Social media as we know it has continued to evolve. With every conference or social media exhibition that you visit or participate, you’ll see how many social media and web application challenges now have compelling and viable solutions.
Whether it is to find and keep in touch with online friends or for the latest social media news, we seem to have incorporated social media into every aspect of our daily lives. With so many solutions on display, here are five of the “cannot seem to get away from” problems that social media and web applications still have yet to successfully address:

Online Search Excess:
Online search remains largely disconnected from the social web, even though Social Media and Search have had an intertwined relationship in their emerging development. Try browsing Facebook to doing a Google search, and you’ll barely see the influence of the social web on the results that get delivered. There are tools that let you crowdsource the search process, but we’re only beginning to see the incorporation of socially-produced knowledge into our primary search tools. When Google search knows what I want to see based on who I’m friends with on Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare — and more importantly, who I pay attention to i.e., collective, friend-filtered, collaborative search — then it will get interesting. Meanwhile, you’ll continue to sift through pages of irrelevant search results.

Contact List Confusion:
Lets say you sign up with a handful of social networks and web services — think Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and FourSquare — and you’ve got multiple lists of contacts to manage in each place. Most of these services let you import contacts from at least two of the others, and even do repeat imports to find friends who’ve recently signed up for a service you’ve used for a while. However, you get the most out of each of these social tools when you take the time to update your contact information, organizing them around different contexts and level of closeness within the relationship. Having said that, work has yet to be done to keep your Twitter lists in sync with your Facebook lists, or to create LinkedIn relationships that reflect your contact information in Gmail. With so many networks and contacts to keep organized, no wonder we are unable to have a fully satisfying experience with any one network.

Information Highway Overload:
RSS started as a way to aggregate all the streams of content we found online, but today we’re more likely to be drowned in a river of feeds — not to mention e-mail, texts, updates, multimedia messages etc. We’ve got great tools for creating, finding, organizing and viewing content, but very little to help us sort out and manage the volume of information that is now available online. The challenge of information overload and attention management isn’t just a technical problem, there needs to be some better tools that would address this issue.

Brand Fixation:
Now that social media is this major force to be part of in marketing, big brands have moved in to seize the opportunities for brand and relationship building. From destination sites to heavily-branded fan pages on Facebook and other networks, social web is transforming into an immersive advertisement. Marketers, social networks and consumers have a stake in finding new ways to create value for site sponsors and advertisers, without eroding the authenticity and trust that are essential to the success of online relationships and social networks.

Lack of Social Concern:
Designers and developers of social media and applications represent the gatekeepers of what is rapidly becoming the world’s most influential medium. Yet only a sliver of that brain power is trained on the world’s pressing environmental and social problems. That miniscule portion has generated some interesting experiments and examples of how social media can bring about social and environmental solutions and be a catalyst for social change. However, we’ve yet to see any evidence that social media will deliver on its world-changing potential. Finding and deploying compelling, scalable models for social and environmental innovation online may be the social web’s toughest challenge — and it’s most crucial one.

If these challenges are still unsolved as social media and applications continue to evolve, it is because few of them are amenable to a strictly technical solution. Design, strategy and most of all social analysis will all be needed to find answers to the problems above.

These days, there’s hardly a mission statement that doesn’t herald it, or a Management that doesn’t laud it. And yet despite all of the attention that business creativity has won over the past few years, little is known about innovation in the work culture.

Whenever I get a chance to interface with a company, I spend a lot of time and thought on what ideas they represent and what lessons we can learn from them. Most of these thought exercises leaves me disappointed. There is a tremendous amount of innovation in making better products, increasing efficiency and reducing costs. There are plenty of companies with a great product, a hip style, or a fast-rising stock price that are, essentially, one-hit wonders—they deliver great short-term results, but they don’t stand for anything big or important for the long term. There seems to a diminishing focus on creating great work environments for employees….one that nourishes commitment, creativity and personal growth. By work environment, I don’t necessarily mean the physical work space but intangibles beyond that.

As I reminisce my 15 year career, my shoulders get broader noting that there has not been single person under my direct supervision and management that quit the job for whatever reason. About three years ago, I started to make note of several aspects of the working culture that I had put in place some knowingly and some not. What I realized and put into practice today is that every employee is looking for something more in their job. Traditional thinking is that creating a working environment conducive to employee satisfaction is about making their tasks at work easier by providing with tools, providing great facilities at work, incentives for their performance etc. But what I realized was that employees are looking for more than work related satisfaction. If someone is spending majority of time at work, more than what they spend with their family, it is only expected that they are looking for an overall personal growth.

The new competitive frontier in the world of business is about repetitive innovation. What this means is that a good working environment should integrate opportunities for employees that not only enhance their working skills but also nurture their overall personal growth. I am not necessarily saying that companies do not embrace this philosophy. Usually this is done as the companies grow in size and money. More as a benefit of success. What about start-ups and smaller companies? Given the scary statistic that more than 95% of new companies fail within the first five years, one would think that the chances of survival for new companies can be extended at least by securing a committed workforce.

I am proud to share that Sapplica is home to a working culture conducive to career growth as well as personal growth. We spend significant time planning and providing for employees all possible avenues that can help them nurture overall growth. Talk to our employees and you will see what it is all about. Even better, drop us an email (connexions[at]sapplica[dot]com) and maybe you can join us for lunch to learn more.

Well, I guess the most appropriate first blog entry would be about the thoughts and efforts behind Sapplica. As most of you might be aware, setting up a new entity in India is not as easy as in some of the other parts of the world. Everything takes time and a ton of effort. So, why all the effort when we had another entity already in place from where we could conduct the same business as Sapplica? Actually, we could not!!

   What we set out to accomplish at Sapplica needed a very unique enviroment. Right mix of forward looking investors, an experienced management team, extremely talented employees and a creative work environment. We wanted to build a workplace where people can be creative, productive, and happy and build products that users could connect with and improve their online experience.

So Sapplica is born!! And no, we are not just another startup.