Sococo is a virtual office space for distributed teams, teleworkers and road-warriors that uses real-world metaphors to make them feel like they’re in the office. Andy gets face-to-face with CEO Chris Wheeler at CES 2012 Showstoppers.

As you can see from the screenshot above, Sococo creates a virtual world that is analogous to a workplace, with conference rooms, team rooms, personal offices, cubicles - I imagine there’s even a water cooler. Small avatars then represent colleagues and their activities, so if some of them are having an (online) meeting, they’ll be located in a conference room. If someone doesn’t want to be disturbed, they can close their office door, complete with sound effect!

Sococo has other collaboration tools, such as screen sharing, but even the simple office space representation makes people feel much more included and part of a team.

Interview by Andy McCaskey of SDR News and RV News Net.

Depending on your point of view about.me either strips the final layers of privacy from a narcisstic world or else provides a handy one-stop signposting to your Web 2.0 presence. As their tag line says, “It’s all about you.”

Like many people, your online life isn’t restricted to just one social media site. You have your friends on Facebook, your work colleagues on LinkedIn, random acquaintances on Twitter and family on Flickr. When it comes to pointing someone to “you” on-line, there’s no one place to go and this is where about.me comes in. At about.me, you can set up a cool picture and a biography, plus links to all of the social sites that you subscribe to.

To get an idea of what it’s like, here’s the about.me page of one of the founders, Tony Conrad. Looks pretty cool doesn’t it? There are editing tools to setup your page just as you’d like and there are stock designs if you don’t have a good photograph to use. To further appeal to the cult of me, about.me will provide statistics and graphics on who has been looking at your page.

It’s all very seductive, isn’t it. But let’s just have a little reality check here…this brings together your whole on-line life. Everything is linked to from one place, so if someone, say a prospective employer, wants to research you then it’s all there for them. They don’t even have to do any digging. Of course, you could have two about.me profiles, one for your public persona and one for your private life…

About.me seems to be backed by AOL amongst other investors and you might recognise a few of their advisors too.

The landrush for good names is underway, but I think the site has only been up a couple of months so I was able to snag my name without any numbers. If you are interested, I’d pop over and grab your page just in case about.me gets big.

It seems in the world of computers and the Internet there is always a steady stream of new things on the horizon, as well as a steady stream of new products and services. It’s been this way for many years at this point.

There are always winners and losers. Winners can win big, and losers at worst fail to make any marketplace splash or even a ripple and end up in the tech dustbin of obscurity with few people ever knowing that the product or service ever existed.

What is it that makes for a successful product? Why is it that some products and services that seem very similar to other products and services end up becoming household names, while others end up being cancelled domain name landing pages?

It’s obvious there are a variety of factors that come into play. If it were easy to predict these things, we would have a lot fewer losers. Why did Twitter become a household name, whereas similar services such as Plurk and Jaiku languish in the shadows? What enabled Facebook to steal most of the MySpace thunder?

New products and services that end up being successful frequently incorporate elements and principles of previously-existing successes, but package them in more compact and useful forms.

Initially when Twitter came along a couple of years ago, I heard people talking about it, but I was a bit resistant to sign up. I felt like I had plenty of ways to communicate with people, so why did I need to add yet another account to a service that would steal away time I already had filled, only to ultimately let yet another account go dormant? I finally signed up for Twitter, and after I began using it I began to understand the value of it. With a service like Twitter, the more people that are using it, the more valuable it becomes.

About the same time I signed up for a Twitter account, I also signed up for a Plurk account. After a few visits to the Plurk website over a period of a month or two, I haven’t been back to the site since.

I believe what is valuable about Twitter is that 140 character limit per Tweet, forcing people to be succinct with their wording. Twitter and Tweet are cute names. The site design is simple, the blue bird logo pleasing to the eye, and the developers kept the API and name open to other developers, allowing an entire ecosystem of ancillary products and services to develop around it at the same time it was rapidly increasing in popularity. Twitter is very much like chat, which was already well established, but it had the added value that it either could be in real time, or not, able to be accessed from a vast array of devices beyond the Twitter website. Twitter also allows you to subscribe to just the people you want, and ignore or even completely block the rest. Twitter also allows you to reach out and touch people, and it allows you to monitor what others are up to whose lives are at once very similar to your own, yet often radically different. You can spend as much or as little time as you wish interacting with the service. Another thing that turned out to be incredibly useful with twitter is the vast 24/7 real-time data stream that it generates. Real-time Twitter data mining has proved to be quite valuable to many people.

To be honest I have always thought that many MySpace pages were often monstrous, unbelievably cluttered messes that often took a long time to load. Nonetheless, MySpace became popular because it obviously served a need with a younger demographic.

