social computing

I’m happy to be reporting on J.P. Rangaswami’s session at Supernova; it’s about web tools used in business, sometimes called Enterprise 2.0, and how they are in play at BT.

I’m an admirer of J.P.’s blog, Confused of Calcutta, and of his work. So this is fun. I’ll edit this during the session — or if I’m too involved to do that, I’ll get back into this and report later.

J.P. and Jeremy Ruston show us a demo of TiddlyWiki - “a reusable non-linear personal web notebook.” I looked at this program first a couple of years ago and liked it, but now I see that it is incredibly useful across a corporation — and anyone can download and use it. Highly recommended.

On top of TiddlyWiki, Jeremy and his team have created a web service to allow anyone to connect any two phones — to create a call, in other words, between those two phones. This is the kind of functionality which has been exclusive to large telecoms; now, instead, it is available to anyone.

Whether the particular application is of value to you or not, I hope you see that this is a revolutionary move. It turns the internal system inside out to present it to the edge of the network, where people can write what Jeremy describes as the equivalent of Excel macros that create new software/communications capability. Great stuff, and learn more at BT’s Developer Centre.

J.P. suggests that there are now thirty such services, with a goal to get to one hundred sixty.