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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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I’ve claimed for several years now that email is broken. At best, email is the lowest common denominator (LCD) for sending messages to a specific Internet user. Every ISP subscription comes with some kind of email account. Free webmail addresses are easy to get. Many mobile phone accounts come with an email address. Alex Iskold’s post from ReadWriteWeb called Is Email in Danger? discusses how microblogging services like Twitter can overcome the inherent problems of heavyweight email clients like Microsoft Outlook.

Broadcasting with a microblog

Microblogging services are best suited for broadcasting messages to lots of users. FriendFeed, Twitter and similar services are widely used by popular bloggers to publicize their latest posts and mention their daily activities. Most of these services accept text messages and offer mobile versions of their web sites, so they are easier to use than email from an ordinary mobile phone. iPhone and BlackBerry users have better email clients on their devices, but microblogging from these devices seems to work well. 

As I mentioned yesterday in my article called The battle against Twitter spam, microblogging services like Twitter have their own problems. Because email is a mission critical service, it’s almost always available and working. Collecting comments and posts from microblogs can be accomplished with RSS - I use this to repost my FriendFeed activity to billso.com, but it would take a bit more effort to do this as part of an archiving and compliance effort. 

I’ve never been a fan of Outlook. In its easly versions (Outlook 97 and 98), the application would crash at least once a day. Microsoft developed  ActiveSync software to support PDAs, but 10 years later it is still a maddening piece of cruft.  

Look out for Outlook and iTunes

My university uses Microsoft Exchange as its faculty/staff email server, so I occasionally get meeting invitations and Outlook forms in my Gmail my box. All of my university email is auto-forwarded into my Gmail account. Microsoft meeting invitations are useless in Gmail - I have to tap out a reply to accept or decline the meeting.  

To be honest, Apple’s iTunes is following a similar evolution. It start as a music player, but has become a media storefront, disc burner and iPhone application installer. I’d think that several specific lightweight apps would work better than a huge, monolithic instance of iTunes. On a Mac, iTunes performance is barely tolerable. iTunes on a Windows box is a lumbering behemoth. 

Gmail, on the other hand, was designed as a lightweight solution that would work in a standard web browser. I love Gmail because I can search for messages quickly, and I know I won’t run out of storage room for old messages. There’s no reason for me to delete an old message in Gmail. 

Attacking the inbox

One approach to managing a bulging email inbox is to sit down and clear the queue. The Inbox Victory web page tries to make this process fun by letting users post pictures of themselves with their empty inboxes. I clear out my Gmali inboxes a few times a year. 

Luis Suarez of IBM claims that he reduced his incoming email by 80%, thanks to his usage of social networking tools like RSS feeds, Twitter and IBM’s internal clone of Facebook, Beehive. Suarez discussed his  article in the New York Times called I Freed Myself from E-Mail’s Grip.

Suarez admits that his job as a social computing evangelist helped him cut his email volume. He’s supposed to encourage his fellow IBM employees and managers to use Beehive, which is as much a knowledge management (KM) tool as it is a social intranet application. IBMers are supposed to use Beehive to share events, lists, pictures, tips, and ideas across the enterprise, as part of formal and ad hoc workgroups and project teams. 

Image courtesy of gwENvision through a Creative Commons license. 

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From Business Week comes a longish article about Lenovo’s ultralight X300 ThinkPad laptop. There’s a picture on the top of the web version of the article that shows a disassembled version of the laptop. It’s the first Lenovo model to carry the ThinkPad brand name.

Weighing in at 3 pounds, the X300 fits inside an interoffice mail envelope and uses flash memory for file storage, just like the MacBook Air. Lenovo is a major sponsor of the 2008 Olympic Games, and the company will supply hundreds of X300s to Olympic staff this summer.

Walt Mossberg of the Wall astreet Journal gave the X300 a glowing review. He’s been a big fan of Apple products for the last couple years. In fact, Mossberg’s biggest problem with the X300 is the Windows operating system. He notes that unlike the MacBook Air, the X300 has 3 USB ports, an RJ-45 jack, a DVD drive, and users can change and add their own batteries.

Designing a laptop computer is tricky work

Laptop computers are highly integrated devices that combine a battery, screen, input devices, and ports with the computer’s core hardware. The final product must withstand everyday use, as well as the occasional drop.

Corporate clients have very specific requests. For example, some companies want security features like power-on passwords, asset tags, and encrypted network cards. It’s much easier to engineer security into a product’s hardware than adding software or dongles after delivery.

Other companies are willing to sacrifice speed and features for rugged construction and reliability. Panasonic Toughbooks have become very popular with police departments and construction firms.

Give the people what they want

The average consumer tends to judge laptops on price, looks and entertainment features. Preinstalled software can dictate the purchase decision, especially the operating system. The ability to expand and maintain the computer is not an important consideration.

Anyone who uses a laptop as their home computer needs to use an external hard drive or a second computer to backup their data. At any moment, that laptop computer could be stolen or damaged. Read my 30 September 2006 article for some tips.

One example that I pointed out on 5 December 2006 is the slotless optical drive that Apple includes on its laptops. Acer and other companies have also put these drives in their laptops. They have no tray, so there’s nothing to use as a cupholder. But, if a user inserts a non-standard CD or DVD into a slotless drive, there is no safe or reliable way to remove the disc. The optical drive must be replaced at a service center.

From ComputerWorld: IBM security researchers claim that hackers are hiding or masking almost all of their Web attacks. JavaScript is still the tool of choice for infiltrating Web browsers. Most users shouldn’t turn off JavaScript, especially students who use tools like webmail, WebCT and TurnItIn.com. So we rely on antivirus and Internet security software that runs on the client-side to screen out these attacks before they can be executed.

Hackers have added more tricks to their toolboxes, because the potential payoff for evading security software and infecting computers can be huge. Encryption is one such tool - hackers often encrypt their programming code so that software cannot easily identify the attack.

As IBM researcher Kris Lamb states, hackers have stopped targeting the operating system and have moved to a higher level of the application stack that runs on almost any desktop and laptop computer that connects to the Internet - the web browser.

So we come back to good old common sense as the user’s best defense against computer attacks.

1. Hover your mouse over a web link and inspect the URL before clicking.
2. Don’t click URLs in email messages if the links look suspicious.
3. Find, install and use good security software. I recommend the free version of Avast for Windows users who need to protect their residential computers.
4. If you’re not using your computer at home, turn it off. You’ll burn less energy, and hackers cannot access your computer if it’s not running.

See my earlier posts on security software and attacks from 10 June 2007, 13 August 2006 and 27 November 2005 for more information.

Engadget reports on a new Windows Mobile PDA that census takers might use for data collection. bandwidth is provided by Sprint. The batteries last 10 hours – an amazing result on a PDA that is deisgned for heavy data entry and network usage in the field.

The US Constitution requires a national census every 10 years. One early use of Hollerith cards was in the 1890 US Census. The previous census in 1880 used manual methods and took 9 years to complete. With Hollerith’s cards and tabulation equipment, the Census Bureau finished the 1890 count within 7 years at twice the cost of the 1880 census. The reports and data were far more complex and complete than any previous census, however.

I keep a stack of vintage Hollerith cards in my office, so I can remember the good old days.