Moon Money

While I love a good conspiracy as much as the next guy (see my bookshelf for items on the Kennedy assassinations, now there's a real conspiracy, or 2) -- this Moon Hoax stuff is pretty over the top.  What I find most distasteful about it is the way this guy is feeding off the people that want to believe the hoax and hooking them with YouTube videos and then directing them to his site to buy the full suite of videos.  They aren't cheap either.  I wonder if this guy was originally a Scientologist.

I guess you have to feel bad for the gullible folks out there that fall for his trap, but I did truly enjoy see Buzz Aldrin pop this dude.  He was way out of line and good for Buzz to lay him out.

Now -- some of these videos really make you wonder - and that Looper song, Dave the Moon Man always had me hooked...

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My current Social Tools

I've been experimenting with a number of so-called Web 2.0 tools as get sucked into the vortex.  What is impressing me is the reality of Software+Services that is happening in the wild.  Hosted infrastructure is providing real value to light up certain types of applications beyond the simple first phase.

My current install set includes:

Flock: Social Browser tool, I love the People bar and the actions integration into things like the wall posts in Facebook.  I've found I don't visit Facebook, unless its via Flock nowadays.  The Twitter and Digg integration also provide good tools for reply's and shouts.  That said, it is not my primary browser on its own.

Twhirl: Client app for Twitter and Friend Feed.  I like the URL shrinking integration and the threaded view of FriendFeed.  Had to turn the notifications off as it amazes me how many people just live an post in FF and Twitter all day long...

Evernote: Note taking applications that is designed for accessing and synchronizing your notes to any location you may need them on -- including a browser based access to the stored notes.  Includes nice tagging integration and smart 1-click to Evernote. Its addictive.

Couple of things are very interesting about these:
- Twhirl and a few other Twitter tools that I've looked at are being built on AIR.  Real apps from early startups are using this platform.  Looks to be building some momentum. 
- Its not Google or Microsoft doing these cool things, the startup community is breaking real, valuable ground again.
- But, which vendor will integrate these tools into things like business workflow, project mgmt, vertical solutions (such as Trading), Field automation, etc.   There is real cross-over value here.

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Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

One of the issues with a large number of the Internet facing social collaboration sites is that they cannot be used for sharing internal content, yet this is the core content that is of most value for the work hours.  You can't post an internal URL for sharing and rating to a site like Digg - for the fact that it can't see it and for the fact that in many cases you don't want that info outside the org.

Today, to get this value of social applications inside the intranet, you need to deploy something on-premise and /or build it yourself.   We've just finished a project that will enable exactly that and it has come out very cool (if I do say so myself).  But it strikes that there needs to be an easier way for these sorts of things to scale form the Internet to Intranet to the Extranet. 

The Software+Services model that we are describing is very much about how to combine on-premise and off-premise capabilities to deliver complete solutions -- federation is such a key foundation to making these sorts of usage scenarios prevalent.  I'm very curious as to the evolution of things to support this world - then we'll start to see more of the "consumerization of IT".

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