DaveJays Blog

Web 2.0 at my Company

APR 24th 2007 • 1 Comments

Today I had the pleasure of attending a keynote by Jose Castillo on Web 2.0. He's runs the blog thinkjose.com and he also spoke at SXSW this year. Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend SXSW, but at least I get to see Jose. This week is Sharepoint days at Eastman Chemical Company where I'm working until May 11. Jose delivered the opening keynote to kick off the conference.

It was a very interesting and entertaining keynote. He talked briefly about all the major next generation technologies that contribute to the whole Web 2.0 experience. From blogs, RSS, wikis, tag clouds, to podcasting and youtube, he covered most of what is associated with web 2.0 today. But what I'm curious about is how Eastman Chemical plans to incorporate these new technologies into their internal operations. Clearly they're utilizing the new version of Sharepoint for this, but in order for these technologies to make a difference people within the company will have to get involved and start thinking about new ways of collaboration that go beyond email in outlook.

Corporate Twitter

One of the technologies that Jose didn't really talk about too much is Twitter (although he did have the logo appear on the screen briefly during a section about widgets). If you don't know what twitter is, just go to twitter.com, you should be able to catch on pretty quick. Twitter receives a lot of undue flak in my opinion. There's plenty of pointless tweets out there, there's no debating that. But I think that it's a great way for people to stay in touch and connected when they might not be otherwise. I have friends and family who have moved far far away. We email occasionally, but it's hard to keep up with somebody strictly over email. That's where twitter really comes in handy! There's no need to catch up over email anymore because I've been able to keep tabs on others via twitter! How can this be used in the corporate world? Easy, if team members simply start using it they'll be able to stay in touch with each other. I have no idea what my coworkers do, the only time I get to catch up with what they've been up to is at my team's weekly meeting, or via email. Twitter would allow people working together to stay connected all the time. Unfortunately, I don't think the new version of Sharepoint has twitter built into it. It's a shame, I think it would be great, *IF* people would simply use it.

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