilities of services such as Twitter and it's clear that email is a completely inadequate messaging infrastructure for building content services that really satisfy today's sophsticated consumer and enterprise audiences. Yet for decades interoperable standards for a successor to email sponsored by major technology companies have been no-starters.
Enter Google Wave, a new communications technology that made its debut at Google's recent I/O conference for developers. Built to leverage the emerging HTML 5 standards for content and software services delivered via Web browsers, Wave is an open-source set of protocols, platforms and products that enable anyone to put together services that allow people to create and share content and display applications with one another using non-proprietary Web programming standards. Given that the Web has been overshadowed recently by proprietary products such as Apple's iPhone and Amazon's Kindle and applications environments such as Adobe Air, Google Wave is a very strong statement from Google that the common and open standards of the Web are the key to unlocking the full potential of the most valuable communications medium ever invented.
Wave is also an extremely strong challenge to Microsoft and just about every major software and services provider hoping to take some piece of the emerging world of real-time collaborative communications that spans consumers, enterprises and an expanding multitude of mobile and desktop computing platforms. While other companies are still trying to leverage their ownership of technology intellectual property, Google learned long ago that it's far more important to own the moments that people interact with technology. Some people try to call those moments "media," but Google was one of the first companies to realize that these transitory moments were far more valuable and complex than both traditional media companies and technology companies had imagined.
If you can find the time it's really worth it to go through the full video of the demo video that shows all of the potential of Wave as a messaging medium. For those that don't have the time, here's a brief tick list of things that will leave you oohing, aahing and - hopefully - thinking:
A "wave" can be any number of digital objects - messages, documents, images, embedded applications - that can be exposed to people just by dragging and dropping a profile icon into the Wave object.
Wave enables concurrent real-time information transfer to and from collaborators. So although you can view completed messages in Wave as you would an email, instant message or other completed communication, you can also experience it as a real-time conversation or collaboration. As you type, the characters of your message appear in the other person's browser as they are being typed. People can type together in multiple languages (with real-time translation as needed). The real-time semantic spell-checker is pretty amazing in the demo. The open-source Wave protocol makes this all happen.
Wave objects can start out as a simple message, have replies and participants added, enables people to share private messages from within the wave, can allow people to edit an object concurrently and to view those edits as they are happening concurrently, can use rich text with drag and drop hyperlinks, allows the dragging and dropping of videos, images, texts, hyperlinks, enables rich tagging - and can do this all in real-time on any platform that uses the Wave protocols, including enterprise platforms.
Anyone can develop Wave-compatible applications, including those who want them "inside the firewall" of an enterprise. Demos were given on Wave working in Google's own Chrome browser but also Firefox and on iPhones as well as Google's own Android mobile smart phones. Examples in the I/O demo of an "Acme" third party implementation of Wave and an embedded "Twave" application for including Twitter messages in Wave underscored that any developer can use Wave protocols and standards to develop compatible applications that leverage Wave capabilities.
In other words, this is a complete rethink of how we use Internet-based messaging to communicate and to collaborate, enabling content to be assembled in Web cloud infrastructure as real-time conversations. It's young technology also, to be sure, but it rides on the back of the enormous cloud infrastructure resources that Google and others have assembled over the past several years. Whatever scalability and reliability issues need to be worked out for Wave are small compared to the decades of effort it has taken to get infrastrcuture in place already to keep up with Wave's potential. If you think of how the relatively simple Twitter infrastructure has been tweaked and kept alive with fairly few "fail whale" outages during its exponential growth of the past year, then it's probably safe to say that the potential for Wave to grow rapidly as a market force in real-time and collaborative messaging is not likely to be gated by basic issues such as networking and servers.
Given the slow adoption rate amongst software developers for Google's Open Social programming interface, though, it was far from certain that developers were going to get jazzed up about Wave as something that deserved their attention - hence the high-energy introduction for Wave at the I/O event. The giveaway of Android phones to I/O attendees was no accident, of course, in this regard. What other real-time messaging medium has the potential to be changed by I/O's potential? Why telephony, of course. With millions of phone calls being made already on services such as Skype and even Second Life, the telephone networks' days as the universal real-time messaging medium are numbered. Google's open-source Android software is about to empower dozens of new and more affordable smart phone models around the world, making Wave a perfect tool to help accelerate the demise of telephony as we have known it. It's likely that Wave will be a key component in accelerating the acceptance of Android, and vice versa.
