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IBM has been using an social network called Beehive to help employees share pictures, videos, links and meet in ad hoc groups. Users can post, share and reuse top 5 lists, which are called Hive5s. The ability to reuse or reshare lists has been a key feature. Over 35,000 IBM employees were registered on Beehive as of May 2008, with 15000 Hive5 lists and over 280,000 shared connections. 

The Associated Press called this a virtual watercooler in a recent article. Intrenet Blog has its own article called Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM that has a screenshot of the application - the default background color is yellow, not blue. 

LinkedIn is developing intranet applications for enterprise clients, so employees can share contact lists and create private connections within a secure enivronment

Facebook is also moving in this direction, if the reports from this week’s F8 developers conference in San Francisco are credible.

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HPU students can check the front page of Pipeline to see a list of changed and canceled classes. This is a good example of a pull system. Students have to log in to Pipeline and look at the channel to see the information.

Here’s a screen shot of today’s notices. There are no classes scheduled today, of course, because it’s Labor Day. The fall term starts tomorrow.

The channel only reports official changes, though. In the past, the university posted these changes by the classroom door, using a paper sign. If an instructor hasn’t told the university that they are canceling a class for a specific day, the change won’t appear by the door or on this new list.

It would be nice if this list were available on the public web site or an RSS feed. As I mentioned on April 16, a push system could send out notices to the affected students, perhaps by email, text messages.

RSS can be either a push or pull system, depending on how it’s used. For example, users can have the posts in this blog sent or pushed to them by email. Just pull up the RSS feed as a web page and look for the option.

Most users tend to employ RSS as a pull system. It’s a bit different from web browsing, as an RSS reader can be set to automatically check and retrieve new articles on a schedule.

I have a longer discussion about RSS and how students can use it in my courses – it was posted January 23, and it links to an older post from September 23, 2006.