Hey everybody, this is our very first post on this blog. Hope you will find it inspiring ! We will present ourselves more thoroughly in another post. But for the moment let’s just share some thoughts about news happening all around the web.

Flickr | Brymo | Creative Commons

A web 2.0 heritage

As always the Enterprise market follows the Consumer market and Web 2.0 problems are starting to emerge in the Enterprise too. One of them is this whole notion of Information Overload. People are more and more annoyed with all those sources they subscribe to.

A regular web user would likely have :

• an email account - for close friends and family
• a Facebook account – to be up to date with not-so-close friends and apparently people are more and more using it as their principal “email” account (and Facebook has big plans about this)
• a Twitter account – for the “Buzz” in general, music, sports, people…
• some feed subscriptions – for “real” news or blogs. For tech aficionados like me, that can be at least 200 items to read per day…
• instant messages
• start pages like iGoogle or Netvibes

And more recently Google tried to invade the social market releasing Google Wave last year and Google Buzz this year. A lot of tools or sources that invade us everyday!

To complete the picture, we should also mention Real-Time, which was definitely one of the buzz-words of 2009. Starting with Twitter, all our information sources are starting to migrate towards a real-time model, based on the freshness of the information rather than on its relevancy.

In the enterprise…

Information Overload in the Enterprise

Enterprise users already have to cope with those previous sources (who does not have Facebook at work? :-p). Now, more and more companies are deploying tools that mimic the consumer ones:

• Facebook or Twitter can be translated by CubeTree, Salesforce Chatter or Yammer
• Internal Blogs, Wikis and Instant messaging are still there
• add to those the change notifications from Project Management Systems, ERPs and maybe some specific Knowledge Management tools
• and of course don’t forget the email which has the lion’s share in enterprise information overload

For the enterprise that’s definitely a loss of productivity (How do I prioritize my info across different tools ?) and a loss of relevant data (In which email was that info mentioned?).

What’s next ?

So “multiplicity of tools”, mmh, let me think… Then let’s create the unique tool that will rule them all! Well, a lot of companies have already tried that paradigm of a Universal Inbox. Without success. As said here, people don’t want to use a new tool – they want all those sources to come directly to their existing tool. So what are starting to emerge currently are plugins that enrich our daily tools. Take Google Buzz, I am sure I will use it much more than Twitter just because it sits right next to my inbox…

Google Reader magic sort

Another big trend is the use of Smart Agents that sort data for us. Their ranking system is based on complex algorithms that learn what is the most important for us (personal relevancy) and others (popularity). Gtriage is such kind of service.
Google Reader also have a smart agent they call “magic sort”… And I must say that one is very smart… or magic.
Facebook’s newsfeed algortihm is much complex and famous. So famous they have patented it.

But well, the miracle solution has yet to be invented.