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Social networking unified identity

With many people having more than 1 web ‘Identity’ it gets difficult to keep all the data in sync. You may have your LinkedIn profile for business, your Myspace page for showing your personality to friends, your pictures on Flickr, etc….

Imagine a single site where you store all of your photos, emails addresses, personal information, etc.. instead of many. Then you go to this site and update your information in 1 place and then the individual sites pull from this source. Maybe you have a unique private key, biometric authorization, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about solving a real problem and making an easy to use site that provides a real service. The issue will be getting the big web 2.0 companies to let go of their hold on your data and start pulling from the central location. It would help them save money in the long run (reduced storage costs) but also potentially cost them eyeballs as you would not need to login to them to update your information.

This ’site’ would need to be very secure and assure the user community that their data is safe, but it is doable. I’ve got my business that on here but wouldn’t every large web 2.0 site looking for more users want to advertise on this site? And given the traffic wouldn’t there be ample opportunity to make even more advertising revenue?

A few good blogs postings on this topic:

http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/02/06/critical-mass-and-social-network-fatigue/

http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php/2007/02/12/do-we-really-want-to-aggregate-identiy

23 Jul 07 | Beyond 2.0, General | Read on | Comments (0)

Outsourcing 2.0

I have used ‘offshore’ resources for many projects in the past and can honestly say there are some pros and cons. The touted benefits of saving a lot of money by replacing a permanent FTE (Full Time Employee) with an offshore resource have to be carefully considered. My experience has been that a project can really benefit from Designing and Specifying a project or feature and then handing off the development work to an offshore team and manager. The team and an on site point of contact should routinely communicate and share progress (Normal project management stuff). I have seen though that the teams I have dealt with had a high turnover rate and that to mitigate this risk the domain expertise should kept in house as turnover in the states is a lot lower.

If you consider the cost savings of a FTE vs. and offshore developer you are immediately drawn to the concept. But consider that the offshore team will require more oversight than an internal team simply because of the distance. Also take into account the time difference between teams and the impact it will have on the resources that will interface with them. And finally, make sure you account for equipping the offshore teams with specific software that you may need for the project as this is typically not covered contractually. Many firms have researched the actual savings of using offshore resources and the numbers I have read mention between 10-20%, personally I have calculated a 35% savings based on my experiences.

A few references below with some good points:
eweek.com

birnbaumassociates.com

silicon.com

sourcingmag.com

My experience overall has been positive to the concept of offshore programming but only if used in the correct fashion. There are many large companies in India, Ireland, South America and Europe that specialize in IT related contract services and only too happy to talk to you.

If your a small company and only need a few hours of consulting time don’t forget about rentacoder.com, sologig.com and posting on craigslist.com, all good sources for local and distant programming help.