We cannot read much on technology these days that doesn't have some kind of Social Network angle. Every article you read has a "Digg it" or "ShareThis" button. Maybe you get the your news via Twitter, or learn about a new product from a friend on Facebook. Perhaps you stay connected with old work buddies via LinkedIn. It has been great for me, using these tools, to help me filter the internet news and noise, and connecting with friends and business collegues. To me, this is some of the best of the internet in action. Lots of people I know and follow agree, and feel there is a great deal of value in these networks.
What is interesting to me is how Social Networks derive their real value: from their users. In most cases, these products/services rely exclusively on the COMMUNITY to provide their content. For Social Networking to be effective there has to be an active community. Without an ethusiastic community, you got nothing. Anybody been to Geocities lately?
If you have been following xTuple or our websites for any amount of time, you know that we use the COMMUNITY word a lot around here. We are thankful for our strong community. It is central to our business. In fact, COMMUNITY is central to all open source software. Similar to Social Networking, for OSS to succeed, there HAS to be a community. If you launch an open source software project, and no one downloads, no one participates, no one contributes, you don't have much of a product or project. Community is everything to us.
The other day I had a xTuple-Social Networking intersection. In the process of my daily job, I will call and follow up with community members who register on the website, and request something or other. On this day, the company in front of me sounded familiar. I called, and asked for the person who registered. The person answering the phone said "Is this Wally TONRA from XXX (my home town)??" How could he have known that? Did the internet catch up with me? Did I get my identity stolen? "Yes,... who is THIS?"
Well, it turns out that I was speaking with a friend I went to high school with who owns a small manufacturing company in New England. His company had been piloting PostBooks for the last month, and they were set to go live the next week. All without so much a conversation with anyone at xTuple. They had leveraged the COMMUNITY, after downloading the software from Sourceforge, and gotten any their questions answered on the xTuple.org Forums.
Apparently this friend had seen a previous blog posting, and recognized my name at that point. It was like a Facebook-LinkedIn-Open Source community collision, all at once. Facebook and Twitter and Digg have been helpful tools for me. xTuple is now the latest Social Networking device helping me stay connected. Go COMMUNITY!
Wally Tonra
Wally has been with xTuple since 2004 and in ERP sales since the mid-1990s. After all that time selling vendor-centric, proprietary enterprise software, moving to an open source, Mac-friendly ERP package was a natural evolution. Prior to xTuple, Wally spent 10 years at JD Edwards, which was eventually acquired by Peoplesoft, in various sales and sales management positions. He made the move to xTuple before Oracle took over both Peoplesoft and the former JDE. Prior to JD Edwards, Wally held sales positions at ERP software company Daly.commerce (formerly Daly and Wolcott), hardware supplier XL/Datacomp and storage vendor EMC. Wally holds a B.S. from Boston College, where the Mac fanaticism all began.