Well done to the team

I’m delighted to hear that the BT Web21C SDK team has just won the eWEEK Excellence Award for Application Development, seeing off competition from Salesforce amongst others. Open multisided platforms are the way, and it’s great to see colleagues being honoured. Well done to the team. Full story here.

Disclaimer: I work for BT. And this is not an advertisement. Just a personal vote of thanks to the team.

Turn on, tune out, drop in

So you’re finding someone’s changed his tweet frequency, he’s tweeting too often for your liking? Maybe he’s got on his high horse about something and he can’t let go. And you just wish you could tune him out for a brief period?

Help is at hand. Look at this:

TwitterSnooze. Personalised short-term filtering out of someone. Now all I need is the same thing for a something and not a someone. When I can choose to tune out tweets about a particular subject or topic or entity, for a short while. [Yes it can be tag-driven if required].

QOTD

I don’t tend to do quotes du jour, but this time I had to make an exception, taken from this post.

Jeff Atwood:

A blog without comments is like Amazon without user reviews

In fact, the entire paragraph is worth highlighting:

A blog without comments is like Amazon without user reviews. Is it really even worth using at that point? The products themselves are commodities; I could buy them anywhere. Having dozens of highly relevant, informed user reviews means I’ll almost always buy stuff from Amazon given the chance. It’s a huge competitive advantage.

I could not agree more. So here’s my twopenn’orth:

Social objects are designed to commoditise over time. And as they commoditise, what makes them valuable is the tags, the reviews and the ratings around them. And in turn that makes the community around them valuable, the people who do the tagging, the reviewing and the rating.

So next time you get asked what the value of a community is, think about the role of the community in enhancing the value of objects that would otherwise be undifferentiated and valueless.