As traditional content and software publishers continue to try to wrestle the Web into one proprietary box after another to suit their established business models, it's important to remember that the world is aching to have cost-effective productivity improvements that will help to boost the global economy. Wave is a good example of a content technology that has the potential to sweep aside many drags on Web and enterprise productivity in ways that can help to create and to contextualize content in more valuable ways than ever before. In the long run, that can only be good for publishing. My suspicion is that you'll see Wave in a Gmail inbox near you pretty soon. For those who were hoping that there would be a breather from the pace of change being fomented by the Web with the introduction of platforms like iPhone and Amazon's Kindle, I am sorry to say that you had best get down to the gym and start getting used to more fast breathing ahead in the emerging Web cloud economy.
In short, Knol will enable people to create encyclopedia-like articles on various topics which can be rated by their readers and have both in-article links to other sources on the Web and automatically generated links to related Knol content. Unlike Wikipedia, there's one author per article, but multiple authors can create articles on the same topic, creating a free-market effect as to who is the leading expert on the topic. Articles will be equipped with Google ads, revenues from which will be shared with the author.
This is quite different in many important aspects from Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia, which in addition to attributing authors only in the history trail on collaboratively edited articles also maintains an ad-free environment for their content. While there are more than passing similarities to Wikipedia in Knol's overall design, the system doesn't seem likely to yield similar results. Knol's emphasis on single authorship without editing means that any particular subject is going to gain popularity based on a particular person's outlook, which may be good one day and quite out of date the next.
So while Knol may help people to get a leg up on what leading experts think about a particular subject - and mind you, that might be great for consultants like us folks at Shore - it's at the mercy of the editing priorities of whomever is maintaining their articles. For fast-changing topics this means that it may take a little bit more work for a reader to figure out who's really at the top of their game on a particular topic - and who's off on holiday for a while. Wikipedia needs constant monitoring to keep powerful people and organizations from trying to add spin to their articles, but at least there's highly active editing of one reasonably definitive version of the facts on a given topic.
While the comparison to Wikipedia is inevitable I see this in many ways as much a play for a wider variety of reference portals. Certainly About.com's docent system has resulted in topic experts who have financial motivations to maintain reference topics well on a wide variety of subjects, and in many ways Knol seems to be aimed at providing more efficient ways for subject matter experts to compete with one another in ways that generate revenues more efficiently than About.com. Knol puts more of an onus on an individual author to keep their information up to date, as others could come up with fresher content first, providing a framework that will help them to focus on content while leaving usability, design and monetization concerns to other. As Google's OpenSocial initiative gains steam one can imagine a person's Knol pages as reference content that can travel with them throughout related social media sites.
This free-market approach to knowledge is intriguing but it highlights a major problem that Google faces. As more and more high-quality user-generated content comes online, many people are finding answers to their questions from leading experts in social media venues that are precluding the need to reference a search engine for answers. As it is, so many topic-oriented searches display Wikipedia articles as the definitive source that in some ways Google has become the default front end for Wikipedia lookups as much as an index of the Web in general, reducing overall ad engagement on Google search results pages - and, in time, fewer searches generated on Google. Fewer searches means less available inventory for Google ads - so keeping more people engaged in Google inventory of some kind becomes an increasingly important goal for Google. So as much as this is a very interesting and useful approach to knowledge development it's overshadowed by commercial considerations that may or may not result in knowledge that people really trust. Collaborative editing has its limits for generating quality reference content, but at some point one's own version of a topic needs to stand up to the challenge of other knowledgeable people.
