This isn't particularly new and Viewdle have some fancier videos on their Website. But I think its better to actually see a live demo of it in action.

Viewdle is all about building "interesting [social networking] applications based on who is standing in front of the camera". Or if we distill it further - its the consumerisation of facial recognition. This idea is likely to create mixed feelings of excitement and dread.

So far these interesting applications include apps for Facebook to auto-tag your 'friends' and an AR role playing game is coming:

Use your camera to recognize enemies and find real-world items. The battle is nearing!

Hmm... Personally I'd like to see what we would get if they opened it up to the hacking community.

So, Color (or Colour, if you prefer) is a new photo-based social networking app.

Techcrunch have a good write up on the background of the start up and what I found most interesting was the idea of a Dynamic Network:

"All of your contacts are presented in a list of thumbnails ordered by how strong your connection is to that user. Whenever Color detects that you’re physically near another user (in other words, that you’re hanging out), your bond on the app gets a little stronger. So when you fire up the app and jump to your list of contacts, you’ll probably see your close friends and family members listed first. But if you don’t see a friend for a long time, they’ll gradually flow down the list, and eventually their photos will fade from color to black-and-white."

Despite the possibilities for collaboration, a Design News survey reveals engineers are avoiding social networks due to concerns around security and irrelevant information overload... Even joining engineering-specific groups on LinkedIn or Facebook resulted in a whole lot of noise and useless chatter, respondents reported, as opposed to serving up focused, practical solutions to real-world engineering problems. "It turns out a lot of the discussions turn esoteric or philosophical and are not really things I found to be useful in the day-to-day functioning of the business or my day-to-day engineering efforts," says survey respondent David Willis, PMP, engineering group manager for Agile Engineering Inc., a manufacturer of precision electromechanical systems. "Even though I was in focused areas, there was no focus."

Design News is a journal for engineers and engineering managers who build real world products. Apparently many are disappointed with their experience of using social networks for collaboration. Not surprisingly, they want collaboration embedded in their work processes. Traditional forums and instant messaging appear to be more immediately useful.

Honestly, I'm not surprised. If you are going to apply social technologies to a situation without considering the specific needs of the people involved, what do you really expect?

This build it and they will come mentality also underplays the importance of a range of different skills needed to run a successful community of practice or virtual team. Sure, they'll come but they won't hang around for long if they don't get value from participation.

Hat tip to Bertrand.

What might be a bigger challenge for Australia's retailers is that they generally haven't been able to make the internet work efficiently for themselves yet. Established retailers are fumbling around much like newspaper publishers trying to work out the mix between print and internet. I've just checked the Harvey Norman site – as far as I can work out, I can't buy anything on it. Gerry Harvey tried the web and found it didn't work for him as a direct channel, so the site just exists to try to drive traffic to local stores.

This is from a column in the Sydney Morning Herald, weighing into the debate about demands from large old school retailers in Australia to charge consumers sales tax (GST) on goods bought online from overseas.

In a follow up article, they quote the Australian Retailers Association who say:

many large companies had been slow to embrace the internet. By contrast, small retailers were using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to promote their wares.

''Small retailers are getting very savvy,'' he said. ''Retailers are going to need to look at various forms of retailing to engage with their customers.''

Actually, I think this should be a wake up call for all large companies in all sectors in Australia. Over the last decade they haven't just been slow to adopt online retailing but have been slow to adopt Web technologies for many aspects of how they do business. This includes government and the non-profit sectors too. This failure cuts across how companies deal with their customers to how they enable their own staff to collaborate.

I used to think it was just the Australian pragmatic character that didn't buy into the technology hype in business. Now, I just wonder if its more a mix of arrogance and a lack of imagination that results in this failure to innovate?

It reminds me of a large Australian insurance company I dealt with recently online - when I encountered a bug, they told me that their Website wasn't designed for the latest Web browsers and instead I should have been using Netscape Navigator or IE 5.5. WTF!

Large Australian companies don't just need to start selling online, they have a decade of technology development to catch up on.

The White House is claiming success in using its LinkedIn social media group as a forum for a public policy discussion on reforming the financial services industry.

The Wall Street conversation has generated 296 comments from members of the White House's LinkedIn group in 12 days. The discussion is being led by Jen Psaki, deputy communications director at the White House and one of the group's three leaders.

This example is from the government sector, but across the board - commercial and non-commercial - I think there is good reason to consider LinkedIn as a place to host a discussion with stakeholders or customers.

The main benefit of using LinkedIn over either hosting your own discussion or using the 'default' strategies of Facebook or Twitter is that you have a ready made community of mainly professional users that you can engage with - if done right - through a platform they already have some level of familiarity with.

