Product Review – latoga labs

Social Networking Social Value

February 20, 2008 Leave a Comment

Social networking sites are still all the rage. The challenge lately seems to be coming up with something that is not only new and original but adds value. Of all the sites where I have created an account LinkedIn is still the only one that I will use multiple times a week due to the value I receive from their service. As a business person, it is extremely valuable to stay on top of changes in my network and being able to leverage my network in my business dealings.

Today for example I came across Dopplr for the first time and have to ask…why bother. If I don’t see the value, either personally or for some greater good, in investing my time creating yet another profile and entering in yet another set of data I won’t do it. While the idea behind it is interesting, the value isn’t there for me. Especially if I have to hand enter the information that makes the social network work.

On the flip side of this coin, I have come across a few that I find really interesting.

One is a stealth social network site that I was granted early access to which not only is a new twist on an old idea but has the potential to add value in an area that is still lacking. The trick is always figuring out how to monetize the community without upsetting the community or destroying the value of the information that draws the community to the network in the first place. This, usability, and my knowledge of the target user community, were the areas that I was talking to this company about. Unfortunately, I was granted access under the agreement that I wouldn’t talk about it yet…so I have to honor my NDA for now, but stay tuned for more as soon as it launches.

Another is a site that my wife came across this morning, Carbonrally. This is such a simple, yet wonderful idea; one of those that surprises you that no one has done something like it before. From their mission statement:

“Carbonrally is a web-based activism platform offering individuals and groups a fun, simple and social way to have a measurable impact on climate change. “

It’s not only a social network of people wanting to fight global warming, but also a platform to enable this through simple challenges that help you reduce your carbon footprint. Yet, by making these challenges competitive and by tracking how you and others do in these challenges, they tap into the human competitive spirit to drive people to have an impact. Combine this with some basic statistics to help you gauge your impact on regional basis (and extend that competitive nature by comparing your region’s impact to others) and you have a very compelling social network that creates real social change.

Unfortunately, I failed today on the latest challenge. I forgot my commuter mug when I got my morning coffee…but after the gentle reminder and concrete information on the impact that my forgetfulness had, I won’t tomorrow.

The future challenge that I see Carbonrally facing is how to keep the site engaging for users so that when the initial competitive thrill wears off there is a reason for the users to keep coming back. There will always be the die hard planet saving types who will create the core of the community, but they need to expand beyond that core to really have global impact. The fact that the topic of the community is something altruistic in nature might help them. Time will tell.

Ohloh: Insight into Your Open Source Projects

June 13, 2007 Leave a Comment

One of the great things about Open Source software development is, well, it’s open-ness. Sort through your list of Open Source packages that you are running in your organization. You can go in and look at the source code for each one of them, right? But what’s behind that source code? Or Who?

I recently found a very interesting open source directory called Ohloh. Ohloh (oh, what a name!) takes a very interesting ‘bot’ approach to open source. They employ a legion of software bots to crawl through the major open source repositories and collect information about open source projects that you may never have known.

For example, did you know that the Firefox project has over 3 million lines of code? More importantly, how fast has the code base been growing? (or is it shrinking?). All you have to do is check out Firefox’s Code Statistics on Ohloh. You can see a breakdown of how many files within the Firefox code base are licensed under which licensing scheme. A trended history of code lines. And a breakdown of what percentage of Firefox is written in what programming language. When deciding on an which smaller scale open source projects to use, you can use this information to make a better decision. Do you have programmers with experience in the languages used within a project?

You can also look at an open source project’s list of contributors and how long they have been with the project as well as how often they submit code. The system even gives a heuristic on each contributors experiences level with various languages based on how many submissions have been found in each language and over a given period. There is even a social network aspect to the site where programmers can rate their peers (which needs to be taken in context of any social network site…). About the only thing that is missing is the one click ability to see if there are other projects that a contributor is also involved with (you can do this by doing a search for a contributor on the main page of the site, but this is so obvious I’m surprised the site’s developers didn’t include that on each developer’s project page).

Of course, what would a website with social features be if you couldn’t have an account and provide your own feedback on projects. Ohloh has that, as well as the ability for members to define the stack of open source software that they use. Which gives viewers the ability to see how many people are using a projects.

Ohloh provides a new twist on evaluating opens source software projects. However, there were a number of projects that I use which were not on the site, some of those missing projects surprised me as Ohloh has been around since 2004. Guess no one is perfect…

Jott Your Thoughts and Reminders

June 6, 2007 Leave a Comment

It’s not too often that I find a really useful and free service that I can see myself using almost daily. Today I found one. Even with the wide spread use of mobile email, at times it still not practical, safe, or possible to take down a quick note on your smart phone and email it out. Wouldn’t it be great if we all had a personal secretary that we could call to transcribe our note and then email it out? But who could afford that…right? Now we all can!

Jott is a essentially a note taking service that allows you to call a toll free phone number, record up to a 30 second note, reminder, idea, or whatever and then have it emailed to your inbox…fully transcribed! Even better, set up other people in your account and have the note emailed to them instead (or sent as a text message to their phone). Group people together and send a note to the entire group. And if you can’t wait the few minutes for the message to be transcribed, send it as an audio attachment! Jott even makes it easy to pull in your contacts from other services.

Jott is so simple, it’s brilliant!

I also love how the “Jott in Action” section on the website simply explains how the system works. If you know how to use a phone, email, and web browser…you can use this service.

Jott has been around for about a year now, and have a great service up and running in that time. The current restriction is that it’s available only in the United States. But I assume that this restriction won’t be there for too much longer.

I will definitely be using this service almost daily!