IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Two- External Applications

As mentioned yesterday, I attended an interesting press session on social software at IBM in Cambridge on November 7, titled: “The Future of Enterprise Social Networks.” I was there as an outside commentator on a panel with Dave Weinberger and Stephen Sparkes. The opening positioning panel of IBMers was covered yesterday. Today, I talk about the demos of external applications. Tomorrow, I cover the demos of stuff going on inside the enterprise. Dave blogged the whole event with his post: IBM shows del.icio.us for the enterprise, and more.

Irene Greif, IBM Fellow and Director, Collaborative User Experience moderated the panel and positioned them within the Web 2.0 frame. Marc Andrews gave the first demo on Social Nets Analytics: WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind. The IBM web site states, “WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition features high-quality, scalable, secure, free-form text search that finds the most relevant corporate information from the plethora of enterprise information stored in file systems, content repositories, databases, collaboration systems, intranets, extranets, and public-facing corporate Web sites.” The demo showed how it can be used for public image monitoring. Marc said it will be a product announced soon. He showed how you can categorize this information, identify hot topics and critical issues, and understand the tone and sentiment of comments. The tool was pointed at public response to the Honda Civic in the demo. You could drill down to specific issues like fuel efficiency and see the tone and sentiment about public comments. I could see how this contextualized information could be more actionable, as Marc stated.

David Sink and Joel Farrell from the IBM Software Group next gave a demo of Appliki – a wiki like tool for quickly generating new applications. In the demo they showed how a chain of hardware stores could quickly set up an application to monitor weather, map stores, and link to inventory suppliers using available web services. In this case the wiki served as an aggregator and displayer of various web services. The services included Google Maps but it was unclear if they had the same integration of the other mashups around Google Maps. They seem to be able to monitor the sales of weather related inventory at the various stores and swap out inventory where needed.

The key feature was the ability to quickly assemble custom applications by drawing on available web services and integrating them. The first demo was based on existing products and is becoming a product itself soon. The demos tomorrow are currently only experiments inside IBM but they certainly have product possibilities.