It does help that LinkedIn finally rolled out some improvements to how groups work a few months ago. To be honest, I had almost given up participating in any LinkedIn groups because the user experience was so bad. That now looks like it is improving, which is why I think LinkedIn is now worth a second look.

Of course, all the functionality in the world doesn't make up for poor community management, which in most cases is the root cause of a bad LinkedIn group. The signs of poor community management are often quite obvious - too much spam, a hands off moderation style, no content curation, lack of community focus and endless questions from people to lazy to research an issue for themselves. There is nothing new here, but as with many community orientated Web 2.0 technologies I find that access to collaboration tools doesn't immediately equate to quality of collaboration.

Learn more about group functionality, in LinkedIn's online help. There is also a case study on how uses Phillips' marketing use their Innovations in Health group.

From my colleague, Dion Hinchcliffe:

"The Social Business Power Map, presented above, is an attempt to identify the major social media trends, how they can be mapped generally along consumer/enterprise axes, and where they are in terms of their overall maturity level today"

Dion provides a more detailed breakdown of each technology in his post and also makes this comment about social networks, which he places in the mature state:

"Social networking is now expected to surpass the top used application online, Internet search, in the near future. There is little likelihood that social networking will be disrupted in the near term though certainly most businesses have not yet adopted them internally and many current block their use from inside the firewall. Unfortunately, the number of businesses blocking access to social networks is going up, not down as they continue to get a handle on managing the perceived risks of social networking. See my discussions on CoIT and how workers are increasingly using their own IT to route around excessive control of their channels of communication."

Curation is the process by which aggregate data is imbued with personalised trust.

Good quote from JP.

Just a thought: Curation is not the same as creating content, in the way for example that a pro-blogger earns a living like any other advertising driven channel. So with that in mind, I wonder, can someone make a living (a job, a business, etc) from being a digital curator? Or is it something that is purely social and altruistic?

In other words, can we buy this kind of trust and are we willing to pay for it?

Over night I've had a chance to sit back and review the buzz about Google's Buzz (to avoid confusion with Yahoo! Buzz or any other social apps with 'buzz' in its name).

One thing I will say first off is that we know Google has an excellent track record overall with producing fast, usable, popular Web apps and services. There is no doubt in my mind that Gmail is in fact the best email client available* (yes, even better than any desktop client I've ever used). For example, why can't all email clients deal with meeting invites like Gmail? So, on the face of it, Gmail and Buzz looks like a great combination from a user experience perspective. The mobile client, experienced through my location aware iPhone, also feels good.

However, alas, these days I spend most of my time in a desktop mail client or my iPhone mail client, because I've got multiple mail boxes to manage (and no, I don't want to route them via Gmail). Unfortunately a lot of the really good stuff appears to take place in the client provided by Google... so are all those third-party developers going to be able to replicate that experience in the mailbox you are using instead?

This is quite a contrast to Twitter, with its generally minimalist approach that has seeded a great deal of innovation both in terms of software, but also how people have invented different ways of working around and within its constraints. Twitter works better for me as it sits separately from other identities - and in fact, using a desktop Twitter client I can manage multiple identities. I also have a slick iPhone app to go with it.

Google of course is placing emphasis on the power of analytics of overcome filter failure. However, as I signed up for Buzz via Gmail I felt it failed on the first hurdle. There was no one it suggested that I either wasn't already following some other way or didn't particularly want to follow anyway. Of course, that's just my experience. An opt in suggestion or expertise location is one thing, but scanning my Gmail address book and equating that to my socialgraph is, well, a major filter failure if you ask me.

I note that Dion Hinchcliffe wrote yesterday about the same issue and said:

"for hyperpersonal, in Buzz this is driven by underlying algorithms that filter and guide the user experience. Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, noted that Google’s insight into the early Web with the famousPage Rank algorithm drove their initial success. He went on to hint that they believe the same algorithmic insight into the Social Web will succeed with Buzz. Either way, Google has clearly used its competency in data and computation to attempt to one-up today’s online social networking services... I do think they’re generally on the right track here but the left brain approach to the Web that dominates Google’s product strategy tends to obscure the notion that social systems are also highly self-organizing and emergent.

To me, Google Buzz makes a lot of sense for people that do spend a time in Gmail and have lots of friends using Gmail and Google Chat. It will make a lot of sense if they are aiming, as they've hinted, at providing a corporate version as part of their enterprise apps offering (so, rather than Twitter being concerned, its the likes of Yammer and Social Cast that should keep an eye on Google in this instance).

If its going to fail, its because ironically it might be because its too clever for its own good.

*Ok, I admit it - its just the Ninja theme I love.