There are many different ways that Knol could evolve out before it launches, but the key factor would seem to be to provide people with a way to aggregate knowledge effectively. As much as one individual's view of a topic can be useful collaborative editing offers the most certain way to gain insights that are going to provide people with the deepest insight into a given topic. There's still room in such a system to reward individuals - one can imagine a system like Wikinvest in which a collaborative neutral article could be supplemented by opinionated personal articles - but first and foremost one hopes that Google will see that the best system will be one that serves the truth before it serves the bottom line. Knol holds out great promise as a platform that can help individuals to create useful reference content, but it may wind up having to serve too many competing interests to gain much of an impact on the marketplace.
I took the suggestion of my colleague Jeff Cutler and sat down to lunch recently with Collexis EVP and CMO Darrell Gunter to get a briefing on their progress in launching product platforms leveraging their core content technologies. I must admit that I approached the lunch with some skepticism. The knowledge management landscape is littered with startups that had great technology ideas but which never quite made it as independent companies. With this troubled environment in mind, what was it that Collexis could offer that would distinguish it quickly enough to be a successful David amongst content Goliaths?
Collexis' core competency is being able to apply its "secret sauce" of semantic processing and faceted navigation to more valuable forms of content than others and to develop unique ways to apply those semantic tools to real-life business problems. Where companies like Inxight had semantic engines trained to parse already commoditized forms of content such as news articles Collexis focuses its semantic processing capabilities on unstructured content generated by professionals such as medical researchers. The story could have ended right there like so many other companies in the KM "dead pool", but instead of settling for marketing a nifty content categorization tool Collexis has worked with its recently acquired platform partner Syynx to develop some very serious solutions for scientific, technical and medical clients that are strong indicators of how semantics and professional networks can combine to create powerful publishing solutions in high-value enterprise markets. The most interesting of these emerging platforms is biomed experts.com, a portal being readied for launch by Collexis that combines Collexis' semantic capabilites with public research articles from PubMed to develop an extremely powerful expert network tool. Put in any relevant set of terms from the world of STM publishing and biomedexperts.com will return a cite-ranked list of relevant categories that can be navigated to find experts who publish research in that topic specialty. Choose any one of these experts (click on screen grab to right for more detail) and get an excellent analysis of their publishing patterns in this topic arena, including a publishing timeline and categoried publication cites organized by more than a dozen related topic areas, including disorders, anatomy, procedures, physiology and so on. If this person's work is of interest to you it's easy in biomedexperts.com to track this person's publications and to invite them into your personal network. Biomedexperts.com enables one to view patterns in research and relationships amongst researchers with other powerful analysis tools, including a nifty map representation of which locations are collaborating heavily with other worldwide locations on a topic as well as a startree-like representation of the strength of publishing ties between different authors.
While we've seen some navigation tools like this deployed on platforms such as Factiva's Search 2.0 research portal Collexis has taken sophisticated analysis of texts to a whole new level in placing the exploration of authors and their network of relationships at the core of biomedexperts.com's capabilities. Not only can one identify rapidly the strengths of an author's research with biomedexperts.com but one can also move rapidly to understand the social contexts in which that research is developed. When your next step in your own research is understanding not only who wrote what but who's in thick with whom in their research it can accelerate rapidly your own next steps.
While it's uncertain that biomedexperts.com will succeed in developing community around its platform any more effectively than other efforts such as Elsevier's 2Collab its focus on organizing both content and authors into meaningful patterns is a key advantage that could help Collexis accelerate its product development efforts in a number of very interesting directions - including other market verticals where professional expertise is expressed effectively through publishing. Collexis understands as well as any other content company out there today that content is as much about the people who create it as it is about documents and data and has developed tools that exploit that understanding very effectively.
This interesting marriage of social insight and insight into topic expertise is a valuable combination that we can expect to see in many major content platforms over the next few years. Collexis has a window of opportunity in which it can sling its very potent capabilities at Goliaths focusing on similar opportunities - or decide to collaborate with a wide range of Davids and Goliaths to help them succeed in keeping their value propositions from frittering away as social networking tools begin to replace document repositories as primary content discovery tools. Lock and load, Collexis, you're in the right place at the right time. Thanks for the sandwich!