I’ve always thought Facebook’s interface is somewhat confusing, though allowing for far less cluttered and confusing-looking profile pages. I still don’t quite understand what got Facebook to the level of critical popularity – perhaps the less-cluttered, faster-loading profile pages gave it the critical edge over MySpace.

It should also be noted that Facebook allowed for an open API, allowing a myriad of interesting and often useful applications to be plugged in to its interface.

However it did it, Facebook managed to get to a critical mass of users where it became THE thing to sign up for and THE place to be to stay connected with family, friends and business associates. Something interesting has happened with Facebook that has never happened before – everyday, non-geek people who had never built website profiles in all the years they had been doing email and web browsing were suddenly signing up for Facebook in unbelievable numbers. Mothers, dads, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, etc. were suddenly showing up on the same service with their kids, nieces, nephews and grandkids. Once the ball rolled, Facebook became an incredible success.

I started noticing a while back that many people were starting to use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with each other in lieu of email. At this point I find myself getting pulled into that trend myself. These services don’t offer the relative privacy of direct email, but they allow for easy, frequent public conversations and easy sharing of personal media such as photos between friends and family on a global scale.

What I take away from the success stories versus the less-successful competitors is that oftentimes the differences in design and implementation can be slight, but those slight differences can offer real, tangible advantages to the end user. If those often-slight advantages can somehow help get the product or service to a critical mass threshold, they can find themselves catapulted to the point of planetary awareness.

Today is the 98th anniversary of the birth Alan Turing, one of most brilliant minds of the 20th Century.  Born on was born on 23rd June 1912 in London, England, he is known as one of the fathers of modern computing, though his ideas for programmable computers were ahead of their time.

He is widely know for the test which bears his name – the Turing Test – which Alan Turing designed to test for machine intelligence. In the test, a person communicates in natural language via keyboard and screen with two hidden respondents, one human, one computer.  If the person cannot tell which of the respondents is the machine, the computer is said to have passed the Turing test.  So far no computer has consistently passed the test.

Turing is also famous for his work during the Second World War at Bletchley Park and the breaking of the German naval Enigma code.  In collaboration with Gordon Welchman, he designed an electromechanical machine called a “bombe” that eliminated unworkable Enigma settings, leaving only a few to be investigated by analysts.  He went on to make a several further contributions to the war effort in different areas.

Regrettably, in 1952, Turing was arrested, tried and convicted for homosexuality which at that time was a criminal offence.  As result, and despite his wartime record, his security clearance to work for the government was revoked.  Sadly, in 7 June 1954, he committed suicide, eating an apple laced with cyanide.

Happy Birthday, Alan.

Jason Calacanis is a very brave man. He is asking anyone who reads his blog to send him mp3 files from the AOL cancellation center. Moreover, he is going to post those files on his own blog and then go through them and say what AOL did wrong and what they did right. He either really believes that “the call” was not a typical experience or he really wants to turn the company around. It will be interesting to see how this ends up.

Yes, I will publish your AOL call center MP3s here. – The Jason Calacanis Weblog

Personally I like Dave Winer, I may not agree with everything he says all the time, but I at least listen and reflect on things he has to say and consider his view point important. With a growing blogging world and converging commercial interest Dave has stood the line and battled a great fight to halt commercial interest from compromising the RSS standard. I understand his frustration to a certain extent, and with so many forces moving to make changes in format, that fit their agenda, their are only so many sucker punches a person can take before one says I have had enough.

This is what I know and will acknowledge till the end of time. Dave stewardship of RSS 2.0 resulted in a lot of people getting rich, his forethought of putting the enclosure tag in RSS 2.0 will continue to revolutionize the way audio an video media is delivered. Thus Dave is at least 50% responsible for Podcasting, he is entitled to that claim! The development of Radio Userland drove people to start companies, to build blogging tools which kick started a whole bunch of cottage industries, companies like Technorati, SixApart, Pubsub, Feedster.

Twenty years ago a Japanese man I was friends with, gave me a stock tip, it was a company that was just getting started and to this day I send that man a bottle of Whiskey every New Years as his tip ended up being a very good one. That man knew a lot about technology at a time when I did not. So I would hope that if Dave some of these companies send Dave a bottle of his choice from time to time as a Thank You.

Additionally so far as I know he is responsible for the unconference which in todays commercial world is a very difficult thing to put together especially when everyone hand is everyones else pocket and payola and the conference side of things is a multi-billion dollar industry where you pay to go to a conference and then hear people sell you there products in the form of infomercials during supposed training and breakout sessions.

Dave, personally I hope you don’t push away the keyboard and if you do some of us will be here to fight the battle. [Scripting News]