I just posted a new entry to my Trends in Web 2.0 blog focused on social software usage in the enterprise. This entry considers the changing workforce demographics with new employees raised on email, IM, MySpace, Facebook, and other social software just entering the workforce, and it discusses how we can use their expertise to help other people become more productive using collaborative, web 2.0 technologies.

You can get the complete entry from the Trends in Web 2.0 blog .

Firefox has always been built on viral marketing, and the SpreadFirefox campaign has been nothing short of brilliant. The latest initiative lives up to the SpreadFirefox legacy. For World Firefox Day, they are asking each of us to bring one friend into the Firefox family by September 15, and in exchange, they will immortalize the names of both the giver and the receiver in Firefox 2.

Please take a minute to visit the World Firefox Day website and start the process.

MySpace is frequently used as a prime example of web 2.0; however, I am finding that it has fewer web 2.0 characteristics than I expected. I recently used this definition of web 2.0: “I think of web 2.0 as a convenient shorthand for the collaborative, community oriented web where collective intelligence is harnessed and content is created by the many rather than the few. Users participate in an open fashion using technology that facilitates participation for those who are not serious coders in contrast to the static web of a few years ago.” (Trends in Web 2.0)

MySpace excels at creating a community of people who generate huge amounts of content in the form of profile information (about me, who I’d like to meet, interests, personal information, schools attended, employers, friends, comments, blogs, group membership, and much more). The volume of content is nothing short of amazing, and this content is promoted virally when friends encourage other friends to join. When all of your friends are on MySpace, you miss out by not joining, which is a strong form of peer pressure. In order to join, you need to share at least some information, thus creating more content. Absolutely brilliant.

However, I have been frustrated with the MySpace experience. I recently blogged about how I do not fit within the age demographic, so I find it less useful than someone closer to 25 might. I will put this frustration aside, since I cannot really blame MySpace for my age, and no change that MySpace could make would roll time backwards to make me 25 again.

Age aside, I am increasingly frustrated by how MySpace uses (or does not use) web 2.0 technologies. They have a very simple interface where the user types content into text fields and the content is displayed on the profile. This is great for novice users, but I would like more. Today, I wanted to add a quick Javascript snippet to display the RSS feed for this blog on my MySpace profile. I can enter HTML to format the content within the text boxes; however, Javascript is not allowed. I also wanted to move a few things around on the page. MyYahoo and many other sites have Ajax interfaces that allow drag and drop of widgets to rearrange them on the page. With MySpace, I would need to write this code myself or download an annoying template that would rearrange it for me; I cannot just drag and drop the boxes to a more convenient location.

MySpace also fails to leverage the expertise of their user base. For example, the MySpace help files are minimal and fairly useless. Here is an example:

Q. How do I add color, graphics, & sound to my Profile page?

A. Adding color, graphics, and sound to your profile page is easy and requires only a basic knowledge of HTML (the programming language used to create web pages on the Internet). Simply go to “Edit Profile” and enter the desired HTML coding where appropriate. If you do not know HTML, you can reach out and make a new friend by asking someone who has color, graphics, and/or sound on their Profile page how they did it. People on MySpace are friendly and always willing to help, so just ask! This is a great way to meet new people! (MySpace)

I am not one to be excited about writing help files; however, MySpace has a robust user community that could be leveraged to provide this information easily via a wiki or other technology. EBay has successfully implemented something similar giving users the ability to easily help each other. MySpace could easily set up a wiki that people could use to share tips and tricks, helpful hints, and other information. In the above example, the users could create detailed instructions about changing profiles including the code required.

MySpace has a lot of strengths in social networking and content creation; however, by utilizing some of the newer technologies, MySpace could feel less like a static environment and more like a dynamic and vibrant web 2.0 site.

Earlier this week, Kate Bevan from The Guardian said, “Firefox is wonderful. It’s up there with chocolate and sex on the grand scale of great things about being alive.” I am a huge fan of Firefox, but right up there with chocolate and sex? Hmmmm, no comment.

