All Roads Lead To RSS, Enterprise Data Capture and Release Scheme...

The ever excellent RRW reports a study that shows that the kids like gmail, and sms. Awesome. Also, that corporate types are obsessed with checking their email. What I found interesting though was that the kids used email to get updates from their social network and other types of alerts. I suspect that like me, they have many groups, clubs, networks that they are members of, and that email is a pretty good place to aggregate the flow of alerts. Which leads me to wonder if gmail will just email me a report at the end of every working day, telling me "what's going on, and what needs responding to".

In what must be one of the coolest company names I have come across in a while Cynapse brings these kinds of activity flows to the desktop. It alerts you as to the change in status of many of the objects and relationships in your corporate environment, which are relevant to you and your team. What I like about it is that it is an example of "loosely coupled, tightly integrated" where you could choose to use it for simple "group notification streams", or more tightly integrate it with an Enterprise wide collaboration capability. As one of the commentators says though, its hard to see where this adds value beyond being an interesting way to present RSS feed activity generated by people and systems.

Again, RWW bring news of Fidelity bank using them damn widget - gadgets to enable actual transactions. Check your current bank balance from the iGoogle front page. Mmmm. I think we can see where this is going folks ( see more from Martin Geddes on this topic of Banking2.0). RWW suggest that myWorklight might be behind this particular implementation.

That's where www.myworklight.com have made some interesting announcements. They have an integration with NetVibes that allows you to actually transact with others. Say you wanted to publish out a widget for "Special offers" in "Restaurants around here", and post it to your own Company Dashboard so you could order for the office every day. Well, you could do that, and pay for it, through the myworklight integration. Oh damn, you can do that with a  credit card? mmmm, how about you integrated with your company purchase management platform, or your benefits in kind / expenses management system? or or or.... My head starts to come off me when I think of all the ways that this could be used. The caveat I would have at this stage is that anytime I hear "server install" I start to worry about scale. I know that this is about security, but whenever I hear the terms "download" I kind-of worry for the company.