"A lot of what we are doing now is figuring out where this all fits in. These things are not replacements for what we already
have," says Duncan Mewherter, development manager for blogs, wikis and feeds at IBM Research. Instead, he describes them as
a light layer of collaboration.
For example, IBM Research's Dogear project is a centralized server where users can store, catalog and share bookmarks. It
can be integrated with Google so when users do a search they get Google results from the Web and Dogear results from internal
sites. The bookmarks are associated with users and ranked based on how many users have stored them and how often they are
hit. A companion application called Fringe does similar organization and ranking around documents.
"I am telling them Dogear should be productized now," says Mike Gotta, an analyst with Burton Group, who describes Dogear
as "people by their behavior telling you what is important. The industry has done certain software wrong because it is not
designed around people's activities, and this will cause a redesign of some sharing tools."
Microsoft is adding syndication-feed support to Office 12 and has developed a wiki template for SharePoint, and its Social
Computing Group at Microsoft Research is working on a project called Raindrop for group blogging and another called Wallop,
which is exploring how people share media and build conversations within social networks.
IBM/Lotus users say they can already see social networking changing the landscape.
"All of this next level of technology does not have the complex user interface that desktop applications have had," says Alan
Bell, principal consultant for Dominux Consulting. "This is technology for everyone."
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