Rafael Sidi is pumped up about Elsevier's new 2collab social bookmarking service, which he describes as the product of "the young turks in Amsterdam," presumably product developers trying to encourage this major scientific publisher to engage the online world of collaborative content. As what sounds to be a countercultural "intrapreneur" initiative 2collab has a lot going for it. 2collab has all of the features that one would expect to find in a modern social bookmarking service - public and private groups, tagging, commenting, voting, easy bookmarking and a very attractive and highly usable design - combined with editable citation information stored with each bookmark (click on the screen grab above to get a flavor of the metadata). However, the citation data cannot be referenced via the 2collab search engine yet, a minor inconvenience in the short run but something that should be addressed once a significant body of content is aggregated via the service.
As to when that significant body will appear is anyone's guess at this point. In spite of a decent launch and prominent billing for the service on Elsevier's corporate portal there appear to be relatively few takers for the service so far. I was challenged to find any publicly posted articles with comments other than my own in five days' worth of posts and thus far today there have been nine public posts in all. To the product's credit the timestamping makes it very easy to figure this out, but in the meantime it's a reminder that the community is still in the process of forming around this product. Group participation doesn't fare much better, with public groups still very small and formed around topics mostly centered on online technology topics.
2collab has an excellent design and the development team is to be commended for a first-rate job in launching a highly credible platform right out of the box, but it's going to take more than features similar to established social media outlets to attract people already using those other platforms. Just as a simple example of the challenge that faces Elsevier, a topic like "congestive heart failure" returns 141 results on del.icio.us, accumulated over a long period of time, to be sure, but in the meantime indicating a ways to go for 2collab to attract active participation. As important as it is to get the technology right in social media it's equally important to get some core communities invested in the platform so that their examples of successful interactions can get other participants jazzed. Consider 2collab to be in serious need of jazzing at this point.
Can Elsevier manage to get some more mojo behind 2collab and develop it into a thriving social media community? In truth Elsevier and other scientific publishers are so far behind in embracing social media that it's going to be an uphill struggle for any of them to make significant progress in developing social media capabilities that are, admittedly, rather long-term investments for as-yet-uncertain future revenues. But one thing seems to be certain: whichever scientific publisher is able to finally crack the social media marketplace and develop a tool that becomes the "go-to" place for sharing and discussing scientific literature is going to win a big, big prize at the end of the day - regardless of how that prize scales to current revenue streams. Consider 2collab a modest bet by Elsevier on the future of social media as a publishing platform that is in need of doubling-down sooner rather than later to ensure a place at the emerging world of user-driven publishing markets.
With much ballyhoo Microsoft unveiled its new HealthVault beta portal recently, a big push by the Microsoft to get a leg up on Google's position as a source for health information. The HealthVault portal itself could hardly be called a portal: it's a landing page that invites you to use a special version of Microsoft's Live Search, set up a portfolio of private health information that can be shared with trusted sources and a link to software that can enable one to download information from health monitoring devices into your HealthVault data. Once you've selected any of these options there's no navigating back to the main portal page. So what you get right now is more of a showcase for potential partners than an online presence that's going to attract an audience.
The Live Search tuned up for HealthVault has a number of useful features, many of which have been used for a long time already in Google's health-oriented searches and in Amazon's A9 search portal. The latter similarities are no coincidence, given Amazon's decision a while back to dump Google as a search partner in favor of Microsoft and the highlighting of Amazon's content in the HealthVault portal. Search results are pretty good in HealthVault, with some being downright rich in content and others being merely comparable to Google search results. Put in a broad terms such as "Autism" and HealthVault Live Search returns a column labeled "Articles" with Wikipedia content - kind of a mini-Answers.com - a column of Web search results and a column of sponsored content from Amazon with contextual ads beneath it. Atop this is a category-based navigation similar to Google's Co-Op feature.
Something a bit more off the beaten track like "pancreatic cancer ductal tumors" ditches the Wikipedia articles and draws in more scholarly content in search results than one would find in Google, which tends to segregate scholarly resources off in its Google Scholar search. That may or may not be a good thing depending on who is using this feature, but if you're trying to dig deeper into a health issue you definitely have some contrasts between Google and Microsoft to consider. There are also some interesting differences when you try a term that may not be thought of immediately as a health resource, such as "cinnamon," which is now being used as a resource for blood sugar and cholesterol management. In Google there is no health-oriented Co-Op category information available for this search whereas HealthVault provides a very useful taxonomy. However, again HealthVault comes out a little heavy on the hardcore health information and a little light on more consumer-accessible informaiton.