Richard MacManus, a ZDNet blogger, suggests that Firefox’s market share will continue to increase as enterprises begin to adopt it. I blogged on a similar topic earlier this week describing how “the tools that we use outside of work as consumers tend to creep into the enterprise.” MacManus describes this phenomenon and relates it back to Firefox with the following insights:

In a corporate blogging program that I’m involved in, a bunch of us were discussing the reasons why Firefox usage is growing. One person noted that in the XiTi survey of European patterns of use, Firefox is most often used at weekends. He inferred that this means personal and household adoption rates are higher than corporate ones.

This trend for Firefox adoption to be driven by the consumer market is a positive sign IMO, because we’re currently seeing a larger trend of ‘Web 2.0’ consumer apps infiltrating the Enterprise. Just today I was speaking to some Salesforce.com execs and one of them pointed out that its Skype mashup is proving very popular amongst its customers. I can point to many other instances of social Web tools becoming utilized a lot more in enterprises – IM, wikis, Web Office services, indeed the software-as-a-service tools that Salesforce.com runs.

My point is that I think Firefox market share will continue its upward trend, particularly when Enterprises start using it more. (ZDNet)

MacManus is right. The applications that we use as consumers will gradually creep into the workplace, and when enough people across the enterprise begin demanding the use of any application, IT will usually relent and eventually begin supporting it to appease the masses. This is especially true for a secure, stable web browser, like Firefox, which would generate fewer IT objections than an application with questionable security or stability issues. It also helps when you can convince a few key people in senior management to request the application just to light a fire under the IT department!

Today on TechMeme, I ran across two new tools using Flickr:

FlickrInspector takes a Flick username, userid or email as input and returns more information than I would have thought possible. It displayed profile information, most recent photos, oldest photos, most interesting photos, tag cloud with some statistics, sets and searches for blogged photos.

Preloader allows you to edit your Flickr photos completely online with no additional software installed on your computer. It allows you to tweak brightness, contrast, hue, etc. along with rotation, flip, crop, and many others. I’m terrible with photo editing software, so here are a couple of screenshots from other blogs.

The beauty in this is not that there are two more tools that work with Flickr (even though these are two pretty cool ones!) The beauty is that web 2.0 applications, like Flickr and many, many others, are architected to make it easy for people to write new applications using the information and value in Flickr in a slightly different way. For example, FlickrInspector was written by Nils K. Windisch aka netomer from Germany in his spare time to improve the user experience of Flickr in a way that made sense to him, and after writing it, he shared it with the world to enhance the user experience of others. Flickr is a great example of the Architecture of Participation in use and harnessing the collective intelligence of your user base.

Nielsen//NetRatings is taking a step in the right direction by starting to look at trends in podcasting, and they just published some fairly interesting statistics on podcast usage. However, the first paragraph in the report comes from the not quite getting it category:

Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, announced today that 6.6 percent of the U.S. adult online population, or 9.2 million Web users, have recently downloaded an audio podcast; 4.0 percent, or 5.6 million Web users, have recently downloaded a video podcast (see Table 1). These figures put the podcasting population on a par with those who publish blogs, 4.8 percent, and online daters, 3.9 percent. However, podcasting is not yet nearly as popular as viewing and paying bills online, 51.6 percent, or online job hunting, 24.6 percent. (Nielsen//NetRatings)

Yes, they just compared those people downloading and listening to podcasts with those who publish blogs. This is sort of like comparing people who read magazines to the number of journalists who write newspapers to conclude that magazines are more popular than newspapers. This a classic case of comparing apples with watermelons. A better choice would have been to compare those publishing podcasts with those publishing blogs or comparing podcast listeners to blog readers.

