Chancellor’s Choice Award: A Picturesque MacHeist

As I mentioned earlier today, I was alerted to a great deal on a Macintosh software bundle last night via Twitter. With 14 fully functional software programs for $39, it’s hard to see how it could be a bad bargain.

But I still wanted to try a couple of the programs before the clock runs out tonight on the limited-time offer. The Times (retail $30)program, which uses a newspaper metaphor for pulling in RSS feeds, is a nice package. I played with The Hit List (retail $49.95) for a few minutes on the bus, and it’s a promising GTD application that will have a related iPhone version.

And here’s what I was able to do with Picturesque (retail $34.95) to enhance the look of our global map of SMUGgles. Here’s what I did in just about 5 minutes this evening:

 

Before (click to enlarge)
Before (click to enlarge)

 

After (click to enlarge)
After (click to enlarge)

I think these three programs alone are worth the $39 price of the MacHeist 3 bundle. But it’s only available until about 10 p.m. CDT today (or 3 more hours.) By the way, 25 percent of the proceeds go to charity, either evenly split among 10 of them or focused on a charity of your choice.

So:

If you’re a Mac user, you should go get this bundle now.

If you’re not a Mac user, please pass this offer along to your friends who are.

LinkedIn Application Platform: A Major Advance

In a playful, tongue-in-cheek, maybe even SMUG sense, I’ve previously called LinkedIn “social networking without the social.” So the announcement last night of its Applications platform raises its usefulness significantly from my perspective.

I first saw this news in my WordPress dashboard as I was writing a post last night, and went to install the WordPress application, which is supposed to display the most recent posts from my blog. Note: it didn’t work in my Safari browser, but it did in Firefox and IE. Hopefully either the WordPress gang or LinkedIn are listening like Yammer and will figure out and fix the Safari problem.

Here’s what it looks like when you add the WordPress application:

All you do is paste in your URL, and hit “Save”

And the widget (which you can drag toward the top of your LinkedIn profile) looks like what you see above. Another great reason to have a WordPress blog, huh?

I think this is a huge development. My friend Jeremiah thinks it could mean the end of the intranet.

It’s important because by opening the platform as Facebook did, LinkedIn is saying “we don’t have all the smartest programmers in the world, and we sure can’t afford to pay them. So we will provide an opportunity for others to enhance the usefulness of our site, and connect their sites and services to ours.”

Jeremiah’s point is similar: many (if not most) corporate intranets are missing the consumer-grade social networking features users have come to expect on the Internet. (Isn’t it funny that consumer-grade means higher quality on the Internet, while “business” or “professional” grade is clunkier? But that’s a topic for another post.)

Especially in today’s economic climate, corporate IT departments aren’t going to be able to afford hiring enough programmers to recreate that same level of social networking funtionality (or to put it another way, to “reinvent the wheel.”)

Open source (like WordPress) and Software as a Service (Saas – like Yammer or Salesforce.com) solutions will be smart ways for organizations to get world-class user experience for employees at significantly lower costs.

If someone else has already developed and polished a fantastic user experience, and if you can get it for free or at an extremely reasonable cost, why wouldn’t you take advantage of it? Why not deploy your programmers to create the links and safeguards that tie these world-class applications together?

Jeremiah thinks his yet-to-be-born kids won’t have any concept of a corporate intranet. I’m not so sure about that, but I’m casting my vote with him. He’s a Forrester analyst, after all. (You can cast YOUR vote below!)

But certainly there are some data elements and resources that your corporate IT department is currently paying boatloads to store and back up, that you could instead have outside your firewall. My blog, for example, is out on the Internet for all to see anyway. And Flickr photo streams or other resources could be “cloudsourced,” which would have the benefit of creating more links to your corporate or professional sites.

The LinkedIn announcement suggests that it could be the major hub for integrating this information. And as more applications are developed and security is proven (and as the economic climate puts more pressure on corporate IT to deliver more services for less), even more highly confidential data could be integrated in a hub like LinkedIn.

What do you think? Is Jeremiah right? (No, not Jeremiah Wright…that’s again another topic.)

Cast your vote below, and add your thoughts about this topic in the comments!

[polldaddy poll=1055581]

Facebook 203: Security and Applications

Late last week I got a message from someone who wants to be known as “The Harmony Guy,” saying he had devised a method that could have been successful (eventually) in meeting the terms of the SMUG $100 Facebook Hacker Challenge. Harmony Guy is a social hacker of the “white hat” variety, as you’ll see in his blog, where he publicly exposes security flaws from social networking sites and urges the companies to fix them.

I learned a lot about Facebook security through my interaction with him, and if you click the (more) link, you will, too. Here’s what he said:

Continue reading “Facebook 203: Security and Applications”