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The fun thing about looking over the shoulders of computer scientists doing product demos isn't necessarily the technology they're pointing to on their computer screens. So many beta programs wind up on the cutting-room floor that it's impossible to predict with much confidence which ones ultimately will transmogrify into hit products. But more often than not, donovan to kentucky you can find clues about the direction a company wants to head.


Mashups for use in collaborative medicine?

(Credit: IBM)So it was that while getting a look Thursday in San Francisco at what IBM Research's been working on, I heard the phrase "social networking" mentioned so often that it sometimes sounded like a Web 2.0 revival meeting. No worries. I have it on good authority that IBM is not planning to hatch a microblogging competitor to Twitter. (Imagine the ensuing bloviation-fest if the TechMeme posse got its hands on that tidbit. Happily, we'll be spared that spectacle.) Instead, IBM is putting serious effort into finding ways to use aspects of social computing for more collaboration among enterprise users. The big idea here being to make it easier for businesses to share corporate data in more useful fashion.

"Our perspective comes from business," said Rod Smith, a computer scientist who is in charge of emerging Internet technologies at IBM. "There are many ecosystems inside the enterprise and we're seeing how they want to expand those connections. So, we're looking at how to do that."

Thus, it was show-and-tell time at what IBM dubbed its "Smarter Web Open House." The labs folks were offering a peek at a cross-section of collaborative Web technologies--mostly in early beta stages and likely to need a lot more fine-tuning in the months ahead. Here are my notes of the highlights:

• Play-by-Play: Collaborative Web browsing via instant messaging. donovan to kentucky You can connect your Internet browser to someone else's browser and you're co-browsing with somebody else. What's particularly nice is a re-sync feature that lets the person on the other end of the connection replay the sequence of Web pages you visited. That's an idea which many a help desk would find handy.