Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Beehive featured in the IBM Design Gallery

The Design gallery section showcases excellent design at IBM and the designers who are responsible for it. The gallery focuses on offerings in each of four categories -- software, systems, services, and research -- and lets teams describe why they think the offering they delivered is a cut above the rest.

"The goal of the Beehive service was to aid corporate users with various people-related challenges in an enterprise, categorized as relationship building and people-sensemaking challenges. Relationship-building challenges include new employees who struggle with making connections that are important for their current project and professional growth, remote workers who have difficulties with team building and staying in touch with their team members, or employees moving on to new assignments who are not easily able to stay touch with former colleges. People-sensemaking includes the difficulties of discovering people with the right skills and common interests, or learning more about someone personally as well as professionally to facilitate making contact, or getting to know about ongoing projects and activities beyond one's immediate team."

Read More Here

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Tune in to our Twitter feed

The center now has a twitter account where we will be sharing information of interest with our community.
You can read our posts on this site or subscribe to our twitter feed

The Center in the news

On September 17th we announced the Center for Social Software. Here's what the press - local and national - had to say about
the center:

  • Boston Globe: Cambridge IBM facility to focus on social links
    link

    "The folks at this IBM center have some very interesting tools to support collaborative views of what's going on," said Thomson-Reuters Healthcare senior vice president William Marder. "The nice part of this center is the potential to interact with some world-class smart people."

  • Boston Business Journal: New IBM center to focus on social software
    link

  • Xconomy: IBM Opens Social Software Research Center in Cambridge
    link

    "... we're talking about social software, not social networking.
    We are seeing a real change from people using social software in who knows whom, and how people find people.
    ... A lot of what our research is about is understanding the broad impact of this category of software."


  • eWeek: IBM to Unveil Social Software Center at Interop
    link

    "We're going to be more focused on explicitly taking on projects that will change our route to market, that will help us work more closely with Lotus, but also develop paths to our own internal deployments that will keep us at the leading edge of social software," Greif said.


  • Network World: IBM to launch social networking center
    link

    "We're going to be more focused on explicitly taking on projects that will change our route to market, that will help us work more closely with Lotus, but also develop paths to our own internal deployments that will keep us at the leading edge of social software," Greif said.

  • PC World: IBM Launches Social Software Think Tank
    link

    "The next generation of Web tools has the potential to significantly enhance our ability to understand and communicate what is happening to patients in the real world," said William Marder, senior VP for for research at Thomson Reuters' healthcare unit.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Putting it into Wordles

Wordle preview

Use Wordle to turn a block of text into a cloud that shows which words are used most frequently. The bigger the word, the more often it's used. Customize the color scheme, layout, and fonts in your wordle, and share it with others. We created this wordle from the About Us page on this site. Wordle's simple interface offers a gallery of wordles that other people have posted, instructions on how to create a cloud, and some creative suggestions for using them. It's easy and fun!

Wordle is the brainchild of Jonathan Feinberg who is a research developer in the Collaborative User Experience research group.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

IBM Announces Center for Social Software

Today, IBM unveiled the IBM Center for Social Software. A first of its kind facility,
the Center brings together the brightest minds from IBM to work with clients, partners,
university students and faculty, creating the industry's premier incubator for the research,
development and testing of social software.

The goal of the Center is to:

  • Explore, innovate and commercialize best practices in social networking.

  • Work with forward-thinking businesses to pilot and customize enterprise
    social networks unique to their industry profile.

  • Create jointly funded research collaborations with government, academia,
    industry and venture capital participation.

  • Design the future of IBM's Web 2.0 collaboration portfolio, including social discovery,
    social search and new scalable architectures for social software including cloud computing.

  • Further social software governance: formal policies encouraging or constraining the uses
    of social networking in organizations.

  • Develop the science of social software: Quantifying social networking.

  • Explore cultural differences in the use of social software.

Stay tuned for more news about our announcement.