Leveraging Free and Open Source Tools to Improve User Experiences

Today's successful web companies are building tools and environments that give non-programmers the ability to quickly add professional, interactive functions to their websites.

For example, here's an interactive map of a hike my family took yesterday. My total time investment in this map is under ten minutes. Not only is this map fully interactive, but you can view a larger map on the the Google Maps site. There you have access to additional options such as launching this map in Google Earth, where can follow our trail in a three-dimensional Earth simulator or roll back the clock on the satellite photography to see the surrounding terrain as it looked years ago.

View Larger Map

Many of these are being developed for bloggers and made available as inclusion in online communities. Some are garbage, while others are amazingly useful. And a few – notably those created by Google – are suitable for business.

Yet outside the high-tech sphere, businesses seem slow to leverage these new technologies.

I can understand a company having qualms about promoting another brand on their website (in the case the Google brand). But for years companies have touted their use of quality tools and services and named their partners and vendors (from "We use only Pennzoil products" to "Intel Inside").

Rather, I think there are some expensive aspects of corporate culture at work here. At one level, executives might believe that by integrating any communication with content served by Google, they are somehow giving too much control of their communications over to Google.

I generally find this attitude among executives who don't use or find value in these emerging tools. Once I had a boss who maintained repeatedly that the only benefit of the Internet was email. All other uses, according to him, resulted in reduced productivity. He was the president of a printing company. Because he found no value in a tool such a Google Maps, he didn't leverage it in his business. Instead, he paid people to work in methods that he understood and saw as valuable, even though many were far less efficient.

At a lower level, the person in charge of creating the communication may simply not have the time or inclination to learn how to use Google Maps. Or worse, they may feel that by replacing their highly specialized output with a free tool (that often does a better job), this will somehow reduce their personal value to the company.

To this last point, I have one simple response: There is no employee more valuable to any company than the employee who finds ways to put themselves out of work. There will always be work for this employee.

So my advice is look around at what's out there—you might be surprised at what functions you can offer to your customers. The Google Maps site has great online tutorials (in the form of Google-owned YouTube videos). And anyone who has basic online skills can be creating customized maps in less than half an hour.

Oh, and if you're interested in the specifics of the hike above, you can find them here: http://www.broomfieldenterprise.com/news/2009/mar/19/new-trail-link-will...