W3C Blog

The W3C held its first purely online event in November, the Social Business Jam. The motivating concept is that standardized social web technologies can enable a whole new round of innovation throughout the entire product cycle, both by "socializing" communication between customers and the enterprise as well as communication inside the enterprise itself. The W3C Jam was enabled via IBM's Collaboration Jam platform, and Watson was used to analyze the results of thousands of posts in order to determine trends and next-steps.

Over a thousand people attended the Social Business Jam, including both visionary innovators such as Tim Berners-Lee and Alex "Sandy" Pentland, discussing jointly with the business technologists such as Evan Prodromou (CEO of Status.Net) and Angel Diaz (IBM's Vice President of Software Standards). The discussion ranged from identity management to social metrics, and a number of innovative concepts were discussed in detail such as the ability to "prioritize" messages into activity streams and how to make e-mail a first-class social technology. In particular, the further development of standards around the federated social web are crucial to most business use-cases.

The final report of the Social Business Jam details a number of recommendations for standardization and use-cases. The main recommendation is to form a Social Business Community Group to develop customer driven use-cases for social business and mature standards around these use-cases - so join the Social Business Community Group!