Brainmesh is HiDef's weekly get-together in which our team discusses technological innovations and trends, relating them to how they impact great causes such as nonprofits and social enterprises.

Back to another rousing edition of Cause-based Work at HiDef, the team had much discuss in terms of new technologies and innovations that folks should know about. Enjoy!

Geolocation and Social Flocking

Kemper talked about getting communities of people together for a cause. One cause we're all passionate about is the home dashboard. William shared how Dave Mathews Band is harnessing such social flocking with geolocation in its app. DMB might not be a great cause, but it's important to note that geolocation is finding its way into the core feature set of many applications. We can all see the ability to find others interested in X as a huge value to pretty much every event or cause. 

Blogging, Microblogging, Facebook, and Posterous

Brian, a Posterous user, brought up the fact that Facebook is becoming more like aggregated RSS rather than a microblogging platform. He cited a Techcrunch article that shows Posterous' fantastic growth as a dead-easy blogging platform. The question we pondered was whether a company like Facebook should see a company like Posterous as just another source of content for its network users, or as a competitor. 

Brad brought up the fact that Facebook could easily turn on "Posterous-like functionality" thanks to the fact that Facebook has enabled one to be much more open with one's content. Rename "Facebook Notes" to "blog" and you're half way there.

At this moment no one feels like you can "blog" on Facebook, but Posterous' growth certainly shows that if Facebook enabled such a feature the right way, it would be killer, for individuals, nonprofits, and businesses.

Twitter, the World Cup, and Peer to Peer Approaches

In the wake of continued down time for Twitter during just about every World Cup game, as millions of fans bring down the network with tweet after tweet, we thought it apropo to talk peer to peer. After all, we look at the underlying system and ask how it can be improved. We discussed a GigaOM article that shared an intriguing sketch from this post. The question the article poses is not whether Twitter will be able to stand up against its own growth, but whether a decentralized approach that depends on individual nodes in its network is the true solution. However, will human nature ever allow decentralization of content? If no single entity is in control, the open standards and protocols allow anyone to become a leader so quickly. Companies usually don't like that, unless they bank 100% on their content and not control over it.

What if you could say, "My tweets should come from and be hosted on my blog"? What if Twitter became something similar to an RSS aggregator? Well, from a business perspective? What if content was truly portable and decentralized. It would mean that Twitter would have to shift from being a platform to becoming a product. Seeing as how that's already in progress, perhaps we can see the dreams of pure P2P technologies come true. At a basic level, some of these things are happening right now, as Brad showed when discussing Facebook's Like button. Read on...

Facebook's Like Button and Semantic Technology

Facebook's like button isn't just allowing people to comment on Facebook from other sites, but also tagging pages with additional information. This is an example of decentralization, kind of like a tag-based wikipedia.

Wordpress vs. Drupal

In our estimation, Wordpress 3.0 kills the Drupal value proposition on a number of levels. Wordpress has always fallen short meeting larger business use cases--more complex integrations with things like donor management tools. Wordpress 3.0 remedies many of those shortcomings, with multi-site deployment done right and the ability to create custom post types being two of the biggies. 

What's up with Symbian and other mobile platforms?

Zach shared with the team a little about why Symbian isn't better known in the U.S., taking largely from this interview by O'Reilly. It's really interesting seeing how the people factor and international markets give and sway, requiring huge companies to be very nimble or risk falling away.

Easy Battery Insertion

Tom rounded out this week's session with an oh-so-subtle innovation from Microsoft that allows people to put batteries into devices any old way they want. How many man hours will this save the world? For me, I see many new-toy preparations coming my way if this makes it to market. 

In all seriousness, such an innovation goes to show that sometimes it is the simple solutions to simple problems that make such a big difference. We always try to take that to heart here at HiDef.