Infovark

Late in 1995, I paid seventy-five bucks to a guy who lived down my street for a Zoltrix 14.4 K PC internal modulator/demodulator card. Its purpose was to connect my new 486 DX-100 to ‘the Internet’ - this newfangled collective of computers talking to each other. I then proceeded to spend an entire weekend with cables, and drivers, and Windows, while I tried to figure it out. Eventually, my Mom got so fed up with not being able to ring my house (because the only phone line was always engaged) that she came over.

When I explained that I was trying to connect my computer to the Internet, she asked me what that was. I thought for a while.

“Well, it’s all the computers in the world connecting to each other.”

My Mom was used to my crazy schemes, and used to humoring me, so she smiled and nodded. Then she said:

“Why would you want to do that?”

At the time, I probably just smiled and said something patronising like “never you mind”and got back to trying to convince Windows 95 to auto-detect the new modem.

But here we are now at Web 2.0, and I think that the question is worth revisiting.

The tools we call “Web 2.0″ have been designed to promote connectivity, and sharing, and communication, which is why they are so interesting to people watching Enterprise 2.0. But what are we actually doing with them right now?

Facebook is the poster child for Web 2.0, so let’s take a look at what people are doing on Facebook. Here’s my personal Facebook “Requests” section - things that people want me to “do” on Facebook:

Hmmm. None of this stuff is earth-crashingly important. Surely we didn’t plug all the worlds’ computers together so that we could pretend to be vampires and pirates and then pretend to bite each other?

Or maybe we did… These kinds of technologies have a viral appeal because they’re just fun. They’re not important. They’re silly.

The Internet doesn’t have a point. We’re all just ‘Hanging Out’ .

An enterprise, on the other hand, is completely different. The reason that information enterprises connect their computers to each other is to focus on a single goal. Real estate agents want to sell houses. Software companies want to sell software. Government workers want to have lunch and play Solitaire. That’s what motivates these organizations to create their own intranets, little protected networks that exist outside of the Internet. They have a point.

Despite the whole SAAS fuss, I think that the utility of Enterprise 2.0 lies behind the firewall and not in the Internet cloud. SAAS is an appealing business model for companies because it means that they can charge customers forever, but the real power of Enterprise 2.0 will come from bringing those lessons learned into the organization.

The real benefits will come when we take the technologies of Web 2.0 and give them something meaningful to do.

Yesterday was an administration day at infovark. I spent the whole day not writing code.

When you start your own software company, you suddenly discover the amount of time you can spend on things other than making software. Before Gordon and I made the leap, we created a high-level schedule to take us to our first release. If you count effort expended against the plan, we’re tracking well. If you measure by milestone dates, we’re far behind. And it’s all due to things other than writing code.

We drastically underestimated the amount of time taken up by finance, legal, marketing, administration and human resources. It’s an understandable mistake. At our previous jobs, we had people to look after these things for us. Now we’re in charge of them as well as heading up our R&D efforts.

For other software entrepreneurs, here’s a short list of things that aren’t code:

• Incorporating your company
• Setting up a bank account
• Conducting shareholder meetings
• Researching your competition
• Setting up your website
• Figuring out health insurance
• Building your brand: logos, colors, style, etc.
• Purchasing hardware and software
• Setting up your phone system
• Setting up email
• Buying business insurance
• Determining product pricing
• Explaining to all your friends why you’re doing something crazy like starting your own business

All of these things are important, of course. You wouldn’t have a company without them. Yet the developer in you desperately wants to be left alone to “get some work done.” It requires an attitude adjustment. As an ISV, it’s all part of your work now.

Before we officially launched infovark, Gordon and I read Eric Sink on the Business of Software. It’s required reading for all developers working in an ISV or thinking about starting one. You can also check out his blog. It’s a great place to start learning about all those important things that aren’t code.

And now back to the fun stuff.

Dion Hinchiffe authored an essential post on the State of Enterprise 2.0. It’s less a survey of Enterprise 2.0 technologies or vendors than a survey of the state of adoption among mainline businesses. Some key insights I gleaned from the article include:

• Enterprise 2.0 is more about a change in mindset than a particular set of technologies. Enterprise 2.0 products are social tools, and cultural change accompanies their use.
• Organizations will find these tools proliferating throughout their enterprises, due to low barriers to adoption. Remember that much of Enterprise 2.0 was piloted on the Internet. The designers of those tools knew that the only reason their applications achieved wide adoption was because they were easy to use and solved customer problems. (Even if the problem is something trivial, like what my friends are doing right now.)
• Enterprise 2.0 technologies tend not to displace existing IT investments, but to add value to them. This is largely due to the grassroots adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools, but also with making participation in online communities optional. Join if you want, contribute if you want, but nobody can force you to do so. (In fact, as the FASTforward blog points out, it’s rare to find firms that aren’t actively standing in the way of Enterprise 2.0 adoption.)

Head over to the ZDNet blogs and have a look.

Radar Networks has announced their “first mainstream semantic web application”, called Twine. It looks to be an intriguing blend of some of the elements of wikipedia, facebook, and a sprinkle of digg and del.icio.us thrown in for good measure. You can see some screenshots, and get a better overview over on readwriteweb. (Twine is currently pre-beta)

It’s a hosted service, that allows for people to create semantic structured web content around themes and topics, called twines. (In some ways, it reminds me of squidoo, too.)

I’m not going to stick my head in the flamebox that is “the semantic web”(because I know Dean is working on that post), but I will say that I really like the way that twine is shaping up to manage relationships with entities other than people. If the semantic web can deliver this in a meaningful way, I think we’ll all be a bit happier.

(But the “Web 3.0″ moniker makes me cringe. I can’t help it. And I’m all about the buzzwords, too…)