Some podcasters are not happy with the strange comparison and want to see statistics on podcasts that they can really use. There were a few interesting tidbits from the report, but none are surprising. For example, podcast listeners tend to be younger and more tech-savvy based on the high usage of non-IE browsers and tech sites visited, and quite a few listeners also come from the Apple community. No surprises here. I agree with Scoble; we need more useful data on podcasting.

The Beastie Boys said, “You gotta fight for your right to party”. In this case, Internet companies are duking it out to fight for their right to be called the number one Internet destination. MySpace had a big coup this week when Hitwise reported that MySpace had taken the number one spot from Yahoo as the most visited U.S. destination on the web. This was a big win, not just for MySpace, but for social networking and web 2.0 in general.

Now the controversy starts. According to Reuters:

Yahoo issued a statement saying that: “The Yahoo network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo’s (e-mail site).”

In the United States, Yahoo said it attracts 129 million unique visitors per month, which represents 74 percent of the online population in the world’s biggest Internet market. By contrast, MySpace reaches 30 percent of the online audience, with 52 million unique visitors, according to Yahoo.

Hitwise does not provide figures for the number of unique visitors to a site. (Reuters)

The big question: Who is right?

Mark Twain popularized the now-famous Benjamin Disraeli quote: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Hitwise measures based on a single site; therefore, MySpace has more visitors than any of Yahoo’s single sites. On the flip side, if you combined all of Yahoo’s web properties, they probably have more visitors than MySpace.

The answer: Both, and it depends on how you measure it.

When we think of web 2.0, many of us naturally associate it with consumers rather than corporations. With examples like MySpace, Digg, Flickr, Wikipedia / wikis, blogging, and others, the value to the consumer is clear; however, the value of web 2.0 can be extended to the enterprise. In another blog entry, I described web 2.0 as “the collaborative, community oriented web where collective intelligence is harnessed and content is created the many rather than the few.” Think about the power of this idea relative to harnessing the collective intelligence of the people within an enterprise and of those people outside of your company who use or care about your products.

More details on web 2.0 in the enterprise, including some quotes from Gartner, can be found on my Intel Trends in Web 2.0 blog.

Sid Yadav posted an interesting entry about the 33 Places to Hangout in the Social Networking Era. He categorizes each site by what type of person it is “best for”, and I was struck by how 14 of his general social networking sites were best for teens, young adults, or college / university students while only 2 were best for adults / middle-aged. My limited experience with MySpace is leading me to the same conclusion. I recently began actively playing with MySpace to better understand all of the buzz (feel free to add me as a friend if you happen to use it and want to help me learn more about using it!)

In one word, this experience is telling me that I am “old”. I typically do not think of 35 as over the hill; however, in MySpace terms, I am positively ancient. The power of MySpace (and I suspect this to be true for similar sites) is the ability to keep in constant touch with all of your friends, which are also all on MySpace. So far, I have managed to add as friends the only three people under 30 that I know along with two other people closer to my own age who also happen to be on MySpace. These three people in their mid-20s have between 54 and 76 friends each with lots of comments left by these friends talking about evenings out, parties, getting together, harassments about phone calls not returned, happy holiday wishes and pictures of nights on the town. I guess it is a little like a mini online party every day with all of your friends.

My fellow old folks, do not despair … according to Yadav, we shine in the niche social networking site category (with “old” being defined as over 30 in this case). The readers of this blog, mostly business types, are probably more familiar with LinkedIn than with MySpace, myself included. However, there are niche social networking sites for everything from dog / cat / fuzzy pet owners to car / film / book / music lovers to shoppers to mommies. We just have to find our niche.

I have to admit that I tend to hang with the LinkedIn crowd more that the MySpace crowd; however, I am making an effort to better understand social networking from the MySpace perspective. Rather than reading yet another article or blog about MySpace, I have decided to just jump in with both feet and use it a bit. I created a profile ages ago, but have not actually used it for anything.

This is a learning experience for me, but if I have any regular readers using MySpace, please feel free to add me as a friend and help me better understand this more social form of online networking. You can find me here.