The House of Windsor now has a channel on YouTube: that’s very welcome… I’m sure it won’t be long before TheRoyalChannel is the most popular way of watching the annual Christmas Queen’s Speech…. and that they add a lot more content to show the Family at work.

Royal YouTube originally appeared on TheCustomer on December 23, 2007.

A nice piece by David Bowen that captures ‘where we’re up to’ on social networking

…and includes this gem
“The price is that it is important to give away really valuable
information, because only this will be picked up. “The first thing you
have to do is relinquish control,””

Yep.
Nailed it.
There’s no point in sharing information that everybody knows.
If you’re an expert, share stuff that only you know, that everybody else (who is interested) will find useful.

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social networking & business roundup article originally appeared on TheCustomer on October 5, 2007.

The FT reports that “BT Group
is attempting to create the world’s largest wi-fi network by persuading
millions of UK customers to turn their home wireless “hubs” into public
hotspots.”

What a smart idea – and it goes back to the idea that networked nodes’ power & value grows with the number of nodes on the network. If they can pull this off, BT’s share price will rocket (if the market understands what they’ve achieved).

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BT networks home wifi originally appeared on TheCustomer on October 5, 2007.

’tis the new big thing: local search + social network recommendations.

Actually, I saw a broadsheet Sunday newspaper quoting research that ‘we’ trust our friends’ and communities’ restaurant  recommendations more than we trust professional restaurant reviewers – so maybe there’s something in this social networking, reviews, and local search thing?!

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Techcrunch on social networks/local search in the UK originally appeared on TheCustomer on September 10, 2007.

What a neat idea… Collabandrate is an online in-house suggestion box – so it’s social, transparent, and efficient.

Neat.

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Collaborate originally appeared on TheCustomer on September 6, 2007.

There’s a video demo of this companion/development of Orkut and a good description on  Googlesystem’s unofficial blog
… which looks just fine – but but but is it just going to feed our privacy concerns?

I’m sure Google will draw a clear line between the data they allow to be scraped & blended into nosey services… but where will they draw the line? And how far back will Google go into our histories?

Picked up from Mashable

Google’s Socialstream blends content… originally appeared on TheCustomer on September 6, 2007.

Have you seen rapleaf ?
or upscoop
oh and there’s quechup as well – which has some of plaxo’s worst habits (which plaxo quickly shed),

It’s Spam 2.0 – the start of the social spam revolution.

I’ve seen conversations on 2 separate professional networks that are apalled by them & the loss of privacy that’s implicit – for example, I now know what’s on one of my client’s Amazon Wish Lists. Which I guess is OK if you actually know somebody… but not OK if you’ve scraped an email address & set out to learn anything you can about a person for who-knows-what purpose.

The only defence is to use separate public & personal email addresses – and even that would be defeated by viral tools in these services’ signup processes.

Oh, and Facebook just announced that it’s opening public profiles to search engines – so expect an outrage in 5-6 weeks time. And then folk will adjust and go back to their lives, on & offline.

But the cumulative effect will be for the ‘signal to noise’ ratio to drop – the proportion of genuine messages will reduce, amongst an increase of social spam.

All these rape our privacy.

Expect to see more folk using closed communities (like Phuser ), and the ‘private’ options on Facebook et al. Bit by bit we’ll learn to take control of our own privacy, and take responsibility for our privacy.

That’s the service that Rapleaf offer: to protect & control your privacy. I’m in two minds as to whether they’ll profit from exposing the problem (which they didn’t create…) Or if they’ll be a victim of their own success at exposing a genuine social problem.

Customer 2.0 : I own my privacy originally appeared on TheCustomer on September 5, 2007.

TomTom GO 520 satellite navigation toy allows customers to update maps while driving, correcting their device’s information with what’s actually on the road. And then, of course to upload that update to a community, in exchange for corrections from other users.

Potentially this lifts the huge burden of updates from mapmakers – when TomTom and other satellite navigation manufacturers achieve a critical mass of customers. Service providers’ role changes to ‘verification’ rather than sourcing the update information, which is always a delayed process. Presumably, over time, an agreed verification standard will establish how often a map error needs to be reported before it’s considered verified.And the next step is to have this information reported back live from the vehicle, rather than delayed, from the owner’s office. That would allow for routing around roadworks that might cause delay for a few hours.

/ edit

Yesterday in Berlin TomTom announced their updated range all of which include Map Share. The range includes TomTom GO 920T and a 3d generation TomTom One

Collaboration, customer, community originally appeared on TheCustomer on August 4, 2007.