If you see an article that interests you in search results you can bookmark it into your HealthVault secure account information via the "Add to Scrapbook" feature, but in doing so you'll have to pass through a login screen and some other screens that were just plain frightening - I had no idea what would happen if I said "yes" to the questions asked, but went along anyway - just to get a bookmark into my HealthVault account. I'll allow that this is a Beta product and that such oddities are likely to be worked out in time, but it's one of those typical instances of Microsoft features that sound great on paper and wind up never working the way that you hoped that they would.
The HealthVault Account feature allows a member to use their HealthVault information in association with a number of health screening services and online medical records services, presumably to make it easier for people to give you proper medical care and advice. This is obviously the big corporate hook for HealthVault, with doubtless the hope that major HealthCare providers would default to HealthVault as a common provider of this type of service and enable them in time to deliver streamlined services and benefits based on HealthVault as a common interface. That may very well be, but right out of the box don't expect too many consumers to be jumping head over heels for this service. The non-friendly home page for HealthVault says in essence to the consumer "Hi, we're Microsoft, give us all of your health history details and we'll make it easy for corporations to look at them." Thanks, but I think that we've been there already with Microsoft Wallet, an earlier stab by Microsoft to become the universal online payment service for ecommerce. You'd think that they'd learn from that experience that it helps to look at things from the consumer's perspective first.
One of the more promising features of the beta HealthVault is the HealthVault Connection Center, which highlights software that makes it easy for people using health monitoring equipment to collect data from these devices in HealthVault and to make it available to physicians who can scan that information as needed. This plays into Microsoft's strengths as a provider of gizmo interfaces and offers some potential long-term benefits for wellness monitoring services. But even here it's early days for the beta product: the HealthVault Connection Center at this point is just a set of links to Microsoft's device driver and software download pages on the main Microsoft Site. There's no integration to speak of.
Microsoft has carved out an ambitious vision for HealthVault, tying in personal, Web and device-driven content into a framework that may make it easier for health care professionals to provide services to patients and wellness enthusiasts. In the still-sketchy outlines of this product you can see how Microsoft sees a huge opportunity to become a master repository for health information that could make it a power player in the health care industry as a result. With the far more competitive and commoditized media marketplace looking less and less like a winner for Microsoft this leveraging of its strengths in both the consumer marketplace and the corporate marketplace may be a great way for Microsoft to firm up its established but threatened footholds in both markets.
But clearly this ambitious vision has a long way to go. The Live Seach results are very well designed and promising, but they are not so clearly superior to Google's existing health care offerings that it is likely to create an immediate stampede to Live's view of health information. The corporate feel of the site and the utter lack of deftness in making people feel that there's something in it for them to provide highly sensitive personal information puts a damper on the potentially strong value-add features that could be built off of it. The device integration is a nice concept, but there's a long way to go before we see dashboards built off of this information that will be useful to both consumers and health professionals. There was enough goodness in all of this to get at least one news cycle of positive spin, but there's a long road ahead to make this a viable hit for Microsoft.
Still, it's more than its major competitors have done lately to offer a vision of how personal, Web, scholarly and device-driven medical content can come together to improve health care for both consumers and professionals. Microsoft would claim that the've stolen the march from Google with this initiative, and from a vision standpoint they may have a reason to crow a bit. But from an execution standpoint it's a clumsy enough start with typical Microsoft over-hyping of fairly modest features and partner relationships that potential heavyweight content partners are not going to get bowled over immediately as they have been in days past. This may buy Google and others time to come up with their own approaches that may have a more consumer-friendly appeal that will be essential for the long-term success of any such initiative. In the meantime HealthVault's visionary offering gives both content producers and medical professionals a lot to think about in how they plan to make better use of the Web to improve their services to consumers.
It's been a busy week for attention-getting events in content technologies, with the 
